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 comprehensive 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 portrait of the people coding a revolution that may reverse the decline and fall of traditional journalism.

An ethnographic study of The New York Times’ business desk provides a unique vantage point to see the future for news in the digital age

In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future.

An ethnographic study of The New York Times' business desk provides a unique vantage point to see the future for news in the digital age.

Journalism scholars have proposed extending tax-exempt status to struggling commercial newspapers. Tax exemption is unlikely to provide much value to struggling news organizations, which often pay little tax due to operating losses, but would require them to give up certain longstanding editorial traditions.

Abstract: The network society is moving into some sort of middle age, or has at least normalized into the daily set of expectations people have for how they live their lives, not to mention consume news and information. In their adolescence, the technological and temporal affordances that have come with these new digital technologies were supposed to make the world better, or least they could have. There was much we did not foresee, such as the way that this brave new world would turn journalism into distributed content, not only taking away news organizations' gatekeeping power but also their business model. This is indeed a midlife crisis. The present moment provides a vantage point for stocktaking and the mix of awe, nostalgia, and ruefulness that comes with maturity

Crowd-funded journalism is a novel business model in which journalists rely on micropayments from ordinary people to finance their reporting. Based on analyses of the database of Spot.us, a pioneering crowd-funded journalism website, we examine the impact of crowd-funded journalism on the news produced. We apply a uses and gratifications approach to study consumers' choices when they donate to crowd-funded journalism and find that consumers are more likely to donate to stories that provide them with practical guidance for daily living (e.g., stories about public health or local city infrastructure), as opposed to stories from which they gain a general awareness of the world (e.g., cultural diversity, or government and politics). We discuss the implications for the future of news.

This paper provides an in-depth analysis of the United States National Public Radio's journey as it strives to become a more Web and multimedia-savvy company. The paper offers a qualitative account of a significant transition phase in the news organization's development: What started as a 400-person retraining of the newsroom and ended as a re-thinking of the newsroom's digital development. The paper looks at how NPR created the conditions of ambiguity that allowed for innovation to take place.