Mapping Transnational Journalism in the Age of Flows: Or How I Ditched “Foreign Correspondence” and the “Immigrant Press” and Started to Love Histoire Croisée

Abstract

This article is about the conceptual and methodological challenges of mapping twenty-first-century transnational journalism. They are examined by focusing on the case study of a journalistic genre that spans the local, national and transnational dimensions at once: online local news in English from non-English-speaking countries. This kind of news appears to defy the boundaries of existing journalistic categories. Given that defining a problem (ontology) affects the way we go about researching it (methodology), the absence of a clear definitional category a researcher can assign this news-phenomenon to raises important questions: Which strategies might be employed to map this genre of news, to identify what is relevant to it, and ultimately to understand it? The analysis first outlines the limitations of existing journalistic categories in capturing the fluid reality of contemporary transnational news. Then, borrowing from the toolkit of International History, it suggests an alternative inductive and relational approach to examining transnational journalistic practices—histoire croisée. The benefits of this approach are illustrated through an empirical mapping of the actors, connectors and connections that make up the “circulatory regime” of the leading provider of local news in English in Europe: The Local.