See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/275488071

The late great International Herald Tribune and The New York Times: Global
media, space, time, print, and online coordination in a 24/7 networked world

Article  in  Journalism · December 2014

DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545743

CITATIONS READS

4 310

1 author:

Nikki Usher
George Washington University
46 PUBLICATIONS   666 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Startup View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Nikki Usher on 25 July 2017.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

545743
research-article2014
JOU0010.1177/1464884914545743JournalismUsher

Article

Journalism

The late great International

2015, Vol. 16(1) 119­–133
© The Author(s) 2014
Reprints and permissions:
Herald Tribune and The New sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1464884914545743
York Times: Global media, jou.sagepub.com

space, time, print, and

online coordination in a 24/7
networked world

Nikki Usher
The George Washington University, USA

Abstract
This article provides an empirical, field-based study of the production processes
of transnational media outlet, the International Herald Tribune, as it negotiates and
coordinates workflow and content with The New York Times. Using Manuel Castells’
concept of the space of flows, the article provides additional nuance to understand the
relationship between material constructs and networked information. Time zones and
geolocation remain important; the biggest node in the network does direct information;
and the coordinated capacity for 24/7 content is more difficult that perhaps imagined
by networked scholars. Both people and product are considered here in an effort to
bring added nuance to the tension between materiality and networks in the production
of information. While the International Herald Tribune has now been rebranded as the
International New York Times, the same considerations and questions remain.

Keywords
Online journalism, news ethnography, news production, networks, castells

In October 2013, The New York Times Company rebranded the storied International
Herald Tribune (IHT) as the International New York Times. The newspaper’s own cover-
age described the move as part of a strategy to slim down but raise influence, stating that

Corresponding author:
Nikki Usher, School of Media and Public Affairs, The George Washington University, 805 21st Street NW,
Washington, DC 20052, USA.
Email: nusher@gwu.edu
120 Journalism 16(1) 

the move was a ‘central component of a stepped-up global growth strategy’ (Haughney,
2013). For the first time, IHT editors would be able to explicitly direct The Times corre-
spondents in both Europe and Asia (Greenslade, 2013). Yet the organization would face
the same slate of questions as it had before, name change notwithstanding: how to coor-
dinate a material product across three geographic zones and five products, namely,
nytimes.com, the global online site (global.nytimes.com), a print Asia edition, a print
Europe edition, and a print US edition.
Whether transnational means a ‘single version to the world’ or not (Reese, 2010: 346)
is contested among global communication scholars – The Times global approach is none-
theless exemplary of a cross-boundary approach to news production and dissemination
– and its products ultimately reach people in 130 different countries.
There are not many news organizations of this ‘transnational’ stature, though more are
emerging. The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times are daily newspapers with
three region-specific print products, The Guardian has recently created a US edition, and
the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and Sky offer good broadcast examples; Time and The
Economist magazine offerings – and these all – have in common products that are created
as intentionally cross-border with some differentiation. Certainly, wire news has flowed
across the globe for decades (Boyd-Barrett and Rantanen, 1998), but as a wholesale prod-
uct, this has generally been intended as raw content for a geo-located artifact – either physi-
cal or online. However, there are an increasing number of transnational news outlets, and
the influence and reach of these existing institutions make inquiry into their production
practices significant for understanding the global flow of news with changes in the density,
speed, and technology of this information (cf. Chalaby, 2005, 2009; Thussu, 2006).
This specific case study investigates the global news production routines of The Times
and the IHT before its rebranding in order to explore how news and information move
across the networked society – bringing to light the tensions between coordinated global
flows of information through the creation of material and online products and the effect
upon work. Using ethnographic data gathered from The Times, the IHT-Europe in Paris,
and IHT-Asia in Hong Kong, I examine the impact of physical location, product goals,
human labor, and specific time and space orientation in a global, instant, and networked
world. On one hand, it is easy to assume an uninterrupted flow of information via 24/7
news from around the globe. However, we need to consider the implications of what it
takes to create this news. This article poses the following major questions: What are the
practices behind transnational news production? What does it mean to have different
geographically specific sites responsible for this content? What is the impact of different
time zones on information creation?
There is generally wide agreement that we have indeed entered a distinct era of global,
digital information exchange enabled by networked communication. For example,
Castells (2001, 2008) argues that we have fundamentally entered a new era of information
distribution; the new capacity to share knowledge in near instant time has created funda-
mental social changes. Thussu (2006) has written about the rise in new communication
technologies whereby Western and non-Western media offers us content that is both
global and local at the same time. Sassen (2001) has theorized extensively about the
linked and node structures of global flows, with communication networks enabling the
production and distribution of new information and capital from centralized and emerging
Usher 121

nodes. While these theorists offer examples, a more specific, nuanced, and detailed por-
trait of how information is produced and created to support this networked information
society is needed.
This article is not about the definitional arguments that all too often plague global
journalism studies (Reese, 2008, 2010). Rather, I seek to interrogate a much broader
question about the relationship between space, place time, and material production in the
creation of information in the networked society. I rely on Castells (2001) because his
work crystallizes some core questions about how to create information in a global envi-
ronment – with animating questions such as whether place and time matter and how
information flows across networks.
After outlining the methods and the case, I showcase three core aspects of global
information production: shaping the print paper across three time zones, content adjust-
ment in the expat and American world, and online coordination and dissonance. I also
offer a microstudy of a single breaking story written for the IHT-Hong Kong (IHT-HK)
and The New York Times (NYT). Ultimately, I conclude that we need more nuance to our
understanding of the networked flow of information, that production practices and con-
texts still matter, and more simply, that there is also a human cost to creating a 24/7 flow
of information.

