News Nerds explores how technological, economic, and societal changes are impacting the institutionalized profession of journalism. Allie Kosterich draws on a mixed-methods research design that blends interviews, social network analysis of LinkedIn data, job postings, and industry publications to make sense of how skills and practices become entrenched throughout the news industry. Taken together, these data reveal the ways in which the profession is evolving to incorporate new technological skillsets and new routines of production.

In telling these stories and sharing these findings, Kosterich directly confronts what happens when new skillsets and new ways of understanding and producing news start to collide with the old routines of journalism. News Nerds introduces the notion of institutional augmentation--a process of institutional change that is not restricted to the expected binary outcome of the reinstitutionalization of something new or failure as a fleeting fad. Instead, as in the case of news nerds and journalism, there exists an alternative possibility in the coexistence of supplementary institutions. News Nerds provides a timely and relevant analysis of contemporary journalism and a model for understanding how industries react to the emergence of new career trajectories and new categories of employment.