Book Review: Making News at the New York Times, by Nikki Usher

Abstract

Making News at the New York Times. Nikki Usher. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2014. 283 pp. $75 hbk. $30 pbk.Winner of more Pulitzers (112) than any other newspaper, the New York Times has been the subject of many books, even a documentary, that expose the inner workings of the world's most influential newsroom.The most recent addition to this esteemed list, Making News at the New York Times, offers a refreshing take on a 163-year-old institution by examining its evolutionary struggle to survive in the age of Twitter, Facebook, and paywalls. This in-depth report on the frantic routines of its staff, primarily three business reporters, makes for a compelling read at least for avid readers of the Times like myself.Nikki Usher spent five months at the Times, not as a staffer but as an outside observer probing for answers to explain how Times' journalists negotiate the challenges of creating online and print content to emergent online journalism values: immediacy, interactivity, and participation.Usher, an assistant professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University, brings an acute understanding of American journalism's dynamic history and uncertain future to her story. When she arrived at their new offices (between 40th and 41st Streets on Eighth Avenue) in January 2010, the Times was the leading online newspaper in the world with thirty million unique website visitors a month. But it also was losing 100,000 print subscribers a year.Readers may wonder: Why focus her microscope exclusively on the Times?She explains, Fundamentally, the New York Times is a special place; its stature, its size, its place in the public imagination and maybe even its sense of its own importance makes its transition to the digital age notable.Usher acknowledges that the Times has many luxuries that the publishers of smaller, less prosperous publications could only dream of having. How the vast majority of America's newspapers transition into digital news is a question that goes unanswered here.Instead, what originated as her PhD dissertation morphed into a fascinating chronicle about the Times' successes and failures to bridge the daunting gap between its Page One (print) and Home Page (web) editions. Despite the newspaper's power, prestige, and Pulitzers, Usher reveals systemic weaknesses that emerge as the Times' struggles to mesh the demands of newsprint subscribers with a feeding frenzy of online readers.As managing editor John Geddes tells her bluntly, We have to get past the written story bias . . . There is a logic in not being defined by print and not by thinking about the limitations but thinking about what is possible on the Web. …