Katz Colloquium: Nikki Usher, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Nikki Usher, Ph.D., will talk about her new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism

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About the Talk

Nikki Usher, Ph.D., will talk about her new book, News for the Rich, White, and Blue: How Place and Power Distort American Journalism, which argues that the market failure facing newspapers is deeply problematic for the future of inclusive democratic life. The book considers how larger structural inequalities and political tensions in American life are instantiated through and by the news media. Dr. Usher argues that while journalism can power democratic life, in many cases, journalism works to perpetuate existing power structures and the status quo. She will discuss how newsrooms remain white places of power, a problem compounded by the political economy of the news media, where white, wealthy audiences are more important than ever to a news organization’s financial survival. Dr. Usher draws on a rich array of qualitative and quantitative data about pertinent issues facing the journalism industry right now: philanthropy and digital advertising, Beltway/Heartland divides, hyper-partisanship and media distrust, Google and Facebook, and the growing challenges to building a diverse newsroom and producing journalism for a multiracial democracy. She considers the “big sort” in journalism, or whether resources for news are increasingly concentrated in big blue cities and what that might mean for growing political divides and distrust in the news media. Dr. Usher also will discuss the counterpoint, drawing on new research on The New York Times, showing that the winner-takes-all dynamic that leaves behind so many Americans also plays out within the news industry. The book uses place as a conceptual hook for analyzing the political economy of the news media, where geography, social relations, and power impact the future of news in the US:  the journalists inside the newsrooms most likely to survive and those who have access to high quality news and information grow more distant culturally, politically, economically, and even geographically from historically-marginalized Americans—namely people of color and rural Americans. Preexisting inequalities in access to news and information stand to worsen, but it is possible to reimagine journalism and move beyond false nostalgia to rethink what journalism could be.

About the Speaker

Nikki Usher, Ph.D., is an associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in the College of Media with affiliate appointments in communication, political science, and the unit for criticism and interpretative theory. She is also a senior fellow at the Open Markets Institute’s Center for Journalism and Liberty, where she focuses on media independence, platforms, and antitrust and a CITAP faculty associate at UNC. She been a fellow at Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Missouri's Reynolds Institute for Journalism, and at Illinois, the Humanities Research Institute. Dr. Usher is the author of two books in addition to News for the Rich, White, and Blue: Making News at the New York Times (2014), winner of the Tankard Book Award, and Interactive Journalism: Hackers, Data, and Code (2016), and the co-editor of Journalism Research that Matters (2021). With Dr. Daniel Kreiss, Dr. Usher edits the Oxford University Press book series Journalism and Political Communication Unbound.

Please note: Members of the Annenberg Community can pick up a copy of Dr. Usher's book and a boxed lunch in Suite 200 starting at 11:30 am.