Mapping Transnational Journalism in the Age of Flows: Or How I Ditched “Foreign Correspondence” and the “Immigrant Press” and Started to LoveHistoire Croisée

Abstract

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.

“Otherness” and Self-Censorship in the Land of Coups: Greek Correspondents in Turkey Pre- and Post-Coup Attempt

“…Through in-depth semi-structured interviews with all the Greek correspondents living and working in Turkey we gained valuable data in order to construct the network of the key actors in their job; we proceeded with the conceptualization of these networks through the prism of Actor Network Theory (Garrety 2014, Latour 1996, Lezaun 2017, Walsham, 1997 combined with the methodological approach of Histoire Croisée (Entangled History) (Droux & Hofstetter, 2014, Iriye & Saunier, 2009, Wernen & Zimmerman, 2006. This combination offers an explanatory ecology, as Archetti (2019) suggests, within which the constellations of the Greek correspondents demonstrate all the critical changes in their work before and after the failed coup attempt. The combination of ANT with Histoire Croisée was chosen because ANT grants equal agency to both humans and non-human actors; it allowed this research to conceptualize the non-human actors -the failed coup attempt, the city of Istanbul, the Greek agency's agenda, the official sources, the correspondents' mobile phone and computer, internet and social media, their output stories-and explore the interplay with the human factors -Greek correspondents and their colleagues.…”

“…The combination of ANT with Histoire Croisée was chosen because ANT grants equal agency to both humans and non-human actors; it allowed this research to conceptualize the non-human actors -the failed coup attempt, the city of Istanbul, the Greek agency's agenda, the official sources, the correspondents' mobile phone and computer, internet and social media, their output stories-and explore the interplay with the human factors -Greek correspondents and their colleagues. The construction of networks has no defined point of beginning and end; therefore, this research opted to apply the approach of Histoire Croisée because it allows the research itself to define the beginning and the end of networks' construction during the research, being an inductive approach that does not shape a priori categories (Archetti, 2019); consequently, there is no arbitrary choice made by the researcher. This research sheds light on the work of the Greek correspondents bearing in mind that working as a correspondent in the opponent's country requires the 'know-how' of reporting to the home agency about issues of national interest to both home and host country (Anastasiou & Bilge, 2015, Yanardağoğlu, 2014.…”

Oportunidades de la robotización en el periodismo local: el caso de 'Mittmedia'

“…La simplificación de los procesos manuales que ha traído consigo esta inteligencia artificial, y el convencimiento de que nos encontremos todavía en etapas primigenias de sus potencialidades, abren numerosas perspectivas en la narración informativa. La dimensión social del periodismo local (Lecompte, 2015), conjugada hoy en día con su capacidad de convertirse en historias globales (Archetti, 2019), impulsan novedosos usos de la IA.…”

Towards alternatives to mechanistic models of translation in contemporary journalism

“…Furthermore, recent years have seen a rise in calls to overcome strictly localising approaches in international news circulation and to develop transnational forms of journalism (Archetti, 2019;Horta et al, 2017). Translation has been called upon to actively contribute towards encompassing the views of a 'global us' (Eide & Ytterstad, 2011, p. 52, 65), i.e.…”

“…Overdependence on foreign voices has been seen to undermine freedom of expression in developing contextsespecially in relation to scientific information (Basu & Datta, 2017) and as a growing and alarming trend in general with regard to news diversity (Boumans et al, 2018). In the corpus studied, content selection allows for a more nuanced reading: although it indicates obvious imbalances in the global flows of information, the general decision to include news on foreign research during a global pandemic can reveal an alignment of these local media with a transnational agenda, with a 'global us'as explained earlier, a growing trend in journalism (Archetti, 2019;Eide & Ytterstad, 2011;Horta et al, 2017). In any event, and taking into account the aforementioned importance of content selection and newswriting in setting images of other cultures and in reinforcing stereotypes (Batista, 2016;Van Doorslaer, 2012), the statistics presented above in relation to the actual 'national' linkages of the origin of research, with a clear preference for research carried out in the US, could actually be seen as reflecting, and bolstering, widely-accepted associations as to from whom the authoritative voices of science are supposed to originate.…”