Photographs of newsrooms: From the printing house to open space offices. Analyzing the transformation of workspaces and information production

Abstract

Evolving from a small room at the heart of the printing house to a large, mobile open office, the newsroom is a concept that allows us to contemplate the changes that have transformed journalism over the past century. This article proposes a preliminary analysis of a corpus of photographs of media newsrooms in France, Canada, and Belgium at various points in history (from the end of the 19th century up to today). The analysis of newsroom photographs is necessarily multidimensional. It allows us to conduct a socio-historical study of how workplaces are created and structured and how information is produced. It paves the way for an analysis of the media’s modes of representation within the logic of external communication (to establish and promote its brand image through videos or pictures). It also permits us to make inferences while analyzing the organizational and managerial aspects of a company, and reveals the value of examining the objects used by journalists in their trade. Our goal is to clarify the various indicators and avenues for research that emerge from this corpus. This step will allow us to defend a specific approach to analyzing the material dimension of journalism.