Mobile/sedentary : News work behind and beyond the desk

• This article examines the changing journalistic norms and roles in terms of mobile and sedentary news work at the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The analysis draws on the research into the small everyday tools of bureaucracy and science. The focus is on the quill, the scissors and paste pot, the body of the reporter and the computer. Journalistic neutrality and truth seem at any given time to be defined in line with the practices made possible by the available tools. A change in tools makes new practices possible, meaning that the norms have to be redefined. Journalism was once synonymous with mobile reporters reporting on events they themselves witnessed. Journalism today, however, is often sedentary copy-and-paste work, much resembling the scissors-and-paste journalism of the nineteenth century. Comparison reveals that such transmission of texts and images produced by someone else always runs the risk of reproducing the voices of the elites.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Annan humaniora (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Other Humanities (hsv//eng)

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Media and Communications (hsv//eng)

Keyword

news

Sweden

journalistic roles

journalistic work

technology

objectivity

media and communication studies

medie- och kommunikationsvetenskap

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)