Global networked flows of information

The undergirding argument Castells (2001, 2008) makes across a variety of books and
articles is that we have entered the ‘networked society’, which consists of interconnected
hubs, nodes, networks, and spaces that facilitate the rapid exchange and dissemination of
information and means a fundamental reconfiguration of state, public, media, govern-
ance, economics, and urbanization. Castells (2001) specifically addresses the nature of
physical space in the networked society through his conception of the ‘space of flows’ or
the ‘transformation of location patterns of core economic activities under the new tech-
nological system’ (p. 408). This is opposed to what we more commonly understand as
‘space of places’. Castells acknowledges, of course, that space is distinctly material –
and includes people, social relationships, practices, and social action. However, the
space of flows is enabled by electronic exchange built on information technologies, and
a common logic organizes various sectors of production thanks to this enhanced com-
munication technology.
Time and place in a networked society are less relevant: ‘places do not disappear, but
their logic and meaning become absorbed in the network’ (Castells, 2001: 48). This is not
to say that cities don’t matter, but that they marshal resources into a larger information
ecology. For example, the material concentration of resources is absolutely essential to
create information across the globe. As Castells maintains, in this new society, knowl-
edge is centered around these information flows that do not rely on physical contiguity.
Perhaps, then, the importance of geo-located time does not matter anymore – instead, we
engage in ‘time-sharing social practices that work through flows’ (p. 442). In practice,
though, this may be more difficult than it seems.
Others have recognized how this theoretical background may be helpful to under-
standing global news, but there have been notably fewer production studies. For instance,
122 Journalism 16(1) 

Gasher and Klein (2008) use Castells’ framework to analyze the flow of information
across The Times of London, Liberation Paris, and Haaretz, arguing that place still
defines information in a global world, while Heinrich (2008, 2011, 2012) looked at
global rise of new nodes and networks for journalism. Significantly, Reese (2010) argues
for the importance of production-based research, using Castells as an imperfect theoreti-
cal background, noting, ‘Underlying these circuits of global flows are structures of peo-
ple in professional and institutional roles. In more concrete terms, these are the agents
who form the infrastructure of the global in specific local settings’ (p. 348). This leads to
the question of how professionals work in these global and specific settings to construct
these information flows. Thus, not only are we interested here in the dynamics of infor-
mation production as content but also the actors engaged in its creation.
The empirical research generally does not focus on actual work production and pro-
cess, though it does offer important insights into global information work. An important
caveat is that this work makes clear that the very words globalization, glocalization,
transnational, international, cross-border, flow, contra-flow, and beyond inspire spirited
debate (Berglez, 2008; Reese, 2008, 2010).
One key question has been to ask ‘what is global’ and whether ‘global’ news/media is
actually possible (Hafez, 2007; Reese, 2008, 2010; Sparks, 2005). As if to echo Reese
empirically, Cottle and Rai’s (2008) analysis of CNN International (CNNI), BBC World,
and for-profit Fox News and Sky News’ frames suggests that global news production
does not simply fit under the two labels as either ‘global dominance’ or ‘global public
sphere’. Other work probes cross-border power relations, political systems, and norma-
tive relations through media (Beck, 2005; De Beer and Merrill, 2008; McPhail, 2010).
Still other scholars are intrigued by the emergence of the global public sphere in journal-
ism (Hjarvard, 2001; Volkmer, 1999), or more critically, point to signs of media imperial-
ism (Boyd-Barrett and Xie, 2008). Clausen’s (2003) work looks at a series of public
broadcasts and framing to think about the homogenization of international news through
news agencies and found that news is locally produced and locally created, with the
exception of foreign news stories. Thurman (2007) has looked at the global audience’s
use of news Web sites, pointing to the extension of the global in the 24/7 Web era.
Scholars argue that international news services like the BBC can provide a sorely
needed alternative news consciousness to a locally situated public (Bicket and Wall,
2009), and locally produced media may be strengthened by exposure to more global
information flows (Rao, 2009). Others, like Volkmer (1999), argue that there was a pos-
sibility for a global public and regional specificity. With this empirical and theoretical
research in mind, this study seeks to build on the theoretical backbone of ‘space of flows’
contrasted with ‘space of places’ and empirical research that investigates how transna-
tional news moves across global networks.

