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Recent Cold War historiography has increasingly put the spotlight on the many different ways in which the Iron Curtain was perforated before the Berlin wall fell. One factor which arguably played a key role in that respect was the East-West communication that took place thanks to radio, TV, and other media. Mass communication during the Cold War, however, is still an under-researched theme. This article will introduce the reader to themes, approaches and theses in the extant literature about Western journalism in the Soviet Bloc during the Cold War, and it will also identify areas which call for further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foreign correspondents are often required to work with government-appointed fixers or minders in authoritarian regimes. This article is a case study of these frequently overlooked journalistic workers in North Korea and the structure of surveillance and social control they work within. Interviews with foreign journalists show that many of these locals are much more than mere government spies. The competing desires Pyongyang has for its fixer-minders—to both control and woo the correspondents—and a news environment increasingly open to Western media have led to a further diversification of roles among these journalistic workers. While minders from the State Security Ministry surveil journalists without directly interacting with them, English-speaking locals who work as photographers or writers contribute by taking pictures and writing stories. Foreign correspondents gradually form collegial rapport with the locals, which in turn makes them suspect in the eyes of the North Korean state despite the impeccable ideological credentials that earned them the posts in the first place. This makes the locals "Marginal Men" (Park 1926), people who belong to multiple cultures that are at odds with each other, people who have "one foot in and one foot out of prison." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces the special issue entitled Reporting Global while being local: Local sources of news for distant audiences. It discusses the rationale behind this special issue's focus on local newsworkers who contribute their labour to international news-reporting and reviews research conducted on the work and working conditions of these newsworkers to date. The article then goes on to describe the articles that appear in the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the work of news fixers based in Moscow, in hopes of better understanding the risks and challenges that they face as they "translate" Russia for foreign journalists. Drawing upon the theoretical concept of "cultural translation," which understands interpretive work as vastly exceeding the merely linguistic register, this study will analyze the complex—and sometimes, risky—processes through which Moscow-based news fixers render Russia intelligible to their foreign clients. Using qualitative, in-depth interviews with 16 news fixers, the study explores news fixers' perceptions of their clients' representations of Russia, as well as investigating the fixers' feelings about the risks they face in the field. The article finds that news fixers in Moscow sometimes find their clients' representations of Russia to be reductive and, in some cases, biased. In order to combat this problem, fixers say that they try to "translate" Russia for their clients, filling in the gaps in foreign journalists' knowledge about the culture. They ultimately say that while their work can subject them to political and financial risk, they do not believe themselves to be in the same level of physical danger as that faced by journalists working in conflict zones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Growing literature critiques the "parachute reporting" model of journalism. Briefly visiting communities as an outsider, overlooking local and cultural nuances, and prioritizing "audiences back home" can make this reporting practice problematic. Instead, we developed an approach called "empowerment journalism." Learning from foreign correspondence, citizen journalism, media activism, and community-based research, we challenge reporting inequities by centering on principles of accountability, reciprocity, collaboration, and local ownership. We develop community partnerships and work with story "subjects" to co-create content that matters to their communities. This commentary offers lessons learned from using this approach with varying levels of success across three projects. (1) In Strangers at Home, we launched a digital storytelling and social media project with members of marginalized communities about rising nativism in Europe. (2) In Through Somali Eyes, we collaborated with Somali journalists who documented their daily routines of reporting and navigating danger with wearable cameras. (3) In Turning Points, we are co-creating visual stories with Indigenous storytellers in Yellowknife that confront stereotypes about alcohol. By reimagining the "newsroom" within – rather than distinct from – communities, we illustrate tensions and opportunities for journalists to transition from gatekeeper to collaborator and empower story "subjects" to produce and own their content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the position and relative power of local journalists who produce foreign correspondence in contemporary authoritarian states. The study uses field theory to examine the forms of capital and the field positions these journalists hold in a context where the local field imposes strong, unwritten boundaries around acceptable methods and forms of storytelling—leaving local journalists to practice what one correspondent called "puppet journalism." This study draws on data collected during seven months of fieldwork, including participant observation in several newsrooms and interviews conducted in and around Kigali, Rwanda. I find that local-foreign correspondents in Rwanda occupy a bridging position, drawing from local and transnational journalism fields to construct their understanding of the journalism game (in Bourdieu's terms, their habitus). These journalists incorporate values into their work routines