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The Architectures of Media Power: Editing, the Newsroom, and Urban Public Space

Space and Culture

Published online on

Abstract

This article considers the relation of the newsroom and the city as a lens into the more general relation of production spaces and mediated publics. Leading theoretically from Lee and LiPuma’s notion of "cultures of circulation," and drawing on an ethnography of the Toronto Star, the article focuses on how media forms circulate and are enacted through particular practices and material settings. With its attention to the urban milieus and orientations of media organizations, this article exhibits both affinities with and also differences to current interests in the urban architectures of media, which describe and theorize how media get "built into" the urban experience more generally. In looking at editing practices situated in the newsroom, an emphasis is placed on the phenomenological appearance of media forms both as objects for material assembly as well as more abstracted subjects of reflexivity, anticipation, and purposiveness. Although this is explored with detailed attention to the settings of the newsroom and the city, the article seeks to also provide insight into the more general question of how publicness is materially shaped and sited.