Cities and News. Urban Imagination in the Age of Global Journalism

CAIMARI, LILA

Cambridge University Press

Lugar: Cambridge, Reino Unido; Año: 2022 p. 67

9781108823807

This book examines urban imaginaries during the expansion of international news between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when everyday information about far away places found its way into newspapers all over the world. Building on the premise that high-circulation periodicals carried an unprecedented power to shape representations of the world, it follows this development as it made its way to the informational landscapes of regular readers in the dominant information nodes and beyond. News expansion produced a major shift in the urban horizon of an ever-increasing pool of readers. The rise of modern newspapers was, of course, an eminently urban phenomenon, one that gave birth to a brand of journalists writing about urban questions of all sorts - from monumental buildings to sewage and street crime, from glamorous theaters to the underworld. Correspondents all over the world were expected to use their writing skills to make certain cities familiar to readers who were located in other cities. Studies agree that the overall dynamic of this system turned a handful of European capitals into reference points for readers all over the world. Without disputing this claim, this book argues that, when observed from the vantage point of newspapers distant from those centers, a number of complexities become apparent. The thematic and geographic dispersion produced by the cable system vastly expanded the urban scenarios offered to readers, bringing many other cities into the regular news offering. Meanwhile, regional capitals gained increasing visibility, as they turned into relay points in the informational routing network. Away from its original contexts of production and transmission, the urban map of news was transformed, refashioned and interpreted for audiences in the distant cities and regions now connected in that network.