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CWA: Please review this for word choice and occasional language use – for instance, my addition of “though more are emerging” on page 3. This article could do with a scan for stuff like this- please just make any changes you want directly, if they are small.

The Late Great International Herald Tribune and The New York Times: Global Media,

Space, Time, Print and Online Coordination in a 24-7 Networked World

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The Late Great International Herald Tribune and The New York Times: Space, Time,Print and Online Coordination in a 24-7 Networked World

Abstract: This article provides an empirical, field-based study of the production processes of transnational media outlet, the International Herald Tribune,as it negotiates and coordinates workflow and content with The New York Times. Using Manuel Castells’ concept of the space of flows, the article provides additional nuance to understand the relationship between material constructs and networked information. Time zones and geolocation remain important; the biggest node in the network does direct information; and the coordinated capacity for 24-7 content is more difficult that perhaps imagined by networkedscholars. Both people and product are considered here in an effort to bring added nuance to the tension between materiality and networks in the productionof information. While the IHT has now been rebranded as the International New York Times, the same considerations and questions remain.

In October 2013, The New York Times Company rebranded the storied International

Herald Tribune (IHT) as the International New York Times. The newspaper’s own coverage

described the move as part of a strategy to slim down but raise influence,

stating that the move was a “central component of a stepped-up global growth

strategy” (Haughney, 2013). For the first time, IHT editors would be able to

explicitly direct Times correspondents in both Europe and Asia (Greenslade,

2013). Yet the organization would face the same slate of questions as it had

before, name change notwithstanding: how to coordinate a material product

across three geographic zones and five products; nytimes.com, the global

online site (global.nyt.com), a print Asia edition, a print Europe edition,

and a print U.S. edition.

Whether transnational means a “single version to the world” or not (Reese,

2010: 346) is contested among global communication scholars—The Times global

approach is nonetheless exemplary of a cross-boundary approach to news

production and dissemination- and its products ultimately reach people in 130

different countries.

There are not many news organizations of this “transnational” stature, though

more are emerging. The Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times are daily newspapers

with three region-specific print products, The Guardian has recently created a

US edition; the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and Sky offer good broadcast examples;

Time and The Economist magazine offerings—and these all have in common products

that are created as intentionally cross-border with some differentiation.

Certainly, wire news has flowed across the globe for decades (Boyd-Barrett and

Rantanen, 1998), but as a wholesale product, this has generally been intended

as raw content for a geo-located artifact – either physical or online.

However, there are an increasing number of transnational news outlets, and the

influence and reach of these existing institutions makes inquiry into their

production practices significant for understanding the global flow of news

with changes in the density, speed, and technology of this information— (c.f.

Thussu, 2006; Chalaby, 2005, 2009).

This specific case study investigates the global news production routines of

The Times and the IHT before its' rebranding in order to explore how news and

information moves across the networked society—bringing to light the tensions

between coordinated global flows of information through the creation of

material and online products and the effect upon work. Using ethnographic data

gathered from The Times, the IHT-Europe in Paris, and IHT-Asia in Hong Kong, I

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examine the impact of physical location, product goals, human labor, and

specific time and space orientation in a global, instant, and networked world.

On one hand, it is easy to assume an uninterrupted flow of information via 24-

7 news from around the globe. However we need to consider the implications of

what it takes to create this news. This paper asks poses major questions: What

are the practices behind transnational news production? What does it mean to

have different geographically-specific sites responsible for this content?

What is the impact of different time zones on information creation?

There is generally wide agreement that we have indeed entered a distinct era

of global, digital information exchange enabled by networked communication.

For example, Castells (2001; 2008) argues that we have fundamentally entered a

new era of information distribution; the new capacity to share knowledge in

near instant time has created fundamental social changes. Thussu (c.f. 2006)

has written about the rise in new communication technologies whereby Western

and non-Western media offers us content that is both global and local at the

same time. Sassen (c.f. 2001) has theorized extensively about the linked and

node structure of global flows, with communication networks enabling the

production and distribution of new information and capital from centralized

and emerging nodes. While these theorists offer examples, a more specific,

nuanced, and detailed portrait of how information is produced and created to

support this networked information society is needed.

