There has been significant academic criticism of the international news coverage of Africa, but little or no first-hand research on the forces that create this news. This thesis draws on 51 semi-structured interviews and ethnographic work with practicing foreign correspondents in Sudan, Kenya and Uganda to explore the question: how can we explain and theorise the production of international news on East Africa? The thesis argues that Pierre Bourdieu’s Field Theory, and its analytical toolbox of ‘field’, ‘capital’ and ‘habitus’, can be meaningfully used to examine international journalistic practice. Field theory has been widely and productively used to understand domestic news production, but it has not yet been employed to empirically investigate journalistic production in the global sphere. The analysis is presented in three sections, each of which focuses on a different ‘layer’ of the international news system: the global field, where newswires compete for clients and capital; the national field ‘back home’ where traditional, nation based news outlets are based; and, finally, the local and immediate site where foreign correspondents work. Each of these layers is explored through an in depth case study of a major news producer/group of producers working in East Africa. The first and most substantial section examines the global journalistic field, and the position and practices of the Reuters newswire within this field. The second examines the foreign correspondents who report on Africa for print outlets in the UK. The final section presents two case studies of correspondents at work, negotiating a local news ecology: the election violence in Kenyan (2007-8), and the international coverage of the Darfur crisis. The discussion explores the fluidity between these three layers. Each analysis section stands alone as an investigations of major news producers in Africa today, and the forces that influence their work. Together, they build the argument that field theory is a useful approach to conceptualising the contemporary global news system, and examining journalistic practices within this. The main strengths of the theory lie in its notion of habitus; the extent to which it can incorporate and explain change; and its ability to link macro level phenomenon with micro level practice. The theory is ideally suited to capture and study the way in which foreign correspondents negotiate a complex and fluid global news system.

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - CAPES / In a context marked by the environmental crisis, climate change emerges as a multidimensional problem, gathering scientific, political, economic, sociocultural factors and implications, among other types. Besides their physical properties, climate phenomenon is also constructed discursively, largely, by journalism. Based on this, the research aims to understand how the discourse on climate change is constructed in magazine Superinteressante, by Abril Company, between 1995 and 2015. The study discusses central aspects related to climate change, highlighting some their historical elements. It also reflects on journalistic coverage of climate change, magazine journalism, and relation between journalism and science. In order to interpret the meanings about climate change in Superinteressante, we use theoretical-methodological French Discourse Analysis. The corpus is formed by 343 discursive sequences, taken from 21 texts, and that are inserted in ten Paraphrastic Networks. These networks, in turn, are encompassed in four Discursive Formations that represent forms of understanding climate change from specific domains, they are: (DF1) Climate change has undesirable effects; (DF2) Climate change is about human action; (DF3) Climate change is a controversial issue; (DF4) Climate change is an unequal problem. Discursive listening points to a significant predominance of (DF1) and, soon after, of (DF2), which shows that the meanings most frequently reiterated by magazine concern negative consequences and human dimensions associated with the problem. In addition, we verified that Superinteressante not just reiterates discourses about the various dimensions of phenomenon, but also updates them over the years. / Num contexto marcado pela crise ambiental, a mudança climática desponta como uma problemática multidimensional, congregando fatores e implicações científicas, políticas, econômicas, socioculturais, entre outras ordens. Além de suas propriedades físicas, o fenômeno do clima também é construído discursivamente, em grande medida, pelo jornalismo. Diante desse entendimento, a pesquisa busca compreender o funcionamento da discursivização sobre a mudança climática na revista Superinteressante, da editora Abril, entre os anos 1995 e 2015. O trabalho reflete acerca dos aspectos centrais relacionados à questão do clima, destacando alguns de seus elementos históricos. Questões da cobertura jornalística sobre a alteração do clima, do jornalismo de revista e da relação entre jornalismo e ciência também compõem a reflexão. Para interpretar os sentidos sobre a mudança do clima em Superinteressante, emprega-se o aporte teórico-metodológico da Análise de Discurso de linha francesa (AD). O corpus é formado por 343 sequências discursivas, recortadas de 21 textos, e que se inserem em dez Redes Parafrásticas. Tais redes, por sua vez, estão englobadas em quatro Formações Discursivas que representam formas de compreensão da mudança climática a partir de domínios específicos, são elas: (FD1) A mudança climática reúne efeitos indesejáveis; (FD2) A mudança climática concerne à ação humana; (FD3) A mudança climática é uma questão controversa; e (FD4) A mudança climática é um problema desigual. A escuta discursiva sinaliza a predominância significativa da (FD1) e, logo depois, da (FD2), o que evidencia que os sentidos mais reiterados pela revista dizem respeito às consequências negativas e às dimensões humanas atreladas ao problema. Além disso, verifica-se que Superinteressante não apenas reitera dizeres acerca das variadas dimensões do fenômeno, mas também os atualiza ao longo dos anos.

