News and the City

Singapore.
And we're back for another day of ICA 2010. I'm afraid I may not see much of today, through, both as I'm still backing up from the football last night and as I still have to finish our slides for tomorrow. The first session I'm seeing, then, starts with Scott Rodgers, whose interest is in the relationship between the newspaper and the city. He highlights the series The Wire as a useful fictional study of the sociology of city journalism; its underlying message is that the hollowing out of the local newspaper has serious implications for the city.

The city is a vast resource for news staff, and one in which editors orient and project the product; the newsroom is also itself a site of the city, of course. Scott introduces the idea of cultures of circulation here - circulation in the first place tends to simply translate to transmission, but circulation really is also a process of interaction; it provides an anti-interpretive dimension (media beyond their meanings) and highlights media without well-defined receivers.

Audience theory also deals with this, of course, and undermines the sender/receiver model. It allows a looser focus on the ways multiple people come in contact with media; it enables a look at media as practice. However, media production can also be seen as participating in circulation - dispersed practices (doing and saying) and integrative practices (teleoaffective structuring and epistemic knowledge) come into play here.

Integrative practices include and depend on specific material arrangements - especially on the site of the social. Scott highlights the newsroom as one such site - the physical newsroom, as well as the social connections which exist in it. Places in the newsroom include the city desk - a conduit for dealing with activities beyond the newsroom setting, it is a relational place. There are also newsroom rhythms which are important - the time-spaces of meetings, for example - and the technological backdrop of the (especially digital) newsroom. Scott also highlights the form of the newspaper, which both creates and inherits media form - divided into specific sections (some local), across which content distribution is negotiated by the editors, who make judgments about the appropriate placement of content.

Editing is a site of media power - a practical entity and an enactable set of practices. The newsroom is an obligatory passage point defined by that practice. News form is a public inheritance; the aesthetic form of newspapers is entangled with their status as a cultural and public form.

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