This paper is not about the definitional arguments that all too often plague

global journalism studies (Reese, 2008; 2010). Rather, I seek to interrogate a

much broader question about the relationship between space, place time, and

material production in the creation of information in the networked society. I

rely on Castells (2001) because his work crystallizes some core questions

about how to create information in a global environment – with animating

questions such as whether place and time matter and how information flows

across networks.

After outlining the methods and the case, I showcase three core aspects of

global information production: shaping the print paper across three time

zones; content adjustment in the expat and American world; and online

coordination and dissonance. I also offer a micro-study of a single breaking

story written for IHT-HK and The New York Times. Ultimately, I conclude that we

need more nuance to our understanding of the networked flow of information;

that production practices and contexts still matter, and more simply, that

there is also a human cost to creating a 24-7 flow of information.

Global Networked Flows of Information:

The undergirding argument Castells (2001, 2008) makes across a variety of

books and articles is that we have entered the “networked society,” which

consists of interconnected hubs, nodes, networks and spaces that facilitate

the rapid exchange and dissemination of information and means a fundamental

reconfiguration of state, public, media, governance, economics, and

urbanization. Castells (2001) specifically addresses the nature of physical

space in the networked society through his conception of the “space of flows”

or the “transformation of location patterns of core economic activities under

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the new technological system” (p. 408). This is opposed to what we more

commonly understand as “space of places.” Castells acknowledges, of course,

that space is distinctly material – and includes people, social relationships,

practices, and social action. However, the space of flows is enabled by

electronic exchange built on information technologies, and a common logic

organizes various sectors of production thanks to this enhanced communication

technology.

Time and place in a networked society are less relevant: “places do not

disappear, but their logic and meaning become absorbed in the network”

(Castells, 2001: 48). This is not to say that cities don’t matter, but that

they marshal resources into a larger information ecology. For example, the

material concentration of resources is absolutely essential to create

information across the globe. As Castells maintains, in this new society,

knowledge is centered around these information flows that do not rely on

physical contiguity. Perhaps, then, the importance of geo-located time does

not matter anymore – instead we engage in “time-sharing social practices that

work through flows” (442). In practice, though, this may be more difficult

than it seems.

Others have recognized how this theoretical background may be helpful to

understanding global news, but there have been notably fewer production

studies. For instance, Gasher and Klein (2008) use Castells’ framework to

analyze the flow of information across The Times of London, Liberation Paris and

Haaretz, arguing that place still defines information in a global world, while

Heinrich (2008, 2011, 2012) looked at global rise of new nodes and networks

for journalism. Significantly, Reese (2010) argues for the importance of

production-based research, using Castells as an imperfect theoretical

background, noting “Underlying these circuits of global flows are structures

of people in professional and institutional roles. In more concrete terms,

these are the agents who form the infrastructure of the global in specific

local settings” (348). This leads to the question of how professionals work in

these global and specific settings to construct these information flows. Thus,

not only are we interested here in the dynamics of information production as

content but also the actors engaged in its creation.

The empirical research generally does not focus on actual work production and

process, though it does offer important insights into global information work.

An important caveat is that this work makes clear that the very words

globalization, glocalization, transnational, international, cross-border,

flow, contra-flow, and beyond inspire spirited debate (Berglez, 2008; Reese,

2008, 2010).

One key question has been to ask “what is global” and whether “global”

news/media is actually possible (Reese 2008, 2010; Hafez, 2007; Sparks, 2005).

