Stringers and the Journalistic Field

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.

‘Steering clear of well-funded newsrooms and glitzy TV studios in metropoles, this book provides a deeply researched and beautifully written account of journalism in mofussil India. Through carefully observed and richly detailed accounts of stringers, Nimmagadda Bhargav charts a new path for regionally grounded studies of news production.’—Aswin Punathambekar, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania‘Increasingly precarious forms of employment for cultural workers such as journalists and its implications not only for the lives of these workers but more broadly for society is becoming an important issue for scholars writing about the Global North. Precarity for journalists in the Global South has been a fact of life for longer and this ethnographic study illuminating the lives of stringers working in small towns in southern India should be essential reading for those interested in understanding the nature and consequences of precarity whether at a local, national or global level. Based on careful and empathetic research of much maligned journalists and grounded in an impressive grasp of sociological and communicaton theory, this is a major contribution to the field of journalism studies in its quest to become global in orientation.’—John Downey, Professor of Comparative Media Analysis, Centre for Research in Communication and Culture, School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University and President, European Communication Research and Education Association‘In this excellent exploration of newspaper stringers in small towns of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh regions in India, Bhargav employs a grounded analytic framework by drawing theoretical and conceptual insights from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory and ‘Ambedkarite social philosophy’ to examine ‘marginality, social organization, division of labour, precarity, and informality’ in Indian language journalism culture in India. The topic of stringers in local Indian language newspapers remains an unexplored in India, and Bhargav should be commended for undertaking this study that offers fresh new theoretical insights into the local journalistic field and the world of the stringers.’—Sanjay Asthana, Professor, School of Journalism and Strategic Media, Middle Tennessee State University

• AcknowledgementsA 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 pandemicIndex