Abstract
In her book Making News at The New York Times, Nikki Usher offers a fascinating and detailed look at the changing routines and priorities at one of the world’s top newspapers during a critical period in its history. Usher spent 5 months in 2010 immersed in the Times newsroom, primarily at the business desk, attending meetings, shadowing 36 people, and interviewing 81 from a variety of departments and levels of the newsroom hierarchy.
Her access to such a prominent and influential, if otherwise atypical, newspaper makes this a particularly interesting read for scholars and journalism practitioners alike. As she acknowledges, this book is but a snapshot in the Times history; many things have changed since and will continue to change in this tumultuous period for legacy news organizations everywhere.
Some of its findings, however, may prove more durable than one might expect. Making News at The New York Times confirms what the internal Innovation Report, made public in 2014, says about the lingering primacy of print at the Times and how it can inhibit needed change. ‘Print was iconic, and online was ephemeral’ Usher wrote, noting that there were few meetings devoted to the web, home page editors operated with incredible autonomy in comparison to the collective decisions made about page 1 stories by top leaders, and most rewards and evaluations for reporters remained centered on their A1 productivity. Although Usher does not focus explicitly on theories of organizational culture, her work confirms a body of literature showing the importance of leaders in setting the impetus for change through what they reward and measure, as well as how the presence of underlying assumptions about the right ways to do things can block stated goals.
The core argument of the book is that three new news values have emerged at the New York Times in the wake of digital ascendancy and economic upheaval: Immediacy, interactivity, and participation. These values have reordered journalists’ daily routines and have largely been accepted as new realities, although they remain contested and unevenly embraced.
Immediacy, or the need to constantly feed the web with ‘fresh’ news to bring back visitors and beat the competition, has altered the Times’ metabolism, often exhausting journalists who are also simultaneously asked to step back from the fast-flowing updates and produce unique, authoritative second-day stories for the print edition. One of the most striking of Usher’s findings was the speed with which even big, time-intensive investigative pieces or major stories disappeared from the home page in the relentless churn, leaving even the reporters struggling to find them.
Usher defines ‘interactivity’ primarily as multimedia, or news content that gives users a greater degree of control over their experience. While Usher found that staffers embraced multimedia as a way to tell stories in new ways and to potentially garner higher home page placement, producing quality multimedia content is often difficult to shoehorn into traditional reporting routines. Multimedia often requires a great deal of time, internal collaboration, and adjustments like different interviewing techniques. For example, unlike text pieces, videos are character driven and subjects must be willing to speak on camera.
Although Usher found that participation was one of the emerging values, at the Times, it was primarily conceived of simply as using social media platforms, not engaging in meaningful conversation with ordinary readers or gathering new perspectives and feedback, as more idealistic future-of-news leaders would have called for. Even among the most social media-savvy Times journalists, including those who have cultivated strong personal brands online, most interaction was with influential elites or traditional sources. As Usher acknowledges, though, the sheer size of the Times audience and the already intense time demands placed on reporters may realistically limit the capacity for more diverse participation in the news report.
Usher views the use of analytics in the newsroom with suspicion, writing, ‘The worst thing that could happen to The Times would be for it to start to take metrics into account for its daily decision making’ (p. 239) and ‘we’ve seen what seems like an almost creepy approach from top management to thinking about how to harness audience power’. While many will agree that overemphasis on metrics like pageviews could erode the Times’ vaunted credibility, some would argue that these measures of audience interest, if viewed as one aspect of a larger constellation of reader feedback, can be valuable tools.
Most encouraging for those who hope to see the emergence of a secure future for news is what Usher reveals about how the Times has emerged as a place for experimentation. ‘The organization was tolerating ambiguity’, she wrote, adding that staffers talked about being in ‘beta model’, like a startup, even creating a public beta site to test apps and new ideas without disrupting the main site (p. 221). If journalism of the Times caliber is to continue to thrive, it must continue to embrace this kind of ongoing, iterative learning.