Putting “Place” in the Center of Journalism Research: A Way Forward to Understand Challenges to Trust and Knowledge in News

Abstract

The U.S. journalism industry is facing unprecedented challenges from questions of economic stability, rising antimedia sentiment among the government and the public, new technologies that have democratizing effects on news production, and the lowest levels of trust in journalism in decades. At the same time, the United States is facing structural inequality and political polarization that has taken on a distinctly place-based dimension. Taken together, the places of news have changed, both because of forces inside and outside journalism: The places where journalists do their work have changed, not only in an immediate sense of their own work routines but also because of the larger place-based realignment in the United States. This monograph argues that place must be at the center of scholarly and industry analysis to better understand the challenges to professional journalism today.

A Sense of Place: VR Journalism and Emotional Engagement

“…How geographically or culturally proximate or distant the events are perceived shapes "what is included, what is excluded and why" (O'Neill and Harcup 2008, 162). Journalism scholars have become increasingly interested in place from the perspective of engaging experiences (e.g., Oppegaard and Rabby 2016;Schmitz Weiss 2015;Usher 2019). Although there is confusion about the meaning of audience engagement (it can be conceptualised from an audience-oriented perspective as attentiveness and participation or from a production-oriented perspective as journalistic techniques), engagement is often connected to close proximity to or an affective relationship with a place.…”

“…Proximity has been understood as a journalistic strategy to signal authority (Allan 2013;Usher 2019;Zelizer 1990). Hence, news organisations aim to amplify audiences' experiences of space-time proximity through reporting techniques such as constructed "on the spot" reporting (Huxford 2007) or the use of citizens' eyewitness imagery that accentuates an embodied sense of being at the scene of events as they happen (Ahva and Hellman 2015;Ahva and Pantti 2014;Usher 2019;Zelizer 2007). Distance, accordingly, is associated with distrust and a lack of an emotional bond (Peters 2011, 34).…”

“…Place has a history, a memory and a sense of community (Ryan 2015, 89). We understand place as being "an agentic player" (Gieryn 2000, 466) in VR stories, rather than merely a backdrop to action and characters (see also Usher 2019). VR journalism alters the way we consider or create a sense of place in news stories (Sandvik 2010, 139;Tricart 2018).…”

“…Space refers to the digital environment and its ability to narrate the events and cater for different forms of agency (de la Peña et al 2010;Tuan 2011). VR simulates a sense of place by manifesting "real" places as digital spaces (Usher 2019).…”

About Actor Positioning in Journalism…Slowly

“…Kemmis et al, 2014, p. 32). If we are interested in the material-economic arrangements, we might be better off with different methods, such as examining place through documenting newsrooms' architectural blueprints or following and making explicit the technoeconomic interrelations between newsrooms and external companies via network ethnography (for a broader argument on "place," see Usher, 2019).…”