Mel Bunce

'This Place Used to be a White British Boys' Club': Reporting Dynamics and Cultural Clash at an International News Bureau in Nairobi

Abstract Africa has long been portrayed by Western media as a dark and conflict-ridden continent. Such reports have traditionally been produced by white journalists in the field, writing for a distant audience ‘back home’. In recent years, significant structural changes in the foreign news industry have seen the near-demise of foreign correspondents and the increasing use of locally hired journalists. This research explores the important role of local correspondents in the production of international news reports, and asks whether their presence may start to change how Africa is depicted in the West. This investigation is framed by a cultural analysis of the Reuters newsroom in Nairobi during the post-election crisis of 2007–08. This newsroom provides a microcosm of the media industry, in which Western and local journalists disagreed and debated the role of the media in a crisis. This clash of values offers a springboard for exploring the potential ability of local national journalists to shape the news: do they have the power to challenge Western reporting modes, or are they simply reproducing the values of this system? This article concludes that the current situation is somewhere between the two: Westerners continue to dominate international reporting, but there are indications that a slow and sometimes uncomfortable synthesis is beginning to emerge.

Management and resistance in the digital newsroom

What happens when there is conflict between the profit motivations of a news outlet and the professional values of its journalists? Questions of managerial influence and journalistic autonomy have interested media scholars from the seminal work of Warren Breed onwards. However, there have only been a handful of studies since the introduction of audience metrics which, this research suggests, allow managers to more efficiently monitor and discipline their journalists. This article presents an ethnographic case study of a Reuters newswire bureau during a time of conflict between the management and journalists. The article outlines the strategies that management used to incentivize their journalists to change their reporting priorities. These included the strategic dissemination of audience metrics and praise, and the hiring and promotion of ‘appropriate’ journalists to positions of influence. These interventions changed who was considered a ‘good journalist’ at the newswire, disrupting existing hierarchies, and eventually changing the culture of the newsroom. The article draws on the insights of Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory to help explain how managerial power operates, and the role that individual journalists play producing and reinforcing newsroom norms.

Africa in the click stream: audience metrics and foreign correspondents in Africa

ABSTRACT Digital technologies have transformed the relationship between news outlets, journalists and their audiences. Notably, editors can now monitor their websites and discern the exact news preferences of their readers. Research suggests that some editors are using this data to help them produce more popular, ‘click friendly’ content. To date, research on this phenomenon has focused on journalists working within newsrooms. This article adds to the literature by exploring the relationship of foreign correspondents in Africa with their audiences, and asks whether readership metrics are influencing the journalists’ selection and development of news stories. Drawing on 67 interviews with foreign correspondents in East and West Africa, the article identifies three different approaches to audience metrics: correspondents who are 1) data-driven; 2) data informed; and 3) data denialists. The article discusses the implications of these approaches for the media image of Africa that is distributed around the globe.