As if to echo Reese empirically, Cottle and Rai’s 2008 analysis of CNNI, BBC

World and for-profit Fox News and Sky News’s frames suggests that global news

production does not simply fit under the two labels as either “global

dominance” or “global public sphere.” Other work probes cross-border power

relations, political systems, and normative relations through media (Beck,

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2005; de Beer and Merrill 2008, McPhail, 2010). Still other scholars are

intrigued by the emergence of the global public sphere in journalism

(Hjarvard, 2001; Volkmer, 1999), or more critically, point to signs of media

imperialism (Boyd-Barrett and Xie, 2008). Clausen’s work (2003) looks at a

series of public broadcasts and framing to think about the homogenization of

international news through news agencies— and found that news is locally

produced and locally created, with the exception of foreign news stories.

Thurman (2007) has looked at the global audience’s use of news Websites,

pointing to the extension of the global in the 24-7 Web era.

Scholars argue that international news services like the BBC can

provide a sorely needed alternative news consciousness to a

locally-situated public (Bicket and Wall, 2009), and locally-

produced media may be strengthened by exposure to more global

information flows (Rao, 2009). Others, like, Volkmer (1999) argue

there was a possibility for a global public and regional

specificity. With this empirical and theoretical research in

mind, this study seeks to build on the theoretical backbone of

“space of flows” contrasted with “space of places,” and empirical

research that investigates how transnational news moves across

global networks.

The Case:

The case presented here looks at the material and the online construction

processes of networked news production at the IHT and The Times through their

two online and three print products. The Times is a significant site of inquiry

as a key influencer in setting the U.S. agenda (Walgrave and Van Aelst, 2006),

and reaches policy-makers, corporate executives and an audience with an

average household income of more than $90,000 (New York Times Media Kit,

n.d.). Despite struggles with the general “newspaper crisis,” The Times has

introduced an aggressive paywall model that CEO Mark Thompson has called the

“most successful decision in years” (Roberts, 2013); nytimes.com still remains

among the 10 most read news sites in the world and gets over 29 million unique

visitors a month. The staff of The Times itself is about 1,000 strong.

The IHT also had a storied history; it was founded in 1887 as The Paris Herald by

James Gordon Bennett, Jr. and was intended as the European edition of the New

York Herald. At the time, it reached an audience much like it did prior to

rebranding: rich expatriates hoping for an international view of the world but

with a slice of news from the U.S. (personal communication, Alison Smale,

executive editor, IHT, 26 April 2010). The Washington Post and The Times became

joint owners in 1967, an agreement that unraveled in 2003, with The Times

assuming complete control. In 2005, The Times created an Asian-specific edition

of the IHT, and opened an office in Hong Kong. Circulation is currently split

60/40 between Europe and Asia (New York Times Global Media Kit, n.d.). Within

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The Times Company, there was indeed a sense in which the IHT is the “B-team”

for New York; however, I was less interested here in internal cultural

politics and more interested in the impact of physical place, space, and time

on news production, though this subtext was of course at work. At the time,

the IHT had approximately 80 people in Paris and 60 in Hong Kong.

From New York, The Times is responsible for the print imprimatur, and 24 hours

a day, New York-based Web producers put up content from around the globe on

nytimes.com and global.nyt.com. The Times also supplemented its print and Web

coverage with IHT coverage, especially in the business section. The origin of

new content for the Web depended on what time it is: at 9 PM in New York, it

is 3 PM in Paris, and 9 am in Hong Kong, but there was a felt urgency at The

Times for “fresh” content (Usher, 2014) that motivated continuous, round-the-

globe demand for news. The Times and the IHT ran on different content management

systems, and as a result, The Times, which had a bigger site, controls the

ultimate version of a story because it must be posted to the Web from its

website. This has broader significance as we will see.

Method

This article emerges from a larger ethnographic project on The New York Times. I

spent a total of five months at the newspaper between January and June 2010

conducting ethnographic field work. I spent over 700 hours in this newsroom

and conducted over 80 interviews. I observed workflow, both print and online,

attended Page One and business desk meetings, and “shadowed” 32 journalists

across newsroom hierarchy, watching them work throughout the day. My principle

site of research was the business desk of The Times. I visited IHT-Europe

(Paris) in April 2010, midway through my time at The NYT, as it had become

clear to me that the IHT and NYT business desk had a close relationship worth

exploring.