The case
The case presented here looks at the material and the online construction processes of
networked news production at the IHT and The Times through their two online and three
print products. The Times is a significant site of inquiry as a key influencer in setting the
US agenda (Walgrave and Van Aelst, 2006) and reaches policy-makers, corporate
Usher 123

executives, and an audience with an average household income of more than USD90,000
(Media Kit: New York Times, n.d.). Despite struggles with the general ‘newspaper cri-
sis’, The Times has introduced an aggressive paywall model that CEO Mark Thompson
has called the ‘most successful decision in years’ (Roberts, 2013); nytimes.com still
remains among the 10 most read news sites in the world and gets over 29 million unique
visitors a month. The staff of The Times itself is about 1000 strong.
The IHT also had a storied history; it was founded in 1887 as The Paris Herald by
James Gordon Bennett, Jr, and was intended as the European edition of the New York
Herald. At the time, it reached an audience much like it did prior to rebranding: rich
expatriates hoping for an international view of the world but with a slice of news from
the United States (Alison Smale, executive editor, the IHT, 26 April 2010, personal com-
munication). The Washington Post and The Times became joint owners in 1967, an
agreement that unraveled in 2003, with The Times assuming complete control. In 2005,
The Times created an Asian-specific edition of the IHT and opened an office in Hong
Kong. Circulation is currently split 60/40 between Europe and Asia (Media Kit: New
York Times Global, n.d.). Within The Times Company, there was indeed a sense in which
the IHT is the ‘B-team’ for New York; however, I was less interested here in internal
cultural politics and more interested in the impact of physical place, space, and time on
news production, though this subtext was of course at work. At the time, the IHT had
approximately 80 people in Paris and 60 in Hong Kong.
From New York, The Times is responsible for the print imprimatur, and 24 hours a day,
New York-based Web producers put up content from around the globe on nytimes.com
and global.nytimes.com. The Times also supplemented its print and Web coverage with
IHT coverage, especially in the business section. The origin of new content for the Web
depended on what time it is: at 9 p.m. in New York, it is 3 p.m. in Paris, and 9 a.m. in
Hong Kong, but there was a felt urgency at The Times for ‘fresh’ content (Usher, 2014)
that motivated continuous, round-the-globe demand for news. The Times and the IHT ran
on different content management systems, and as a result, The Times, which had a bigger
site, controls the ultimate version of a story because it must be posted to the Web from its
Web site. This has broader significance as we will see.

Method
This article emerges from a larger ethnographic project on the NYT. I spent a total of
5 months at the newspaper between January and June 2010 conducting ethnographic
field work. I spent over 700 hours in this newsroom and conducted over 80 interviews. I
observed workflow, both print and online, attended Page One and business desk meet-
ings, and ‘shadowed’ 32 journalists across newsroom hierarchy, watching them work
throughout the day. My principal site of research was the business desk of The Times. I
visited the IHT-Europe (Paris) in April 2010, midway through my time at the NYT, as it
had become clear to me that the IHT and NYT business desks had a close relationship
worth exploring.
To understand this coordination, I spent 6 days in the Paris newsroom and 4 days in
Hong Kong. In Paris, I attended daily news meetings, observed general newsroom work-
flow, and conducted a total of 20 interviews lasting between 30 minutes to 1 hour with
124 Journalism 16(1) 

people across the newsroom hierarchy, selected based on a convenience sample based on
who was available in a busy newsroom. This included IHT-Asia and IHT-Europe editor-
in-chief, the managing editor, reporters, editors, and copy editors. In June 2010, I visited
the IHT-Asia (Hong Kong). I followed a similar research schedule and interviewed 13
journalists, most of whom were editors and print and online production focused. At the
time, there were only three official IHT-Asia reporters. The questions were asked about
news production between New York, Paris, and Hong Kong and were incrementally
adapted building upon new data. Across all research sites, some journalists requested
anonymity, but my agreement with these journalists and the Institutional Review Board
(IRB) was that I could use their names unless they requested otherwise.
I kept jottings (down to the level of specific verbatim quotes in meetings) in a note-
book throughout the day of conversation and took notes verbatim for interviews on my
laptop. My work was guided by Glaser and Strauss’ (1967) constant comparative method.
This method informed my ability to recognize and code themes based on their promi-
nence and evaluate them in terms existing the theory and literature. I had previously
coded my Times data for ‘Times interaction with IHT’. For this project, I coded for a
variety of categories related to this interaction, from 24/7 Web operations, to print per-
spective, audience perception, and reporter workflow. I then collapsed these categories
into broader themes regarding global news production: audience difference, print pro-
duction, online coordination, and online/print coordination.

Shaping the print paper

On one hand, Castells suggests that specific locations are significant because they are
sites of production that are responsible for generating information for a larger informa-
tion ecosystem. On the other hand, though, physical contiguity should matter less because
in a networked society, as time-sharing makes place less important. Arguably, if informa-
tion production is concentrated, this has less to do with geography because these cities
are engaged in process rather than product. What we see in the case of the three Times
Co. news outlets is that information does not flow easily from place to place because
time still matters in shaping physical production. Similarly, there is an uneasy relation-
ship between process and product.
In New York, there is little consideration for The Times paper’s existence outside of
the United States. However, the creation of the print paper in New York has significant
consequences for the IHT’s print paper. New York is the dominant point for all informa-
tion distribution. The Times has two Page One meetings: one at 10 a.m. to set the day’s
agenda and another at 4:30 p.m. intended to finalize the front page. New York sets the
tone for what will be the most important print coverage, choosing from an array of enter-
prise stories with a longer shelf life and breaking news stories. Enterprise stories are like
a game of cat and mouse: the story will be offered to the top New York editors for 2 or
3 days, as editors don’t want to lose their chance at having a Page One story, but when
they will run is unclear.
But when Paris calls in for the 10 a.m. New York meeting – which is 4 p.m. Paris time
– Paris needs to be able to plan for its 9 p.m. print deadline. This means hoping that New
York will have a good sense of what stories it can use, so Paris can begin creating a plan
Usher 125

