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Dr Nikki Usher, Associate Professor, College of Media, University of Illinois
‘Overcoming Place via Scale: The New York Times’s Global Expansion’
Thursday 18th September 2019, 4-6pm, Professor Stuart Hall Building, Room 102, Goldsmiths, University of London
This talk picks up on
Usher’s fieldwork at The
New York Times from 2010, when The New York Times had independent outposts in Hong Kong and Paris from which its
International Herald Tribune was produced and published. However, today, there is only one
New York Times, at home and abroad, and it may well be the strategy that will save
The New York Times’ financial prospects. Unlike most other general interest newspapers in the US,
The New York Times can reasonably make a case for global ambitions. The sun never sets on
The New York Times empire, or at least that is the strategic vision. However, this approach brings to bear questions about how power and privilege, from who gets covered to how global audiences are understood to where The Times is making new investments.
Ultimately, The Times finds itself trying to become a news organization with digital global reach, seeing itself as the best journalism institution in the world while nonetheless trying to “de-other” the rest of the world. This is part of a larger book
project about the importance of place as a concept, how geospatial inequalities impact news production and what this means for the future of news. Methodologically, students and faculty may be interested a conversation about negotiating access for qualitative
research at elite institutions in the hohe post-2016 era.
Dr Nikki Usher is best known for her extensive fieldwork in elite newsrooms around the world. Her research focuses on news production in the changing digital environment, blending insights from media sociology and political communication. Her current book project, The Where of News, currently under contract with Columbia University Press, looks at the contested nature of place in journalism. Her first book, Making News at The New York Times (University of Michigan Press, 2014) was the first book-length study of the US’s foremost newspaper in the Internet era and won the Tankard Award, a national book award from the Association for Education and Mass Communication in Journalism. Her second book, Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code (University of Illinois Press, 2016), focused on the rise of programming and data journalism, and was a finalist for the Tankard Award, making Usher the first solo author to be a two-time finalist.
She has been a fellow at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, a fellow at the Reynold's Institute at the University of Missouri, and a Digital Journalism Fellow at Norway's OsloMet. She is the winner of the AEJMC Emerging Scholar Award and was named the Lillian Lodge Kopenhaver Outstanding Junior Scholar, in addition to joining the Kopenhaver Center as a leadership fellow. Prior to joining the Illinois faculty, she was an associate professor at George Washington University in the School of Media and Public Affairs. She is a frequent commentator on the evolving news media landscape, serving as an expert source for journalists, and, on occasion, writes commentary for industry-facing and popular press outlets. Dr Usher enjoys contributing to wide-ranging policy conversations about the future of the media landscape in an era of big tech.