Global Journalism

Tables and Figures

Table 2.1
The Difference Between a Global and Cosmopolitan Outlook

Table 2.2
Space, Power, and Identity in Global Journalism

Table 2.3
Global Crises and Issues in the News

Table 2.4
Various Combinations of Global Journalism in the News

Table 3.1
The Basic Difference Between News “in” the Global Village
and News “for” the Global Village

Table 3.2
News and Journalism in the Westphalian and Post-Westphalian
Orders from a Global Journalistic Viewpoint

Table 3.3
The Two Main Types of Global Journalism and Their Characteristics

Table 4.1
Various Challenges to Global Journalism

Table 4.2
The Cognitive and Discursive Handling of
the Proximate and Distant in Global Journalism

Table 5.1
Global Journalism on the Web from Three Perspectives

Figure 5.1
Global Journalism on the Web

Figure 5.2
The Hypertextual Organization of Global Causes

Figure 5.3
Globalizing News Discourse on the Web

Series Editor’s Preface

Global Crises and the Media

We live in a global age. We inhabit a world that has become radically interconnected, interdependent, and communicated in the formations and flows of the media. This same world also spawns proliferating, often interpenetrating, “global crises.”

From climate change to the war on terror, financial meltdowns to forced migrations, pandemics to world poverty, and humanitarian disasters to the denial of human rights, these and other crises represent the dark side of our globalized planet. Their origins and outcomes are not confined behind national borders and they are not best conceived through national prisms of understanding. The impacts of global crises often register across “sovereign” national territories, surrounding regions and beyond, and they can also become subject to systems of governance and forms of civil society response that are no less encompassing or transnational in scope. In today’s interdependent world, global crises cannot be regarded as exceptional or aberrant events only, erupting without rhyme or reason or dislocated from the contemporary world (dis)order. They are endemic to the contemporary global world, deeply enmeshed within it. And so too are they highly dependent on the world’s media and communication networks.

The series Global Crises and the Media sets out to examine not only the media’s role in the communication of global threats and crises but also how they can variously enter into their constitution, enacting them on the public stage and helping to shape their future trajectory around the world. More specifically, the volumes in this series seek to: (1) contextualize the study of global crisis reporting in relation to wider debates about the changing flows and formations of world media communication; (2) address how global crises become variously communicated and contested in both so-called “old” and “new” media around the world; (3) consider the possible impacts of global crisis reporting on public awareness, political action, and policy responses; (4) showcase the very latest research findings and discussion from leading authorities in their respective fields of inquiry; and (5) contribute to the development of po ← xi | xii → sitions of theory and debate that deliberately move beyond national parochialisms and/or geographically disaggregated research agendas. In these ways the specially commissioned books in the Global Crises and the Media series aim to provide a sophisticated and empirically engaged understanding of the media’s changing roles in global crises and thereby contribute to academic and public debate about some of the most significant global threats, conflicts, and contentions in the world today.

Every now and then a book comes along that stands head and shoulders above the rest. Such books interrupt as much as intervene within extant fields of scholarship. They invite us to revisit, re-conceptualize and re-theorize our views on and approaches to the study of a particular subject domain or substantive range of problems. Such invitations to re-think established ways of conceiving and knowing are generally to be welcomed; they can help to extend the parameters of a subject field or, sometimes, completely redefine it and reorient research. In an earlier time when “normal” and “routine” study in established fields of academic inquiry was perhaps not in quite the current state of multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary flux and epistemological profusion that it is now, such interventions may have been seen in terms of “paradigm shift.” Peter Berglez’s Global Journalism: Theory and Practice is one of those rare, special books that can help to steer the field of scholarship into a new and necessary trajectory. His book specially commissioned for the Global Crises and Media Series does more than simply explore the changing nature of journalism in a global context; it asks us to seriously consider and radically reconceive what global journalism is and can yet become in a globalized world.

Global Journalism: Theory and Practice tackles head on the conceptual myopia and underdevelopment of theory in the contemporary field of thinking about “the global journalist” and “global journalism”. In an increasingly globalized age of interconnection, interdependency and shared threats it is time to question and challenge the conceptualization of “the global” as simply the sum of national parts, including ideas of “global journalism” conceived as the collection of national journalisms or journalist cultures found around the world. The flows and formations of journalism, we know, increasingly extend beyond national frontiers and interpenetrate within today’s complex world news ecology. The professional frontiers of journalism are themselves becoming increasingly porous with the rise of new social media and citizen journalists who now inject a flood of images and ideas from afar, sometimes into mainstream news agendas and/or bypassing traditional news gatekeepers all together.

This new ferment in the field requires that we map and explore not only ← xii | xiii → journalism’s demographics and commitments to professional norms and values within particular national contexts, but also how journalism horizons may now also be on the move, infused by, but also contributing to, a more globalized awareness and outlook on events, processes and issues in the world today. What are the journalist practices and dispositions today that exist both inside as well as outside of nationally conceived journalism formations that could yet serve to address or deepen our understanding of our global age? To what extent and how do journalists help us to make sense of those breaking and routine news stories that speak to an interdependent and impacting world of interests and identities? How can and how should “global journalists” help to recover and illuminate the complex interconnections and inequalities, causations and human consequences of living in a globalized world?

Peter Berglez‘s intervention is unquestionably cutting-edge and seminal. Its importance, moreover, is not confined to the academic fields of journalism studies or even media and communication studies more widely, but speaks to what it now means—politically, socially and culturally—to live within a globalized world and the responsibilities that this places upon us all, including today’s journalists. Global journalism, Berglez argued in an earlier article and which here becomes richly elaborated, “is the form of journalism needed in times of globalization” (2008: 855). Global journalism does not, therefore, simply imply extensive geographical or global reach, but depends rather on the extent to which news, whether about local, national, international or transnational events and developments, becomes properly situated and explained in terms of wider and reciprocally interacting global social relations and contours of power. This is a necessary departure from the national or even nationally comparative focus of much contemporary journalism scholarship today, and it is one that scholars undoubtedly will need to take on board, develop and apply in the years ahead. Berglez’s theoretical disquisition on global journalism as well as his formulation of analytically incisive concepts with which to interrogate it, provides not only a rich theoretical platform for further work in this area but also a methodological tool-box of enormous practical utility for scholars and students who will follow in his footsteps. This is an important and original book and it is one that demands to be read by all of us who are concerned by the dark side of globalization, its inequalities and injustices, and who see an emergent journalism as performing a crucial role in its democratization and humanization.