for its front page. A number of examples illuminate the difficulty in coordinating the
material news production for Paris based simply on time.
On 26 April 2010, business editor Larry Ingrassia presented a story slugged WIND to
the morning Page One meeting. He said, ‘There’s a story about a wind farm off Cape
Cod. It’s contentious because rich people don’t want it in their backyard. It’s a test case
for wind power if the administration says yes or no’. It met with almost no feedback or
interest. Ingrassia tried to push his story with more urgency and said, ‘They are going to
decide in a day or two’.
As the last person to pipe in over the teleconference, Smale from Paris noted, ‘We
would really like WIND’, and after the Page One meeting, she conferred to her col-
leagues, ‘This will be nice for our readers, how America is behind in wind’. (This
comment also reflects the Europe-focused sentiment, in this case, about the wind
industry).
Smale had to know the following: Would New York use WIND that day? Would it be
on the front page? That day, she got lucky, and Ingrassia told her she could have it, as
saving it for Page One seemed to be a lost cause and he wanted to run the story.
The following day illustrated more dramatically the difficulty of having something
from New York meet the Paris print deadlines. Goldman Sachs was defending itself
against mounting evidence that it had purposely shorted the housing market. The situa-
tion was developing in New York, but whether there would be an analytical story in time
for Paris was unclear. ‘We have [two reporters] blogging …’ Ingrassia added. Assistant
Managing Editor Jim Roberts told Smale, ‘We’ll try to have something for you’ (Field
notes, 27 April 2010). Paris made the best out of an early draft.
The situation is peculiar for Hong Kong, which prints a paper with news from the
United States, that is, as Asia Editor Philip McClellan noted, ‘30 hours behind New York’
(14 June 2010, personal communication), or as another editor noted, ‘We publish a day-
old newspaper’. The conundrum is that The Times produces the bulk of material for the
IHT-Asia, but most of the stories that Hong Kong can run in its newspaper will have
already been up on the Web page. The saving grace is the Reuters business news supple-
ment that adds to print content, according to Tom Sims, business news editor in Paris.
The conundrum for Hong Kong is particularly difficult when it comes to choosing
photos. ‘There is not a lot of art that moves from Asia’, in part because there are fewer
Times and wire agency photographers located there. Sims continued, ‘There’s only so
many times you can put rioting Bangladeshis on the front page … and you don’t want an
American photo that is a day old …’ So the editors resort to finding photos from wire
services when possible, but are left with few options.
In an age of networked information, it would seem like it makes little sense to even
bother with a print product. All these headaches would be erased. Yet the reliance on the
print product reveals that we have not completely moved to a world where information
exchange is indeed reduced to networked global information flows. There is a reason still
for creating material, physical information: it sells and funds The Times Co. The IHT,
while costly to produce, offers a high-income audience and, as a result, high advertise-
ment rates (USD240,000 per home; front-page advertisements for USD110,000), and
will for now remain in print. Similarly, despite circulation declines, The Times makes
most of its money from its print product.
126 Journalism 16(1) 

The coordination of whose content belongs where and when belies the easy transfer
of information suggested by Castells. On one hand, we are still dealing with a material
information exchange. For Castells, however, even manufacturing can fit into this net-
worked flow; physical production in turn may be facilitated through information
exchange. However, in this case, what makes coordination complicated is that one site of
information production, The Times, has most of the control over what information is
available to the IHT. A significant portion of intellectual resources and labor come from
New York; Paris and Hong Kong can’t alone fill their newspapers without The Times.
This would point to the importance of a single place marshaling the resources of the
material concentration of information exchange and sharing it, suggesting more difficul-
ties than predicted between material and networked coordination. The IHT is not freed
from the space of places, time zones, and physical contiguity.

Content adjustment in the expat and American world

The larger debates about global journalism, and globalization more generally, have pitted
whether it is possible to actually have global content. Castells’ work suggests that con-
tent can be locally produced but have global ramifications, offering other nodes of the
network greater insight. One example is the case of the Mayo Clinic’s capacity to have
top doctors working in Rochester, Minnesota, but through teleconferencing and other
means, this knowledge can be shared and locally integrated into other medical communi-
ties. One of the most difficult aspects to rectify within the networked society is this
conflation of local and global experience, and what we can see through The Times and
the IHT is that information does require local interpretation. Nonetheless, he argues that
information can come from any point in the network and be reinterpreted by any other
point in the network in an exchange that was previously far more difficult.
Geographical perspective colors content creation. In New York, business news editors
were concerned with global issues, but their approach belied an American understanding
of global dynamics. For example, Times journalists were often critical of the European
social welfare state, with editors asserting that it was ‘unsustainable’ (Field notes, 3
March 2010). In another case, a reporter offered a story about the Greek origin of the
debt crisis – tax evasion. Business editor Larry Ingrassia noted, ‘The Greeks need to stop
living beyond their means’ (Field notes, 7 March 2010). ‘Greeks just don’t pay their
taxes. They have swimming pool[s], and then they say they don’t have any money’, as
one editor expounded, ‘It’s ridiculous the kinds of claims that are made. It’s like cultur-
ally no one pays taxes’ (Field notes, 14 March 2010).
On the other hand, The Times also looked for IHT stories to inform New York about
the European debt crisis because these writers had more intimate knowledge of the
Eurozone finance conditions, suggesting that information could come from other nodes
in the network. Yet that European Union (EU) story was different for The Times than it
was for Paris. One IHT business writer noted,

