Usher named IPRH Faculty Fellow

Congratulations to Nikki Usher, associate professor of journalism, for being named an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities Faculty Fellow for 2019-2020.

Usher's focus will be on The Where of News, "which considers the role of professional journalism in fomenting the place-based divisions that have contributed to the toxic 'post-truth' moment in the U.S. Drawing from 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork inside newsrooms, I situate place-based critiques of press performance (e.g. 'coastal elites' and 'the beltway versus the heartland') in theories about place, knowledge, and trust drawn from communication, geography, sociology, philosophy, and political science."

The Where of News is also a book that Usher is working on with Columbia University Press, which "showcases how the affordances of place influences news production, from how journalists decide what counts as news to the resources that enable them to do their work."