Assessing Physical and Digital News Spaces: Placemaking in Global South Journalism

ABSTRACT

Homepages and front pages are both important places in the news production world. And yet, we know little about how these differ in contexts beyond Western Europe and the United States. This study contributes a field theory-based assessment of the differences in news content and presentation between the homepage and front page of the Daily Monitor, an influential Ugandan newspaper. Using a qualitative analysis of PDFs taken from 27 days in April, May, and June 2020 (N = 143), during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, we find that the two places differ across dimensions of topic, tone, and location. The results show that the Daily Monitor’s online and physical spaces occupy different places in the journalism field. The physical front page space marks out the newspaper’s place as a locally oriented and civically invested opposition voice, while the virtual space of the homepage signals the newspaper’s place as a cosmopolitan, globally oriented news organization. Our findings suggest that Global South news organizations have robust, thoughtful approaches to their online presences and that news organizations can use different content spaces to engage in placemaking and stake out multiple field positions.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• placemaking
• Ugandan journalism
• Global South
• websites
• news content

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We selected the following dates in this study to cover the period during which COVID-19 was first spreading across Uganda: April 13–16; May 11–15 and 18–21; and June 15–28.