There’s a European edition for the IHT, which you really want a smart lede which you want
may have global ramifications and ramification for Europe and you need to think with a big
voice … If it is a really important story you are going to be working … another version to file
Usher 127

for The Times – you write [for example]: a lot of this affected the American market … (21 April
2010, personal communication)

The personal technology page offers a good example of the tension between creating
content for a global marketplace and serving three distinct audiences. In New York, the
personal technology page was a Thursday section that previewed the latest and greatest
apps, the gizmos perceived as up and coming in the world of technology, tech writer
David Pogue’s column, and other tidbits. Because both Paris and Hong Kong do not
produce enough of their own original content to fill the business pages, they rely on the
personal technology content for the print paper.
For Paris, two problems emerged with this section: availability of the gadgets and
European mindsets about technology. ‘They do a lot more consumer friendly stuff, with
the latest gadget and they have the bodies. But they did a lot on the iPad and it will be a
day and forever until it comes out [here]’, said John-Paul Rofe, tech editor at the time
(Field notes, 26 April 2010). Similarly, what if an app wasn’t available on a European
Smartphone? And as IHT-Europe media and tech writer Eric Pfanner noted, ‘This con-
tent doesn’t always work for us. People in Europe have much more concerns about pri-
vacy than in the United States. We aren’t so utopian’ (Field notes, 26 April 2010).
In Asia, the opposite problem emerged. As editor Mike Wolengarter noted to me,
‘People here already have the latest stuff. We’re ahead of the U.S. We know what’s going
on before they do. We just don’t have the bodies that The Times has to cover it’ (Field
notes, 16 June 2010). So the content was not appropriate to the audience, and there was
specific geo-located information.
In this instance, we can see signs that Castells’ broader explication of information flows
as dehierarchial and disembedded from physical contiguity does not quite make sense. But
other parts of his assessment do make sense: that The Times, as a central node, offers infor-
mation to other parts of the network, which then take up this information – knowledge is
distributed in this sense rather than centrally held. And the IHT, then, provides additional
information back into this globally dispersed information ecosystem. Nonetheless, The
Times is the source of information; it offers a product that must be further disaggregated. The
American perspective of technology must be adjusted for more global needs. This suggests
the importance of recognizing more uneven balance of global information flows.

Online coordination (and dissonance) in the networked

public sphere
So far, we have examined material production and content creation, but have not addressed
perhaps the richest site of inquiry into global flows of information: the transfer and
exchange of networked, online news across the three Times outlets. The data offer compel-
ling support for the potential for Castells’ theorization of a global information distribution
through a 24/7 networked information environment. But what we have less insight into is
the actual coordination and human costs required to create this global coordination; from
our desks or our phones, it is easy to imagine information coming to us at any time when
we want it, but the process is far from simple, as this production process suggests. The case
of the markets story and breaking news out of China help elucidate this nuance.
128 Journalism 16(1) 

On one hand, time is an absolute requirement for organizing the transfer of global infor-
mation; without clear coordination between time zones, the quest for the 24/7 nytimes.com
would be impossible. On the other hand, the space of flows is perhaps best represented
through online production as ‘time-sharing social practices’ (Castells, 2001); access to infor-
mation is not bound by any one material time zone; and work processes themselves create
global flows. Gerry Mullany, the night Web news editor expressed this sentiment: ‘The New
York Times never sleeps. Somewhere it is always morning’ (5 April 2010, personal commu-
nication). But making the site ‘always morning’ requires careful handoffs for this globally
accessible online product. Similarly, some information does actually vanish because of the
networked efforts, and more significantly, there is a human cost to this 24/7 operation.
The markets story – the chart of the rise and fall of markets across the world – offers
insight into the kind of global handoff required for information to flow from node to
node. Each day, the markets story begins in Hong Kong. But the Hong Kong reporter
must be focused on New York. ‘I check my Blackberry while still in bed …’, she
explained. She continued to detail the continuous updating process:

I write about how New York finished [indicates] how Asia will do … literally I’ll do that as my
first thing – I’ll keep readers informed about the market sentiment and as the day progresses I’ll
make updates, and the Asian markets all close at different times.

