Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Regional Television News »

Into the Newsroom explores how journalists and the digital technologies with which they are entangled construct television news at the micro level of practice. It challenges orthodox readings of television news production to explore fundamental questions concerning the way we understand how journalists and technologies combine with one another in unpredictable ways in order to create news. Hemmingway investigates the processes of regional BBC news production, by adapting Actor Network Theory to an ethnographic study of a specific newsroom to reveal how news work is constructed by this contingent and complex interplay of digital media technologies and human actors.

The book provides a rigorous investigation of the everyday rituals that are performed in the television newsroom, and offers a unique suggestion that news is both a highly haphazard and yet technologically complicated process of deliberate construction involving the interweaving of reflexive professional journalists as well as developing, unpredictable technologies. Arguing specifically for a recognition and an exploration of technological agency, this book takes the reader on an exciting journey into the digital newsroom, using exclusive observation and interviews from those journalists working on the BBC's recent pilot project of local television news as part of its empirical evidence.

This book is an essential introduction for both those seeking to understand news processes at the level of every day routines and practices, and for those students and scholars who are eager to adopt new and challenging ways to theorise news as practice.

Foreword Robert Huffaker vi

Preface viii

Acknowledgements xi

1 Introduction 1

2 Actor Network Theory 11

3 Entering the network: the media Hub and i!s status as a black box 39

4 Video journalism (1): how a technological innovation enters the news network 70

5 Video journalism (2): the translation of the news network and the reconfiguration of news 92

6 Extending the network: the BBC's local television project 115

7 The satellite truck and live reporting 142

8 Human actors, intentionality and Actor Network Theory 175

Conclusion 205

Glossary 218

Notes 228

Bibliography 233

Index 240