To understand this coordination, I spent 6 days in the Paris newsroom and 4

days in Hong Kong. In Paris, I attended daily news meetings, observed general

newsroom workflow and conducted a total of 20 interviews lasting between 30

minutes to an hour with a with people across the newsroom hierarchy, selected

based on a conveience sample based on who was available in a busy newsroom.

This included the IHT Asia and Europe editor in chief, the managing editor,

reporters, editors, and copy editors. In June 2010, I visited IHT-Asia (Hong

Kong). I followed a similar research schedule and interviewed 13 journalists,

most of whom were editors and print and online production focused. At the

time, there were only 3 official IHT-Asia reporters. The questions were asked

about news production between New York, Paris and Hong Kong, and was

incrementally adapted building upon new data. Across all research sites some

journalists requested anonymity, but my agreement with these journalists and

the IRB was that I could use their names unless they requested otherwise.

I kept jottings (down to the level of specific verbatim quotes in meetings) in

a notebook throughout the day of conversation, and took notes verbatim for

interviews on my laptop. My work was guided by Glaser and Strauss’ (1967)

constant comparative method. This method informed my ability to recognize and

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code themes based on their prominence and evaluate them in terms existing the

theory and literature. I had previously coded my Times data for “Times

interaction with IHT.” For this project, I coded for a variety of categories

related to this interaction, from 24-7 web operations, to print perspective,

audience perception, and reporter workflow. I then collapsed these categories

into broader themes regarding global news production: audience difference,

print production, online coordination, and online/print coordination.

Shaping the Print Paper

On one hand, Castells suggests that specific locations are significant because

they are sites of production that are responsible for generating information

for a larger information ecosystem. On the other hand, though, physical

contiguity should matter less because in a networked society, as time-sharing

makes place less important. Arguably, if information production is

concentrated, this has less to do with geography because these cities are

engaged in process rather than product. What we see in the case of the three

Times Co. news outlets is that information does not flow easily from place to

place because time still matters in shaping physical production. Similarly,

there is an uneasy relationship between process and product.

In New York, there is little consideration for The Times paper’s existence

outside of the U.S. However, the creation of the print paper in New York has

significant consequences for the IHT’s print paper. New York is the dominant

point for all information distribution. The Times has two Page One meetings;

one at 10 a.m. to set the day’s agenda and another at 4:30 p.m. intended to

finalize the front page. New York sets the tone for what will be the most

important print coverage, choosing from an array of enterprise stories with a

longer shelf life and breaking news stories. Enterprise stories are like a

game of cat and mouse: the story will be offered to the top New York editors

for two or three days, as editors don’t want to lose their chance at having a

Page One story, but when they will run is unclear.

But when Paris calls in for the 10 a.m. New York meeting—which is 4 p.m. Paris

time– Paris needs to be able to plan for its 9 p.m. print deadline. This means

hoping that New York will have a good sense of what stories it can use so

Paris can begin creating a plan for its front page. A number of examples

illuminate the difficulty of coordinating the material news production for

Paris based simply on time.

On April 26, 2010, business editor Larry Ingrassia presented a story slugged

WIND to the morning Page One meeting. He said: “There’s a story about a wind

farm off Cape Cod. It’s contentious because rich people don't want it in their

backyard. It's a test case for wind power if the administration says yes or

no.” It met with almost no feedback or interest. Ingrassia tried to push his

story with more urgency, and said, “They are going to decide in a day or two.”

As the last person to pipe in over the teleconference, Smale from

Paris noted, “We would really like WIND,” and after the Page One

meeting conferred to her colleagues, “This will be nice for our

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readers, how America is behind in wind.” (This comment also reflects

the Europe-focused sentiment, in this case about the wind industry).

