Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making, and although all of its errors are mine alone, I am deeply indebted to many people and institutions for helping it see the light of day. First, I want to thank the MIT Press—Margy Avery for first acquiring this project, Gita Manaktala for seeing it to completion, and Deborah Cantor-Adams and the entire editorial and production team. I am especially grateful for Gita’s patience and supportive guidance as the project took shape and am deeply appreciative of her work as an editor and expert publisher. I am also grateful to the four anonymous reviewers who generously and thoughtfully helped me to improve the book in its final stages.

Although it has been entirely rewritten and updated, this project began as my doctoral dissertation in Stanford University’s Department of Communication. I was fortunate to have as my adviser the indefatigably generous, inquisitive, and supportive Ted Glasser. In one of our first meetings, he taught me that any good project should be able to answer the questions “What is it?” and “Why does it matter?” With that deceptively simply starting point, he showed me how to be a scholar and how to think about journalism and the press in ways that are both critical and optimistic. I am grateful for his ongoing guidance and friendship. Similarly, Fred Turner was a member of my dissertation committee, a generous mentor, and a wise guide through the theories of science and technology studies that underpin this book. He taught me to think about technology and culture as intertwined, inseparable forces and pushed me to see news production as a world of contingencies, ideologies, and power struggles. I am also indebted to my other committee members—Jeremy Bailenson, S. Lochlann Jain, and Barbara van Schewick—who were supportive and thoughtful as I developed these ideas. My time at Stanford also was greatly enriched through an early relationship with the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS), especially its faculty codirectors, Woody Powell and Rob Reich. Woody was the best mentor I could have hoped to have on questions of institutional sociology and organizational dynamics but also on ways to craft a project that was interdisciplinary and engaged with multiple communities of scholarship. Similarly, Rob helped me appreciate the broader ethical implications of the questions I was asking, gently forcing me to translate my work in different ways so it might speak to people concerned with civil society writ large, not just journalism. I am grateful for the community that they and the PACS students created; they became my indispensable, interdisciplinary, informal sounding board. At Stanford and in San Francisco, I was grateful for the friendship and camaraderie of Isabel Awad, Scott Cataffa, Jeannette Colyvas, Vince Fecteau, Seeta Peña Gangadharan, Janet Go, Dan Kreiss, Lise Marken, and Kat Murray.

While at Stanford, I was generously supported by a multiyear scholarship from the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. First welcomed into the Foundation by Bettina Cenerelli, Josée St-Martin, and Stephen Toope and later P. G Forest, it quickly became a key part of my professional network, a place for smart and kind feedback, and my Canadian touchstone. Through it, I met many friends and colleagues, including Jill Boyd, Lisa Freeman, Lisa Helps, Kate Hennessy, Myles Leslie, Leah Levac, Taylor Owen, Kate Parizeau, Chris Tenove, and many more. Directly and indirectly, the Foundation and its members intellectually framed this project.

Since leaving Stanford, I have been fortunate to be part many different communities that have made this work much stronger, either by engaging with it directly or providing social and intellectual homes where I could make connections, learn new literatures, and better understand how to do interdisciplinary scholarship. I am especially grateful to Microsoft Research New England’s Social Media Collective. Founded by long-time friend, activist/scholar, and ongoing field guide danah boyd, the group has convened some of the finest minds in many different fields, many of which I was able to work with closely and continue to call good friends. In addition to a stellar set of people I overlapped with—Nancy Baym, Nicole Ellison, Eszter Hargittai, Cliff Lampe, Jessica Lingel, and Jason Schultz—several Collective folks stand out as key for this work. As a fellow postdoc, Alice Marwick was a fellow traveler in all things Microsoft and a keenly critical scholar who patiently explained myriad popular culture phenomena, and helped me understand how to write a book. I am grateful to Mary Gray for reminding me to foreground the people in my research by highlighting them, their experiences, and their expectations and contexts amid often abstract talk of technology and institutions. Tarleton Gillespie showed me how to look at a sociotechnical phenomenon from more analytical angles than I knew existed and has generously helped me puzzle through a host of questions related to platforms, algorithms, and journalism. Kate Crawford has been a consistently engaged and generous collaborator, helped me think about the ethics, histories, and politics of my research, and served as a key interlocutor for many of this book’s ideas.

As a place to hone my thinking about the networked press, I could not have landed at a better institution than the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Its faculty—especially Jonathan Aronson, Francois Bar, Christina Dunbar-Hester, Tom Goodnight, Larry Gross, Henry Jenkins, Gabe Kahn, Andy Lakoff, Colin Maclay, and Allison Trope—are world-class collaborators and mentors. In particular, I thank Sarah Banet-Weiser and Christina Dunbar-Hester for their ongoing support, friendship, and good humor; they helped me remember the value of this project and provided me with the perspectives and resources I needed to see it through. I have also been fortunate to work with some of the finest doctoral students in the field—especially Leila Bighash, Renyi Hong, Cynthia Wang, and Sarah Meyers West—who have provided feedback on these ideas at various stages of their development. And special thanks go to Kate Miltner, who read the manuscript, caught many mistakes, provided constructive feedback, and helped me hone my thinking in several places. Annenberg staff members Allyson Arguello, Jordan Gary, Sarah Holterman, Christine Lloreda, and Billie Shotlow were also extremely helpful with various parts of this project’s logistics and administration.

Beyond the communities already mentioned, I am indebted to a collection of communication and science and technology scholars who have, in various conversations over the years or through their own writing, helped me develop this book’s argument: Chris Anderson (who read the entire manuscript and provided critically helpful feedback in its final stages), Lance Bennett, Rod Benson, Pablo Boczkowski, Josh Braun, Matt Carlson, Andy Chadwick, Nick Couldry, Dan Kreiss, Seth Lewis, Phil Napoli, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Zizi Papacharissi, Caitlin Petre, Victor Pickard, Matt Powers, Adrienne Russell, Michael Schudson, Keren Tenenboim-Weinblatt, Nikki Usher, Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, and Barbie Zelizer. Two scholars in particular were excellent guides, made key interventions at critical moments, and were kind and generous comrades as we wrote our respective books: Kjerstin Thorson is one of the smartest, funniest, and truth-speaking collaborators I could have hoped for, and Megan Finn is one of the sharpest and most constructively supportive sources of sanity and critique I could have imagined.

I also have some family members to thank. Dad and Irene were early supporters of this project, and embody my ideals of informed and engaged readers who care about public life. As the first journalists I met, Uncle Frank and Aunt Linda were in my mind during much of this writing, as exemplary journalists working in the public interest. George and Ann Lawson provided me with more laughter, friendship, hospitality, and support than they may realize; from talking me through bumps along the way to knowing exactly when not to ask how the book was going, it all meant a great deal, and I am deeply grateful to them for helping me see this project through and becoming family along the way. Almost finally, John and M.B. have been the bee’s knees, a formulation I know they will appreciate. John, especially, is a mensch. He read almost every word of this book, helped me clarify my thinking, and provided gut-checks at key moments, reminding me that this was a project worth doing and that might be helpful to nonacademics.

Finally: Wells. You have been my biggest champion, my most tenacious and understanding partner, and my best friend. You endured missed dinners, delayed vacations, compressed weekends, my short fuses, and my overabundant italics and love of em-dashes. You read every word of this book, literally made the spaces where I worked, and when I forgot or doubted, reminded me why this work matters and why I could do it. I am grateful beyond measure and dedicate this to you.