The manufacture of an international news event: The day Kosovo was born

Abstract

When the new country of Kosovo declared its independence in 2008 it received extensive, but fleeting, international news coverage. This study seeks to provide insight into how an international news event was orchestrated by participants and how news coverage was planned and implemented by international media. We do so by investigating factors initiating, enabling, shaping, and limiting the global news coverage of this story. Particular attention is paid to the close relationship between local ‘fixers’ and media representatives, which is instrumental in most international news coverage, but which has received little scholarly examination; and to the influential role of the UK-based international television news agencies.

Proximity and distance in the mediation of suffering: Local photographers in war-torn Aleppo and the international media circuit

“…If we look beyond literature dealing particularly with images, collaborations between international news organisations and local actors have been studied in literature on war reporting. This research, like that of Schwenkel and Bishara, emphasises the increasingly important role of local media workers, particularly in relation to the wars in Iraq and Syria (Murrell, 2009, 2010; Palmer and Fontan, 2007; Pendry, 2011; Skrubbeltrang, 2014; Vandevoordt, 2016, 2017; Wall and El Zahed, 2015), but also in relation to Kosovo (Paterson et al, 2012). However, despite consensus on the significance of local media workers, most of these studies have mainly or exclusively explored the conditions of local media workers through interviews with foreign correspondents.…”

Reporting in Conflict Zones in Pakistan: Risks and Challenges for Fixers

“…They show that this cooperation between international reporters and fixers has been crucial to global news reporting for a long time. Previous studies conducted in the Middle East (Murrell, 2009(Murrell, , 2010(Murrell, , 2011(Murrell, , 2013(Murrell, , 2015Palmer & Fontan, 2007), locally in Palestine (Bishara, 2006), Kosovo (Andresen, 2008(Andresen, , 2009(Andresen, , 2015Paterson, Andresen, & Hoxha, 2012), and in Pakistan (Khan, 2011(Khan, , 2016(Khan, , 2019 pinpoint how, on an international scale, the highly unrecognized influence of the local fixers on news reporting from the field matters. A major reason why fixers are crucial is to avoid what can be framed as 'parachute journalism,' which is itself a rather loaded term used to describe journalism where international reporters spend a short time in a conflict area, working in situ for a few days, before moving on to the next conflict:…”

Embedded journalism: constructing romanticized images of China by US journalists in the 1970s

“…The embedding process can be regarded as a variant of the sourcing pattern that arranges all aspects of reportorial sites in such a way as to facilitate news-gathering activities for the reporters, by focusing their attention on targeted scenes and intended events while isolating them from "the big picture" (Haigh et al, 2006;Paterson, Andresen, & Hoxha, 2012). Under embedding arrangements in a particularly defined situation, foreign correspondents may offer the minutiae of their eyewitness accounts without probing into the larger context and strategic motives of these missions.…”

“…Embedding might mean social and epistemological isolation, thus losing sight of the complexity of news events or processes. More specifically, aside from language and cultural barriers, embedding may prevent reporters from accessing wider and more reliable sources beyond the small circle of authorized personalities and settings (Palmer & Fontan, 2007;Paterson et al, 2012). Shoemaker and Reese (1996) identified four levels of forces that influenced the news gathering, which included individual, media routines, organization, and extramedia forces (e.g.…”