During this time, she and her editor are in touch with New York, where it is the middle
of the night. Yet even online, information loses currency as it moves across the globe –
and across time. The reporter explained, ‘For European editions it needs to be more
Europe focused, and by the time we progress to the US markets whatever Asia has done
has been rendered irrelevant’ (14 June 2010, personal communication).
Then in Paris, journalist David Jolly picks up the markets story that the Asia reporter
has been working on all day. He begins again constant Web updates, filling the nytimes.
com Web site with news of the latest jitters in the European marketplace in pre-trading
hours. Jolly explained his mandate: ‘There is a constant appetite from New York for us
to produce whatever we can produce …’ This process then continues in New York, with
reporter Javier Hernandez taking over the story for premarket trading. But even before
he gets to work, his editor, Mark Getzfred, prepares for the New York day deleting most
of the Asian markets information and topping the Europe markets information with new
paragraphs about US premarket trading. In an effort to keep up with the global flow of
finance, older information is dropped from the story in favor of updated information
focused on each trading sphere. Because this information is edited online, it also dies
online. If a New Yorker wanted to look online in the afternoon about how the Asian mar-
kets performed that day, that information simply wouldn’t exist on nytimes.com – even
though it had been there just hours ago.
The handoffs are well coordinated but require considerable communication, with edi-
tors from two time zones always in touch with each other during the few hours they
overlap. The Asia editor touches base with the Europe editor who touches base with New
York editors who then prepare to be in touch with the Asia editor again. For the periods
of overlap, the editors chatter back and forth about reporters on duty, where stories are in
Usher 129

the system and what each has been able to catch about the next opening market to help
that editor and reporter start their day.
At the end of the US day, Hernandez is responsible for providing an overall recap for
what has happened across the markets. The goal, according to Getzfred, is to provide a
thorough, more analytical look at what happened rather than the moment by moment – a
take-out story. But Hernandez’ story is a US markets story, with nary a mention of Europe
or Asia, and this, ultimately is the story that lives online. But this means that Jolly and
the Hong Kong reporter rarely see a byline. As Jolly puts it, The Times ultimately treated
his Europe story as ‘wire copy … they can do whatever they want to it’. And for him, that
meant real consequences. ‘I will be working on a story all day and sometimes not even
receive a contributing line for it … and that kind of stuff happens with depressing fre-
quency’ (Field notes, 27 April 2010).
From the perspective of journalists working on the story, those attached to the infor-
mation they have gathered and created, this disjuncture of information and ownership
over the story means something to them. For Hernandez, the byline remains his. But for
the Hong Kong writer and for Jolly, their efforts are lost to the global exchange. This is
an illustration of perhaps something forgotten about global information exchange:
through information churn, people whose work has intellectual value to them may get
lost in the global shuffle for the desire for fast, efficient information.
The human cost goes beyond just bylines and disconnect from intellectual effort,
though. Answering to a 24/7 operation that can be focused across entirely different global
zones is simply physically exhausting for a journalist. The online and print coordination
of the NYT and IHT for a breaking story illustrated this difficulty – made especially more
demanding by the need to also meet hard physical deadlines.
NYT reporter Keith Bradsher consults with the IHT and NYT Shanghai bureau chief
for direction on stories. He shared with me the process of working on a breaking story
of a rare protest march of Chinese workers striking at a Honda plant in Zhongshan,
China. On 10 June 2010, Bradsher arrived in the evening at the site of the strike and sent
an email ‘revised Bradsher whereabouts’ and told his editors at 8:33 p.m. Zhongshan
time that he planned to file for the IHT late print deadlines. He got an email back
20 minutes later from New York, with an editor asking him to file as soon as possible.
Bradsher replied, ‘Yes, my plan is to file in one hour from now. I have a lot of writing
to do to hit that goal, however’. He then began filing the story for New York, updating
the story after finding out new information about an independent union (rare in China).
Bradsher noted,

This additional information meant that I kept rewriting and expanding the story in my laptop.
New York waited a couple hours for me to refile before deciding to go ahead and putting the
IHT version up on the web without waiting for me any longer.

Although Bradsher was pleased to have the story go up, the pace of the process illustrates
the intensity of his work. The NYT posted the story at 10 p.m. Zhongshan time. Bradsher
updated the story again at 11 p.m. his time. He gave more information in to New York at
12:00 a.m., or roughly 12:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST). He told me about the
process:
130 Journalism 16(1) 

I finally went to sleep at 3:40 a.m., then got up at 6 a.m. to go through New York’s edited
version and have breakfast. The web had posted my full story with the 8 a.m. protest march at
about 4:45 a.m. That was too late for other reporters in Hong Kong to make it to Zhongshan in
time for the march. I went back out to the strike around 7 and called in to New York with
updates from the protest march and brief confrontation with riot police. I was the only reporter
at the march who was on deadline.

