Introduction

Abstract

The introduction to this book begins with a detailed description of what news fixers are and how their work has evolved over time. Since the book focuses primarily on news fixing in the 21st century, the introduction historicizes the figure of the fixer, illuminating the fixer’s connections to the interpreters or guides hired by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists of past centuries. This brief but necessary historicization is firmly rooted within the critical framework of postcolonial studies, a theoretical lens that helps me explain the deeply entrenched tradition of colonial dependence on regionally specific knowledge—knowledge that unfortunately did not prevent the misrepresentation and exploitation of the people living in these other places. The introduction then moves to an examination of the news fixers’ current role within the larger ecosystem of international reporting. Building off the rich literature found in the field of journalism studies, which examines the various elements of the labor of foreign correspondence, the introduction will show that a space must be made within journalism scholarship for the study of news fixers. What is more, the field of global journalism ethics also has much to gain from a closer examination of these locally based media employees.

Friends like these: A shift in labour, security and the normative ideals of conflict journalism

“…It is worth noting that for reporters from and operating in the global south, precarity is of a different order (Kotišová, 2023; Palmer, 2019), with fixers operating in a perpetual state of ‘socio-political precariousness’; in contexts such as the second Iraq war fixers might commonly be labelled ‘traitors’ for helping Western reporters (Palmer, 2019). We are concerned that the practical and normative convergence of journalism and humanitarian communications may complicate an already difficult-to-navigate social/political space.…”

“…The mixedness of how the war is being represented ranges from orthodox news reporting by recognisable networks to volunteer NGO campaigns to document Russian war crimes (Amnesty International, 2022) and online communities dedicated to counting losses of materiel 1 and interrogating open-source footage from the frontlines. Local reporters have gained huge international followings on social media, in ways that are strikingly different to other recent global conflicts, particularly in the global south, where local journalists (often relegated to fixing roles for internationals) often remain ‘invisible’, underlining clear global and racial hierarchies of such reportage (Palmer, 2019). Yet as with much that is ‘new’ about the hybrid nature of reporting the war in Ukraine, newness may not be marking novelty, so much as a shift in degree (of the phenomena or Western academia's notice of it).…”

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

“…Now more than ever before, it is safe to assume recognition among scholars of journalism and international communication that the various types of invisible or “underground” journalistic labor (Palmer, 2019: 18) – often referred to simply as “fixing” – is integral to the practice of cross-border journalism. Recognizing that “fixing” can be an umbrella term for various types of journalistic as well as journalism-adjacent labor, conducted both by journalists and non-journalistic agents, we use the term “local-foreign news work” (Hamilton and Jenner, 2004) to refer to the labor of fixers and locally-based journalists who play a professional and editorial role within cross-border news production.…”

“…Recognizing that “fixing” can be an umbrella term for various types of journalistic as well as journalism-adjacent labor, conducted both by journalists and non-journalistic agents, we use the term “local-foreign news work” (Hamilton and Jenner, 2004) to refer to the labor of fixers and locally-based journalists who play a professional and editorial role within cross-border news production. 2 This category of labor, often undertaken on intensely precarious terms, encompasses information-sourcing and cultural mediation, logistics and security assessment, translation and interviewing, and even the production of primary news texts and images – often without any public or professional recognition (Palmer, 2019; Khan, M., 2020: 124-153).…”

“…Rather, locally-based journalists and news fixers who cater to distant audiences are better described as perpetual straddlers . We know from existing studies that local-foreign news workers navigate their identity as individuals with a doubled or even multitudinous sense of cultural belonging (Palmer, 2019). But this cultural polyvalence is accompanied by the multi-spatial nature of these individuals’ professional experience (Hellmueller and Berglez, 2022), as their work is conducted through embodied, lived, and relational acts.…”