Guest Post: Allie Kosterich discusses her new book News Nerds

“I argue that the profession of journalism has undergone institutional augmentation”

Journalism, at the core, is the presentation of news through media. While the content of news has not changed much—headlines today are dominated by politicians, celebrities, wars, crime, and sports just as they were a century ago—how journalists gather and disseminate information has been turned on its head.

Gone are the simpler days of editors assigning stories to writers, who then research, inquire, and present what they found in a compelling fashion.

Many of today's journalists are coding, programming, running analytics, and developing apps.

My new book, News Nerds: Institutional Change in Journalism, examines the reasons for this change; its mechanics, timing, and impact.

I define news nerds as industry professionals working in jobs at the intersection of traditional journalism and technologically-intensive positions that were once largely separate. Consequently, news nerds have changed the institutionalized view of journalism, which has now evolved to account for these new professionals.

While news nerds’ titles and specific responsibilities vary, they all seek to produce news more effectively and efficiently by harnessing the power of technological advances such as the growth and accessibility of big data, computing technologies, networked devices, and mobile and social platforms. News nerds, and the news they produce, reflect the increasing dependence of journalism on digital technological developments. However, even though they are dependent on technological skills, they remain in service of traditional journalistic values and are incorporated into the workflows of the established profession.

Many news nerds, particularly those involved in working with data and computation, are driving new forms of journalism. This requires some new thinking because any change in the agreed-upon understanding of who a journalist is and what a journalist ought to do inevitably impacts the production of news, news organizations’ performance, public perceptions, and democratic citizenship. So, we need to pay attention to the particular roles that news nerds occupy within the profession of journalism, the news industry, and society at large.

I argue that the profession of journalism has undergone institutional augmentation. This is not the same thing as institutional change because it results in neither the complete displacement of an existing institution nor the failure of the new one. Instead, an existing institution—traditional journalism—is augmented to allow for the coexistence of a qualitatively and quantitatively distinct, supplementary institution. News organizations increasingly integrate news nerds into the newsroom; their relevance and legitimacy is now pervasive throughout the industry. However, news nerds are not fully diffused such that they work in every newsroom, nor have they entirely displaced traditional journalists. Not every traditional journalist has become a news nerd; instead, journalism has been augmented to allow for the coexistence of roles.

While this book focuses on the context of journalism, the theory of institutional augmentation is relevant for many other media industries that have been impacted by digital technologies.

One of my book’s themes is how technological, economic, and societal changes are impacting journalism’s hiring and training practices. I analyze this by drawing on a mixed-method research design combining interviews with professional journalists, textual analysis of the trade press, and social network analysis of journalists’ career histories. Taken together, these data reveal the ways in which the institution of professional journalism is evolving to incorporate new technological skillsets and new routines of production.

The challenges facing news organizations today are prompting critical questions about whether journalism is being undermined by engagement with data, analytics, platform, and product technologies. The role of news organizations in the public sphere is becoming more complex. In telling these stories and sharing these findings, I directly confront what happens when new skillsets and new ways of understanding and producing news start to collide with the old routines of journalism.

News Nerds builds on the premise that today’s societies are inherently digital and data centric. It unpacks the mechanisms of change, both internal and external to the news industry, that give rise to the emergence and growth of new journalism roles.

It shows when and how technological changes really matter for the news we see, and go beyond short-term trends and failed fads. But it also demonstrates that, in the long run, the best way to understand change is to move away from simplistic binary distinctions between the supposed losers of the old regime and the supposed winners of the new one.

News Nerds: Institutional Change in Journalism by Allie Kosterich is published by Oxford University Press in the Oxford Studies in Digital Politics series.