The email traffic he shared with me showed a conversation between him and the New
York copy desk at 5:24 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. Zhongshan time, respectively.
Bradsher was covering a breaking story with many moving parts: a big protest out China.
But he was coordinating between filing for a print deadline before the IHT-Asia deadline
and then working with NYT editors after the IHT finished up for the evening. He focused on
the IHT version of the story for the Web version at first and then put up a full version later
on the next morning. This meant he slept just over 2 hours to keep this constant flow of
information going. The global flow of information was coming 24/7 from a single person,
not from multiple nodes in the network. And this was not even an A-1 story for New York.
So here is the cost that seems especially trenchant: for the global flow of information
to proceed smoothly, something material must be sacrificed. It may not be a product like
content, but human capital. In this case, the global flow of information would not have
been possible without one reporter sleeping 2 hours to make sure the story had the most
updated information for both sides of the world. The demand for content made Bradsher
a central node in the network offering a constant flow of news. But Bradsher is just one
person – up for 24 hours. Someone could always be working with him, and he always had
a way to distribute information to a global audience.
This human toll of labor asked of the ‘flexible worker’ (Harvey, 1991) is something
we may miss if we focus too much on the information itself rather than the process.
Global flows (or microflows) of information through a single person are more likely
when the person has a continued and coordinated potential for the distribution of his or
her news content. But 24-hour coverage seems unreasonable even if it is possible. The
desire for the news organizations to be constantly updated creates physical wear and tear
on the people producing the content, whether it be tired night editors in Hong Kong mak-
ing sure that the early morning New York markets editor really has a clear sense of the
wrap-up or the reporter on the scene filing for multiple Web and print deadlines. In this
way, global flows are deeply rooted to the material; people create the content for instant
information access, and the networked society may require a mental and physical sacri-
fice from workers whose organizations make money from offering this information.

Space, time, and global information flows of information in

news production
This article has aspired to shed light beyond the language of global flows to explore more
specifically the production processes and people behind the information society and to
explore the relationship between their local situation and their place in the global infor-
mation ecology. Castells offers an important starting point to begin this inquiry because
he aptly provides a framework to understand the transfer of information across the globe
Usher 131

in near instant time through the networked society as a series of flows that displace the
importance of physical space in favor of process, larger and smaller nodes, and the deem-
phasis of time bound by space as a way to experience the information society.
From the perspective of an information-seeker, the existence of 24/7 readily available news
from all over the world seems to embody the reality of these global information flows. And
while Castells has applied his analysis equally to finance and to manufacturing, what we know
less about is the experience of the actual production that enables this information ecology. The
case of The Times and the IHT underscores the complicated relationship between production
and global demands for information; time, and time zones, in particular, play a significant role
in the physical coordination of material production. Content creation across the United States,
Europe, and Asia underscores the importance of making information locally relevant and
reveals that particular nodes in the information environment may take on possibly more hegem-
onic positions due to their capacity to create content. And while online coordination across a
24/7 global news landscape is facilitated by the networked society, this may mean the actual loss
of information. More significantly, there is a real human cost to this 24/7 production.
Castells suggests that global flows render time as disembodied from space. Yet when it
comes to journalism – a critically important source of information in, well, the information age
– time does matter. The news cycles still follow a diurnal process that begin and end according
to when the day begin and ends in a particular time zone. The Times produces content that can
fill its global offshoots, but the centrality of New York as the key source of information means
that both the IHT-Europe and IHT-Asia must follow its lead. The size and power of this node
as a key producer of information means that it dominates the resulting physical transfer of
information to the Paris and Hong Kong newsrooms. This suggests a more hegemonic per-
spective of global information transfer: one node can dictate the availability of news to another
node in the network. The exchange of information is not so easily facilitated.
Content creation, too, raises larger issues about the relationship between global and
local. Other scholars (perhaps most notably Appadurai, 1996) – notes that global hegem-
onic constructions become deeply imbedded in the local imaginary, adapted for consist-
ency but nonetheless bearing the stamp of the point of origin. In a networked society,
Castells does suggest that certain centers will become the central source for information,
but that this information will be easily shared across and through networks, enabling
greater connections where location is less important than the knowledge itself. Yet con-
tent, as we see here, is not disembodied from location. New York has an American audi-
ence; the content it offers must be recreated for European and Asian audiences – and at
times, the original content may make little sense when distributed across global nodes.
The markets stories reveal the actual disappearance of locally created information
from Europe and Asia in favor of the end-of-day New York story. Ultimately, the exist-
ence of a content management system organized and based in New York that dictates the
presentation of the Web and the final archiving of the stories means that global informa-
tion available to the world through networked space is ultimately processed through one
information hub. This suggests the need to understand content creation in a more nuanced
way that addresses where information comes from and how it is distributed rather than
looking at the process through which people are able to access this information.
Finally, what has been under-explored and needs further consideration are the conse-
quences of the networked society on individual workers. Harvey’s (1991) assessment of
132 Journalism 16(1) 

flexible workers begins to address some of the demands placed on workers in a post-
Fordist world, displaced from traditional institutions and organized, time-bound work-
flow. But this article offers some insight into just how difficult it is for workers to be
actually bound to the demand for constant information in a 24/7 information cycle;
Bradsher’s work on China illustrates that the worker is expected to be divorced from
time and location in order to respond to the demand for global information flow from
multiple nodes in The Times and the IHT online and print networks. And psychic demands
for credit and ownership over content creation are subsumed across the larger informa-
tion environment. Some have addressed the constant 24/7 multiplatform demands of
journalists (Deuze, 2007); this global demand for information may go one step beyond.
When thinking broadly about global information flows, the networked society offers
rich potential for information exchange that can, indeed, be widely dispersed and disag-
gregated from place and time. But this does not mean that the actors themselves engaged
in this information creation are also swept up by the ease of global information flows; for
them, as we see in the case of news production, material considerations matter, physical
space matters, and time matters. This complicates what we know about the people and
processes behind information distribution and begs additional study.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

