Abstract
Journalists are not simply a form of portable surveillance equipment, passively recording snippets of humanity in an undefined space. Their sentient presence instead is an active source of semiotic generation and a provocation of placemaking. In other words, something physically happens in a particular location, garners public attention, and journalists document the moment, not necessarily in that order, creating a mediated and interpretive record of its corporeal and grounded existence.
In the relatively short-but-dense book Geographies of Journalism: The Imaginative Power of Place in Making Digital News, co-authors Robert E. Gutsche Jr. and Kristy Hess address the power of placemaking and “the spatial turn” of journalism from various angles to untangle intertwined relationships among ideology, perceptions, location, proximity, and influence. The writing style is clear, focused, and mostly jargon-free, as they elevate toward a transdisciplinary discourse on this topic.
Gutsche, a senior lecturer in Critical Digital Media Practice at Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, and Hess, an associate professor of Communication at Deakin University in Australia, have placed their book in Routledge’s “Disruptions: Studies in Digital Journalism” series, which is focused upon radical changes provoked by the affordances of disruptive new digital technologies. In this case, however, instead of a focus on novelties of emerging gadgets, the authors assemble an argument based on profound synergies developing between many simultaneous and emerging adaptations of communication infrastructure, which are forcing reexaminations of conceptualizations of place, territories, and space in an increasingly complex locative-media ecology.
In the process, the authors reassert the importance of the material world to complicate as well as unpack journalism’s broader and deeper relationships with geography. That approach includes ways in which journalistic discourse shapes perceptions of locations to inversions of journalistic infrastructure, bringing the invisible to the surface. In doing so, this book documents connections among physical and digital spaces where journalism is practiced, as they affect public discourse and perceptions of place.
Chapter-length topics include the following: “Mapping the Geographies of Journalism,” “Symbolic and Imaginative Power: From Doxa to Innovation in Journalism,” and “Demarcating News Space(s) in Digital News.” For those unfamiliar with either the foundations of geography studies or journalism studies, or both, the book begins with a basic orientation that both binds and transcends traditional disciplinary discourse through a valuable genealogy of related fields around various common dimensions: physical, social, cultural, economic, digital, and media-based.
Several scholars already working down this path of inquiry are documented as developing concepts around geography-oriented journalism, which integrate sociability and digital technologies with cultural, physical, and temporal affordances. Even though smartphones have been around for just about a decade, and are about to enter their teenage years, the overlapping interests among journalism studies, mobile media, geography, and geolocation technologies still need significant disentangling. Some scholars have argued about the lessening importance of place, in a world where digital media circumnavigates global networks instantaneously. Virtual presence, via these networked technologies, in some senses also can create a paradoxical perception of close proximity.
This book as a whole, however, makes many compelling counterarguments, including propositions that the idea of “place” is fluid—not frozen or fixed—and is constantly being inscribed, reinscribed, negotiated, renegotiated, and inherently challenged and contested by each interlocutor, continually producing new layers of conversations and media, representing rituals and stories about experiences but also even presenting just the potential of place (or space) conjured by imaginations.
Environmental journalism, for example, creates a complicated metaconversation about these matters. Natural dimensions of a landscape clearly affect the creation and communication of journalistic discourses in each place, from geologic source materials to physical barriers in production and dissemination processes. These dimensions create inherent digital divides and news deserts, with clouds of information and communication technology “blackspots.” Even if the production part of the place-inscribing process is relatively unhindered, the audience must be fully equipped, positioned, and literate in the discourse to receive and decode whatever messages about a place are being shared. At the topmost layer, rhetorical discourse about the environment, combined with scientific data, shape perceptions about a place, from any number of perspectives, if all of the rest of the parts of this system function properly. That last part is certainly not a given, among other digital-divide issues.
While most journalistic organizations, particularly capitalistic ones, focus heavily on claiming geographically specific news territories by battling over turf, generating binaries between audiences, and even erecting new walls on their borders (i.e., paywalls), the authors suggest seeing geographic dimensions of journalism as inclusionary and affording new cultural rites of passage, overlaying synthesis among spatial and social structures.
The authors are not pinpointing a small and niche corner of the journalistic media ecosystem. They are describing a potentially radical and pervasive paradigm shift—beyond any particular theory, methodology, or practice in the present field—that encompasses the epistemologies of how we know about and understand places and the people who intersect them.
The authors periodically acknowledge their intent as one to initiate discussions, however, rather than to territorialize and end debates about the geographical perspective of newsmaking, from both traditional and new vantage points. Even though this package is small, at 132 half-sized pages, and the aim is exploratory, this book succeeds in generating many intriguing conversation starters.
