Stringers and the Journalistic Field

This book is one of the first ethnographic works on small-town stringers or informal news workers in Indian journalism. It explores existing practices and cultures in the field of local journalism and the roles and spaces stringers occupy. The book outlines the caste, gender, class and region-based biases in the production of Indian-language journalism with a specific focus on stringers working in Telugu dailies in small towns or 'mofussil' areas of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, states in south India. Further, it captures their daily work and processes of news production, and the precarious lives they often lead while working in small towns or mofussils. The author, by using Bourdieu's field theory, introduces the journalistic practices of stringers working on the margins and how they negotiate the complex hierarchies that exist within the journalistic field and outside it. This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of ethnography, media sociology, journalism and media studies, labour studies and Area studies, especially South Asian studies.

Nimmagadda Bhargav is a faculty member in the communications at the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, India. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Hyderabad's Department of Communication and was a postdoctoral research assistant on an Arts and Humanities Research Council and UKRI-funded project led by Loughborough University.

Acknowledgements A note on translation, transliteration, language, and style - Introduction: Studying small-town stringers - Locating the stringer: Social and political scaffoldings - Masculinity and missing women in the journalistic field - Dispositions and recruitment patterns of agents - Roles and/as hierarchies - The logic of local journalistic practice - Informality, precarity, and news labour - Conclusion: Newswork in the time of pandemic Index