References
Appadurai A (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Beck U (2005) Power in the Global Age. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Berglez P (2008) What is global journalism? Journalism Studies 9(6): 845–858.
Bicket D and Wall M (2009) BBC News in the United States: A ‘super-alternative’ news medium
emerges. Media, Culture & Society 31: 365–384.
Boyd-Barrett O and Rantanen T (eds) (1998) The Globalization of News. London: SAGE.
Boyd-Barrett O and Xie S (2008) Al-Jazeera, Phoenix Satellite Television and the return of the
state: Case studies in market liberalization, public sphere and media imperialism. International
Journal of Communication 2: 206–222.
Castells M (2001) The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age. Economy, Society and
Culture, vol. I. London: Blackwell.
Castells M (2008) The new public sphere: Global civil society, communication networks, and global
governance. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 616: 78–93.
Chalaby JK (2005) Deconstructing the transnational: A typology of cross-border television chan-
nels in Europe. New Media & Society 7(2): 155–175.
Chalaby JK (2009) Transnational Television in Europe: Reconfiguring Global Communication
Networks. London: I.B. Tauris.
Clausen L (2003) Global News Production. Denmark: Copenhagen Business School Press.
Cottle S and Rai M (2008) Global 24/7 news providers: Emissaries of global dominance or global
public sphere? Global Media and Communication 4: 157–181.
De Beer A and Merrill J (2008) Global Journalism: Topical Issues and Media Systems. New York:
Pearson.
Deuze M (2007) Media Work. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Gasher M and Klein R (2008) Mapping the geography of online news. Canadian Journal of
Communication 33(2): 193.
Usher 133

Glaser BG and Strauss AL (1967) The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative
Research. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Greenslade R (2013) Why The New York Times is moving on from the Herald Tribune. The
Guardian, 29 July. Available at: http://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2013/jul/29/
new-york-times-digital-media
Hafez K (2007) The Myth of Media Globalization. Malden, MA: Polity Press.
Harvey D (1991) The Conditions of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural
Change. London: Wiley-Blackwell.
Haughney C (2013) A leaner Times aims for global growth. The New York Times, 14 October.
Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/business/media/a-leaner-times-aims-for-
global-growth.html?_r=0&;pagewanted=all
Heinrich A (2008) Network journalism: Moving towards a global journalism culture. Paper deliv-
ered to the RIPE conference in Mainz, 9–11 October.
Heinrich A (2011) Network Journalism: Journalistic Practice in Interactive Spheres. New York:
Routledge.
Heinrich A (2012) Foreign reporting in the sphere of network journalism. Journalism Practice
6(5): 766–775.
Hjarvard S (2001) News Media and the Globalization of the Public Sphere: News Media in a
Globalized Society. Goteborg: Nordicom, pp. 17–40.
McPhail T (2010) Global Communication: Theories, Stakeholders and Trends. London: Wiley-
Blackwell.
Media Kit: New York Times Global (n.d.) http://www.nytimesglobal.com/online/destination-
sections.aspx
Media Kit: New York Times (n.d.) http://nytmediakit.com/newspaper
Rao S (2009) Glocalization of Indian journalism. Journalism Studies 10(4): 474–488.
Reese SD (2008) Theorizing a globalized journalism. In: Loeffelholz M and Weaver D (eds) Global
Journalism Research: Theories, Methods, Findings, Future. London: Blackwell, pp. 240–252.
Reese SD (2010) Journalism and globalisation. Sociology Compass 4: 344–353.
Roberts JJ (2013) New York Times CEO calls digital pay model ‘most successful’ decision in
years. Paid Content, 2 May. Available at: http://paidcontent.org/2013/05/20/new-york-times-
ceo-calls-digital-pay-model-most-successful-decision-in-years/
Sassen S (2001) The Global City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Sparks C (2005) Media and the (global) public sphere: An evaluative approach. In: de John W, Shaw
M and Stammer N (eds) Global Activism, Global Media. London: Pluto Press, pp. 34–39.
Thurman N (2007) The globalisation of journalism online: A transatlantic study of news websites
and their international readers. Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 8(3): 285–307.
Thussu D (ed.) (2006) Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow. New York: Routledge.
Usher N (2014) Making News at The New York Times. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan
Press.
Volkmer I (1999) News in the Global Sphere: A Study of CNN and Its Impact on Global
Communication. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Walgrave S and Van Aelst P (2006) The contingency of the mass media’s political agenda setting
power: Toward a preliminary theory. Journal of Communication 56(1): 88–109.

Author biography
Nikki Usher, PhD, is an assistant professor at The George Washington University’s School of
Media and Public Affairs. She is most recently an author of the book Making News at the New
York Times, the first in-depth ethnographic portrait of the newspaper in the digital age. She
received her PhD and MA from the Annenberg School of Communication, University of
Southern California.

View publication stats