Interactive Journalism : Hackers, Data, and Code

Interactive journalism has transformed the newsroom. Emerging out of changes in technology, culture, and economics, this new specialty uses a visual presentation of storytelling that allows users to interact with the reporting of information. Today it stands at a nexus: part of the traditional newsroom, yet still novel enough to contribute innovative practices and thinking to the industry. Nikki Usher brings together a comprehensive portrait of nothing less than a new journalistic identity. Usher provides a history of the impact of digital technology on reporting, photojournalism, graphics, and other disciplines that define interactive journalism. Her eyewitness study of the field's evolution and accomplishments ranges from the interactive creation of Al Jazeera English to the celebrated data desk at the Guardian to the New York Times ' Pulitzer-endowed efforts in the new field. What emerges is an illuminating, richly reported profile of the people coding a revolution that may reverse the decline and fall of traditional journalism. | Cover Title Copyright Contents Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: Interactives in the News 1. Interactive Journalism: A Budding Profession 2. The Rise of a Subspecialty: Interactive Journalism 3. Hacker Journalists, Programmer Journalists, and Data Journalists 4. Inside the Interactive Journalism Newsroom 5. Interactives and Journalism's Systems of Knowledge Conclusion: Interactives and the Future of Journalism Methodology Notes Bibliography Index |"The future of interactive journalism will not depend on whether it can increase page views or session times, but whether it can deepen our readers' and viewers' engagement with complex issues. Nikki Usher's Interactive Journalism is a great introduction into this emerging field of journalism where the most collaborative and interdisciplinary team players will thrive."—Wolfgang Blau, Director of Digital Strategy, Chief Digital Officer, Condé Nast International "In Interactive Journalism , Nikki Usher skillfully answers three questions rarely addressed at the same time: how are newsrooms changing with their adoption of interactive journalism, what economic and cultural factors are driving this adoption, and why new ways of telling stories may affect the impact of journalism."—James T. Hamilton, author of All the News That's Fit to Sell: How the Market Transforms Information into News "For future scholars of journalism production, this book will provide an important look at how interactive journalism—a subfield that seems likely to expand and transform in the coming decades—was practiced in the second decade of the 21st century." — Newspaper Research Journal | Nikki Usher is an assistant professor at the George Washington University's School of Media and Public Affairs. She is the author of Making News at the New York Times . "Traditional journalism faces the growing reality that the news business model remains an unsolvable problem. Audiences can go anywhere at any time. Technological and computing advances offer opportunities to explore on web and mobile beyond what has ever been possible before, thanks to an explosion in programming knowledge. The infrastructure and experience of information delivery has evolved to seemingly erase time and space boundaries. This larger setting for news, bound up in changes to economics, technology and culture, has created the conditions for a new subspecialty of the journalism profession to emerge: interactive journalism. In Interactive Journalism, Nikki Usher brings together a comprehensive theoretical and empirical portrait of this subspeciality. Beginning with a theoretical overview of professionalism, Usher provides a comprehensive history of fields that come together to define interactive journalism: computer assisted reporting, photojournalism and graphics. She then moves from the people behind interactive journalism to the work that these journalists do to the special abstract knowledge they provide the profession. With vignettes from across the world, she takes us from in-depth look at Al Jazeera English interactive creation to the BBC to the Guardian's data desk to the New York Times. Interactive Journalism illuminates the professions, people, work and knowledge of a subspeciality that has emerged in the age of the rise of digital culture as a possible answer to the decline and fall of traditional journalism"-- Provided by publisher "Traditional journalism faces the growing reality that the news business model remains an unsolvable problem. Audiences can go anywhere at any time. Technological and computing advances offer opportunities to explore on web and mobile beyond what has ever been possible before, thanks to an explosion in programming knowledge. The infrastructure and experience of information delivery has evolved to seemingly erase time and space boundaries. This larger setting for news, bound up in changes to economics, technology and culture, has created the conditions for a new subspecialty of the journalism profession to emerge: interactive journalism. In Interactive Journalism, Nikki Usher brings together a comprehensive theoretical and empirical portrait of this subspeciality. Beginning with a theoretical overview of professionalism, Usher provides a comprehensive history of fields that come together to define interactive journalism: computer assisted reporting, photojournalism and graphics. She then moves from the people behind interactive journalism to the work that these journalists do to the special abstract knowledge they provide the profession. With vignettes from across the world, she takes us from in-depth look at Al Jazeera English interactive creation to the BBC to the Guardian's data desk to the New York Times. Interactive Journalism illuminates the professions, people, work and knowledge of a subspeciality that has emerged in the age of the rise of digital culture as a possible answer to the decline and fall of traditional journalism"-- Résumé de l'éditeur