The Fixers: Local News Workers' Perspectives on International Reporting
Lindsay Palmer
Abstract
This book conducts a cultural analysis of the labor of the news fixer—the locally based media employee who helps international correspondents research stories, set up interviews, translate foreign languages, and navigate unfamiliar regions. Foreign reporters often say that their work would be impossible without these local news assistants. Yet, fixers are among some of the most exploited and persecuted people contributing to the production of international news. Targeted by militant groups, by their own governments, or even by their own neighbors, fixers must often engage in a precarious balan ... More
This book conducts a cultural analysis of the labor of the news fixer—the locally based media employee who helps international correspondents research stories, set up interviews, translate foreign languages, and navigate unfamiliar regions. Foreign reporters often say that their work would be impossible without these local news assistants. Yet, fixers are among some of the most exploited and persecuted people contributing to the production of international news. Targeted by militant groups, by their own governments, or even by their own neighbors, fixers must often engage in a precarious balancing act between appeasing their community members and pleasing the correspondents who visit from faraway. Though foreign news outlets routinely depend upon news fixers’ insider awareness of politically tense situations in order to keep their own reporters safe in the field, fixers themselves continually face detainment, injury, and death. Even so, international news organizations almost never provide their fixers with hazardous environment training or medical insurance. What is more, fixers rarely receive professional credit from the reporters who hire them, suggesting that their often life-threatening labor is deeply undervalued. Drawing upon 75 interviews with fixers from 39 different countries, this book argues that although fixers’ labor is essential to international news reporting, it is still relegated to the shadows of the international news industry.
Keywords:
international reporting,
international journalism,
foreign correspondents,
fixers,
translators,
global studies,
postcolonial theory,
news work,
production studies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780190680824 |
| Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: July 2019 |
DOI:10.1093/oso/9780190680824.001.0001 |
