Summary
Based on a range of interviews with foreign diplomats in London, this article explains the considerable variation in the way that communication technologies both affect diplomatic practices and are appropriated by diplomats to pursue the respective countries’ information-gathering and public outreach objectives. The study shows that London, as an information environment, is experienced differently by each of the diplomats and embassy actors. The analysis elaborates a model of the ‘communication behaviour’ of foreign diplomats, based on an evolutionary analogy: foreign diplomats in the context of the British capital, within their respective embassy organizations, can each be compared to the members of a species that is attempting to survive in a natural environment. The nuances highlighted by the explanatory model challenge the largely homogeneous and generalized nature of current debates about media and diplomacy, as well as public diplomacy.
This article is about the conceptual and methodological challenges of mapping 21 st century transnational journalism. They are examined by focusing on the case study of a journalistic genre that spans the local, national and transnational dimensions at once: online local news in English from non-English speaking countries. This kind of news appears to defy the boundaries of existing journalistic categories. Given that defining a problem (ontology) affects the way we go about researching it (methodology), the absence of a clear definitional category a researcher can assign this news-phenomenon to raises important questions: Which strategies might be employed to map this genre of news, to identify what is relevant to it, and ultimately to understand it? The analysis first outlines the limitations of existing journalistic categories in capturing the fluid reality of contemporary transnational news. Then, borrowing from the toolkit of International History, it suggests an alternative inductive and relational approach to examining transnational journalistic practices-histoire croisée. The benefits of this approach are illustrated through an empirical mapping of the actors, connectors and connections that make up the "circulatory regime" of the leading provider of local news in English in Europe: The Local.
The article challenges the widespread notion that, in the age of global and instantaneous communication, foreign correspondence is becoming ‘redundant’. Based on a range of in-depth interviews with foreign correspondents in London, it examines the identity, newsgathering routines, and outputs of journalists working for a range of foreign media organizations. The study suggests that foreign correspondence is indeed evolving, but that the changes are not necessarily for the worse. In fact, not only are foreign journalists not disappearing, but the heavy use of new communication technologies – rather than leading to superficial and low-quality reporting – also supports the pursuit of exclusive news-story angles and a fuller delivery of the correspondent’s value.
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