Paper short abstract:

Exploring intersections between place and work, this paper discusses transformation in newsrooms in the global south. Post-digitization, news collection, and dissemination cease to have a fixed place. The paper examines place-based challenges within the journalistic profession in contemporary India.

Paper long abstract:

Deuze (2014) contends that worldwide migration of capital and labor, digitalization, environmental concerns, and global conflicts have made societies less cohesive and present times unsettling. Polarization within media systems, further convergences of media formats, and the coming of newer journalistic forms and practices have put journalism in a precarious position. On the one hand, journalism tries to reiterate and reflect upon age-old practices and values. On the other hand, however, it also has to surf through a rapidly changing and unsettling environment. With digitalization being the central force, the shift in the places where journalists work has had the most lasting impact on the profession. Usher (2019) considers the place to be more than just the setting where journalists do their work. The setting also brings under its purview their daily routines and practices (Usher 2019). Borrowing from Taylor (1999), Gieryn (2000), and Usher (2019), the place is not considered the same as space. It is not just an abstract setting but also an agentic player that lets journalists draw identity and meaning. This paper foregrounds the pivotal importance of the variable of place in the practice of journalism by looking at the transformations in the sites of news production and dissemination. The approach is to assess the decoupling of journalists’ claims of witnessing and recording unfolding events based on their proximity to the same. This was carried out through an ethnographic study of diverse newsrooms in North India.