This thesis explores how burglars and burglary in London were understood in cultural, criminological, legal, political, and economic discourse during the period 1860-1939, demonstrating how the ideas about crime and the criminal circulating in these domains were mutually constitutive. Specifically, it identifies how characterisations of burglary in visual and written forms of media — encompassing legal and criminological documents, as well as those produced by the press and commercial advertising, and in fiction, theatre, and film — cultivated a range of attitudes towards the crime to a greater or lesser extent. Encompassing not only fear-mongering and sympathetic representations, but also those designed to be exciting, to challenge preconceptions, and to entertain, I argue that these conflicting attitudes towards burglary and burglars emerged in response to specific changes in the cultural landscape: the advent of mass literacy and corresponding interest in narratives of crime that reflected the social, cultural, and political concerns of an audience diverse of class, age, and gender; the commercial imperatives of the insurance and entertainment industries as the middle classes expanded, including the development of household insurance and the popularity of the ‘true crime’ genre; debates surrounding women’s increasing social and sexual agency and their alignment with particular crimes; and the evolution of new modes of policing and regulation. The thesis thereby uses the topic of burglary to illuminate a broader range of contemporary preoccupations and experiences with gender relations, class structures and stereotypes, and the moral authority of state and society. By approaching burglary as a focus of interactions not only between police, criminal, and victim, but also between the market, consumers, and the state, this thesis uncovers new terrain upon which crime intersected with everyday lives historically.

This study focuses on the factors shaping innovation in online newsrooms in three nations of the Arab World, with particular interest in the adoption of multimedia news innovations. Applying theoretical perspectives from the social shaping of technology and the diffusion of innovation literature, this study sought to identify the key factors shaping the innovation process. Field studies were based in three Arabic newsrooms: Aljazeera Net in Qatar, Almasry Alyoum in Egypt, and Almassae in Morocco. The case studies are grounded in two weeks of participant-observation field research within each online newsroom, along with over 100 in-depth interviews with those involved in the production of online news, and online archival reviews of the three news portals since their inception. Field research began with participant observation at Aljazeera in 2010, prior to the uprisings of the Arab Spring, and continued through early 2013. The political context of each newsroom during the field research became a major aspect of the innovation process of each case study. The thesis reinforces a wide range of social, economic, and organizational factors in the adoption and adaptation of multimedia technologies in the newsrooms studied, supporting earlier research on newsroom innovation across other regions of the world. For example, conceptions about ‘ideal’ industry multimedia models for the modern newsroom were important in each case. However, in the political context of events related to the Arab Spring, the overriding importance of the larger political context emerged in each case. The significance of this observation suggests that research on news organizations cannot take the political context for granted and should more explicitly embed it in discussion of the social shaping of innovation, even under more stable and liberal political conditions. There is a relative lack of systematic empirical research on Arabic newsrooms among studies of news innovation. Looking at the political context of emergent or weak democracies and their influence on modern multimedia newsrooms especially during crisis events, therefore, can contribute to the development of theory and research in Western democracies; and reintroduce politics into theories of innovation within modern newsrooms. This study suggests that future scholarship brings politics into the study of the social shaping of newsroom innovation without losing the many significant advances of existing research in more liberal democratic Western contexts of the multimedia newsroom.