and news coverage that align with the transnational field, while adapting these values to better coexist with the expectations of the local field. This analysis offers insight into the routines and capital of local-foreign correspondents in a development-oriented authoritarian country and, more broadly, unpacks the ways that a journalist might draw from multiple fields to construct a bridging habitus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociologists and media scholars have offered a robust body of literature regarding the daily workings of global journalism – both in newsrooms and with freelancers. Within this literature, which is both critical and reflexive, the role of fixers is acknowledged, but rarely questioned. Such work often fails to critically examine power dynamics inherent in the actual institutional and global arrangement. This project aims to fill this gap, focusing on the realities and constraints of editorial agency by fixers. Through a large-scale survey (450 responses from more than 70 countries) followed by 35 semi-structured interviews with journalists, fixers and people who identify as both, we map current trends and highlight nuanced dynamics and tensions within the practice. Specifically, we sought to understand what effect, if any, the fixer has in shaping the content of a story, highlighting the disjuncture between journalists and fixers in recognizing the potential editorial impacts. Lastly, the work examines the inequality between international journalists and their local fixers worldwide, and seeks to examine how the relationship is understood culturally within the rapidly changing field of global journalism. This article not only identifies problems within current practices, but also explores potential remedies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the year 2000, Kurt Schork, a freelance journalist working for Reuters, was killed while on assignment in Sierra Leone. His death, along with that of Associated Press cameraman Miguel Gil Moreno de Mora, sent shockwaves through the news industry. But since the turn of the century, the death of journalists has become an all too familiar occurrence and while the targeting of high-profile international correspondents such as Marie Colvin has rightly caused international outrage, the overwhelming majority of those killed have been local journalists and fixers whose work often goes unheralded. Since the deaths in 2000, a number of trusts and foundations have been set up to support local journalists and fixers, while academic scholarship has started to focus on their work. But this commentary argues that much more needs to be done to recognise the invaluable role they play in today's newsgathering environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how fixers and local journalists are increasingly organising among themselves to manage working contracts with foreign correspondents venturing into their countries. This study first reflects on the traditional modus operandi of foreign correspondents and fixers, as covered in the work of authors such as Hannerz, Maxwell-Hamilton, Murrell and Paterson et al. It then moves on to update the narrative of one group of fixers, from being ad hoc hires to becoming media entrepreneurs. This study also explores the growing number of online organisations that are turning this long-standing newsgathering role into a trading profession, that is opening up beyond the news media into other areas of practice such as film-making and business. It explores a range of new media organisations from large transnational ones to boutique operations, and gathers data from some of the key people behind these changes. As local fixers, producers and journalists remain uniquely exposed to violence and danger in the course of their jobs, this study also explores if any changes are being implemented to try and ensure better safety standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the social composition of the U.S. correspondents in China during the first half of twentieth century? Borrowing Pierre Bourdieu's concept of capital and adopting the collective biography approach, this study analyzed the demographic characteristics and career paths of 161 correspondents to illustrate the opportunity structure and its historical variations in the largely unstructured field of foreign correspondence during its formative years. Being a missionary kid, having a journalism education, especially from the Missouri School of Journalism, or being raised in the northeast region with an Ivy League education, were among the kinds of valued social and cultural capital that conferred an advantage in becoming a China correspondent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What happens when there is conflict between the profit motivations of a news outlet and the professional values of its journalists? Questions of managerial influence and journalistic autonomy have interested media scholars from the seminal work of Warren Breed onwards. However, there have only been a handful of studies since the introduction of audience metrics which, this research suggests, allow managers to more efficiently monitor and discipline their journalists. This article presents an ethnographic case study of a Reuters newswire bureau during a time of conflict between the management and journalists. The article outlines the strategies that management used to incentivize their journalists to change their reporting priorities. These included the strategic dissemination of audience metrics and praise, and the hiring and promotion of 'appropriate' journalists to positions of influence. These interventions changed who was considered a 'good journalist' at the newswire, disrupting existing hierarchies, and eventually changing the culture of the newsroom. The article draws on the insights of Pierre Bourdieu's field theory to help explain how managerial power operates, and the role that individual journalists play producing and reinforcing newsroom norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to investigate the applicability of the Propaganda Model (PM) elaborated by Herman and Chomsky within the context of the conflict between South and North Korea. Coupled with the