WHAT IS GLOBAL JOURNALISM?

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the emergence of transnational crises and threats such as the Muhammad cartoons controversy, the avian flu epidemic and climate change, call for new ways of analysing news. The point of departure is that news media content seems to be becoming more and more deterritorialised, involving complex relations and flows across national borders and continents. In a globalising world, news on politics, ecological processes, agriculture etc. could thus become endowed with a global outlook on social reality, something which has by tradition only been associated with financial news. Even if it seems difficult to estimate more exactly the extent to which everyday news media content has become global, the indications are that it has become harder to categorise news texts as either solely domestic or foreign news. This, in turn, argues for the potential usefulness of the concept of global journalism, which transgresses and transcends the traditional domestic-foreign dichotomy. In news media and journalism studies, the concept of global journalism is under theoretical development, and still in need of a more stringent definition. The purpose of this article is therefore to define theoretically global journalism as a distinctive news style in order to facilitate empirical analyses of it, preferably news text analyses. The suggestion is that this news style rests on a distinct epistemology (the global outlook) when it comes to the representation of space, power and identity.

Keywords:

• epistemology
• global journalism
• globalisation
• the global outlook
• news style
• news texts

Acknowledgements

My gratitude goes to the members of the research programme, Threat Images and Identity, at Örebro University, who have read and commented on the manuscript, with special thanks to Birgitta Höijer and Ulrika Olausson. Thanks also to Leonor Camaüer and Sean Phelan. This article has been produced within the scope of the research project Social Representations of Climate Change in the Media and Among Citizens at Örebro University, which is funded by FORMAS, the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning.

Notes

1. An interesting example of independent journalism with a strong global outlook is the Independent Media Center (www.indymedia.org). Its reporting on global political issues is characterised by network-like relationships between a central website and numerous local ones.

2. This needs to be empirically examined, as in Riegert et al.'s (2008) comparative research on CNN International's and Swedish TV4's news coverage from the Indian Ocean tsunami catastrophe.

3. Table 2 is based on an idea that was initially formulated by Birgitta Höijer. The domestic consequently includes local, regional and national news/outlooks. It is, however, possible to create a more complex table by defining local, regional and national news/outlooks as separate categories.