Smale had to know: Would New York use WIND that day? Would it be on

the front page? That day, she got lucky, and Ingrassia told her she

could have it, as saving it for Page One seemed to be a lost cause and

he wanted to run the story.

The following day illustrated more dramatically the difficulty of

having something from New York meet the Paris print deadlines. Goldman

Sachs was defending itself against mounting evidence that it had

purposely shorted the housing market. The situation was developing in

New York, but whether there would be an analytical story in time for

Paris was unclear. “We have [two reporters] blogging….” Ingrassia

added. Assistant Managing Editor Jim Roberts told Smale, “We’ll try to

have something for you” (Field notes, 27 April 2010). Paris made the

best out of an early draft.

The situation is peculiar for Hong Kong, which prints a paper with

news from the U.S. that is, as Asia Editor Philip McClellan noted, “30

hours behind New York” (personal communication, 14 June 2010), or as

another editor noted, “We publish a day-old newspaper.” The conundrum

is that The Times produces the bulk of material for IHT-Asia, but most of

the stories that Hong Kong can run in its newspaper will have already

been up on the Web page. The saving grace is the Reuters business news

supplement that adds to print content, according to Tom Sims, business

news editor in Paris.

The conundrum for Hong Kong is particularly difficult when it comes to

choosing photos. “There is not a lot of art that moves from Asia,” in

part because there are fewer Times and wire agency photographers

located there. Sims continued, “There’s only so many times you can put

rioting Bangladeshis on the front page…and you don’t want an American

photo that is a day old…” So the editors resort to finding photos from

wire services when possible, but are left with few options.

In an age of networked information, it would seem like it makes little

sense to even bother with a print product. All these headaches would

be erased. Yet the reliance on the print product reveals that we have

not completely moved to a world where information exchange is indeed

reduced to networked global information flows. There is a reason still

for creating material, physical information: it sells and funds The

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Times Co. The IHT, while costly to produce, offers a high-income

audience and, as a result, high ad rates ($240,000 per home; front-

page ads for $110,000), and will for now remain in print. Similarly,

despite circulation declines, The Times makes most of its money from its

print product.

The coordination of whose content belongs where when belies the easy

transfer of information suggested by Castells. On one hand, we are

still dealing with a material information exchange. For Castells,

however, even manufacturing can fit into this networked flow; physical

production in turn may be facilitated through information exchange.

However, in this case, what makes coordination complicated is that one

site of information production, The Times, has most of the control over

what information is available to the IHT. A significant portion of

intellectual resources and labor come from New York; Paris and Hong

Kong can’t alone fill their newspapers without The Times. This would

point to the importance of a single place marshaling the resources of

the material concentration of information exchange and sharing it-

suggesting more difficulties than predicted between material and

networked coordination. The IHT is not freed from the space of places,

time zones and physical contiguity.

Content Adjustment in the Expat and American World

The larger debates about global journalism, and globalization more generally,

have pitted whether it is possible to actually have global content. Castells’

work suggests that content can be locally produced but have global

ramifications, offering other nodes of the network greater insight. One

example is the case of the Mayo Clinic’s capacity to have top doctors working

in Rochester, Minnesota, but through teleconferencing and other means, this

knowledge can be shared and locally integrated into other medical communities.

One of the most difficult aspects to rectify within the networked society is

this conflation of local and global experience, and what we can see through

The Times and the IHT is that information does require local interpretation.

Nonetheless, he argues that information can come from any point in the network

and be reinterpreted by any other point in the network in an exchange that was

previously far more difficult.

