Straddlers not spiralists: Critical questions for research on fixers, local-foreign news work, and cross-border journalism

Abstract

This article challenges current trends in the study of fixers and other forms of “local-foreign news work” through discussion of questions crucial to future investigations. Responding to Kotišová and Deuze’s call to complicate the existing “repertoire of concepts, theories, and epistemic categories” now in use in scholarship on fixing (2022: 1172), we provide theoretical frameworks relevant to, but thus far unutilized by, this scholarship. Considering local-foreign news work as a process of straddling political, cultural, and epistemic boundaries allows us to interrogate the conceptual binaries operating in the relevant research, such as west/nonwest, local/foreign, fixer/journalist. By engaging the liminality of local journalistic labor, this article brings into relief dynamics often obscured in current studies, namely, the impact of race and gender identities, and the post-colonial contexts within which much local-foreign news work takes place. Attention to these dynamics challenges the conceptual divisions upon which studies of cross-border journalism often rely, while revealing the consequential – and boundary-defying – positionality of local news workers. Finally, examination of the “cosmopolitanism” of local-foreign news work, and the “situatedness” of the knowledge produced by local news workers, serves to thicken scholarship on the topic in ways that deactivate essentialisms, deepen empirical foundations, and address problematic configurations of power critical to the study of news production today. By diversifying the research queries we pose, and the theoretical perspectives we employ, future research can better account for the dynamism of local-foreign news work in the contemporary global news landscape.