identification of dominant news frames, this study draws on in-depth interviews with foreign correspondents in Seoul to explore journalistic practices in covering conflicts in the Korean Peninsula. The findings show that a conflict frame and a human interest frame were prominent in national and international news, respectively. This article further discusses the role of the international news media in reporting on international conflicts from sociological and geopolitical perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Journalistic branding in the age of social media has been attracting growing academic interest. Self-branding has become an everyday routine among journalists, but the very limited scholarship on journalistic branding on social media has largely focused on national or local journalists in single democracies, ignoring foreign correspondents, who traditionally enjoy more professional autonomy but are going social under the challenges in the age of social media. This study looks at how foreign correspondents in China, with a heavily regulated and censored social media environment, use Twitter for journalistic branding, and examines the dynamics of this branding. The Twitter profiles of 129 China correspondents and 1,249 of their tweets were content analyzed, with the findings suggesting that foreign correspondents in China use Twitter primarily for broadcasting rather than networking. They also emphasize organizational identity much more than personal one. The implications of those findings and the extent to which they might be specific to China are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Western foreign correspondence is retreating, Chinese central media and correspondents, resourced by the government's financial backing for media's role in public diplomacy, are taking the opportunities to expand overseas bureaus, hire experienced local employees, enhance the quantity and quality of international news reporting, use digital technologies in newsgathering and dissemination, and receive Western-style trainings. Against this backdrop, this paper studies the identities, media cultures, and journalistic practices of Chinese foreign correspondents, as well as the international news output, and media-audience and media-foreign policy relationships. In doing so, we propose a new six-level theoretical model: (1) journalists' identities; (2) cultures; (3) practices; (4) news output; (5) news dissemination, reception, and audiences' interactions; and (6) the impacts of international news coverage. Based on semi-structured interviews with Chinese resident journalists over eight years, we argue that the media-audience and media- foreign policy relationships in China have become more interactive, dynamic, and complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This lecture explores the shared terrain between the new international history and the history of emotions. In the summer and fall of 1942, American foreign correspondents played a key role in sparking a furore over British rule in India. Drawing on their own first-hand reporting from India, they depicted the British Empire as retrograde and abusive, a dangerous, destabilizing force and a threat to the post-war peace. Diagnosing what it called ‘a new landslide of anti-British feeling’, the British Ministry of Information spearheaded the formation of high-level, interdepartmental, secret committee charged with the task of figuring out how to reconcile Americans to the British Empire. What they found was that the job itself was impossible: a significant proportion of Americans ‘whose views, they concluded, were driven in large measure by emotion’ would not under any circumstances soften their opinions about the British Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amidst the debate over a ‘global journalistic culture’, this study, drawing on Hallin and Mancini’s typology of media systems and Hanitzsch’s deconstruction of journalistic role perception, looks into how foreign correspondents in China perceive their professional roles, and how their role perceptions differ across different media systems. Based on a survey analysis of 101 journalists, the study identifies three role types among China correspondents: detached disseminator, populist watchdog, and facilitative change agent. A majority of respondents perceive their professional role as non-facilitative and non-advocate, disputing the ‘hostile foreign forces’ allegation China usually employs to discredit foreign correspondents. No significant national variance is detected in the relative size of the three role types, and journalists from different media systems all value objectivity, neutrality, detachment, as well as a strong audience orientation, echoing the global homogenizing tendency in certain components of journalistic culture. Yet, strong national variance prevails in key dimensions, including a watchdog role for the host country, advocacy orientation and power distance with home government, largely consistent with the respective journalistic culture in each media system, suggesting that national journalistic culture still holds a strong grip on foreign correspondence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arthur Ransome’s 12-volume Swallows and Amazons series (1930–1947), is often seen as the pioneer of the school holiday adventure story. However, a striking feature of these stories is the incorporation of a very large number of survival skills that are described in considerable ‘this-is-how-you-do-it’ detail. Previously overlooked or seen merely as references to Baden Powell’s burgeoning Scout movement, these books are better understood in the context of Ransome being a very experienced foreign correspondent. As this paper suggests, moreover, within the school holiday format, he is drawing a blueprint for rural guerrilla warfare after a successful invasion. Since the men will be away fighting, women must take leadership roles within a society, which, while respecting class differences, works harmoniously across them and which has taught its young people the skills to survive in the countryside, while observing on and reporting back about the invaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]