Geographical perspective colors content creation. In New York, business news

editors were concerned with global issues, but their approach belied an

American understanding of global dynamics. For example, Times journalists were

often critical of the European social welfare state, with editors asserting

that it was “unsustainable” (field notes, 3 March 2010). In another case, a

reporter offered a story about the Greek origin of the debt crisis-- tax

evasion. Business editor Larry Ingrassia noted, “The Greeks need to stop

living beyond their means” (field notes, 7 March 2010). “Greeks just don’t pay

their taxes. They have swimming pool[s], and then they say they don’t have any

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money,” as one editor expounded. “It’s ridiculous the kinds of claims that are

made. It’s like culturally no one pays taxes” (field notes, 14 March 2010).

On the other hand, The Times also looked for IHT stories to inform New York

about the European debt crisis because these writers had more intimate

knowledge of the Eurozone finance conditions, suggesting that information

could come from other nodes in the network. Yet that EU story was different

for The Times than it was for Paris. One IHT business writer noted: “There’s a

European edition for the IHT, which you really want a smart lede which you want

may have global ramifications and ramification for Europe and you need to

think with a big voice… If it is a really important story you are going to be

working… another version to file for The Times – you write [for example]: a lot

of this affected the American market…” (personal communication, 21April 2010).

The personal technology page offers a good example of the tension between

creating content for a global marketplace and serving three distinct

audiences. In New York, the personal technology page was a Thursday section

that previewed the latest and greatest apps, the gizmos perceived as up and

coming in the world of technology, tech writer David Pogue’s column, and other

tidbits. Because both Paris and Hong Kong do not produce enough of their own

original content to fill the business pages, they rely on the personal

technology content for the print paper.

For Paris, two problems emerged with this section: availability of the gadgets

and European mindsets about technology. “They do a lot more consumer friendly

stuff, with the latest gadget and they have the bodies. But they did a lot on

the iPad and it will be a day and forever until it comes out [here]” said

John-Paul Rofe, tech editor at the time (field notes, 26 April 2010).

Similarly, what if an app wasn’t available on a European smartphone? And as

IHT-Europe media and tech writer Eric Pfanner noted, “This content doesn’t

always work for us. People in Europe have much more concerns about privacy

than in the U.S. We aren’t so utopian” (field notes, 26 April 2010).

In Asia, the opposite problem emerged. As editor Mike Wolengarter noted to me,

“People here already have the latest stuff. We’re ahead of the U.S. We know

what’s going on before they do. We just don’t have the bodies that The Times

has to cover it” (field notes, 16 June 2010). So the content was not

appropriate to the audience, and there was specific geolocated information.

In this instance, we can see signs that Castells’ broader explication of

information flows as dehierarchial and disembedded from physical contiguity

does not quite make sense. But other parts of his assessment do make sense;

that The Times, as a central node, offers information to other parts of the

network, which then take up this information – knowledge is distributed in

this sense rather than centrally-held. And the IHT, then, provides additional

information back into this globally dispersed information ecosystem.

Nonetheless, The Times is the source of information; it offers a product that

must be further disaggregated. The American perspective of technology must be

adjusted for more global needs. This suggests the importance of recognizing

more uneven balance of global information flows.

Online Coordination (and dissonance) in the Networked Public Sphere

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So far, we have examined material production and content creation, but have

not addressed perhaps the richest site of inquiry into global flows of

information: the transfer and exchange of networked, online news across the

three Times outlets. The data offer compelling support for the potential for

Castells’ theorization of a global information distribution through a 24-7

networked information environment. But what we have less insight into is the

actual coordination and human costs required to create this global

coordination; from our desks or our phones it is easy to imagine information

coming to us at any time when we want it, but the process is far from simple,

as this production process suggests. The case of the markets story and

breaking news out of China help elucidate this nuance.

On one hand, time is an absolute requirement for organizing the transfer of

global information; without clear coordination between time zones, the quest

for the 24-7 nytimes.com would be impossible. On the other hand, the space of

flows is perhaps best represented through online production as “time-sharing

social practices” (Castells, 2001); access to information is not bound by any

one material time zone; work processes themselves create global flows. Gerry

Mullany, the night Web news editor expressed this sentiment: “The New York Times

never sleeps. Somewhere it is always morning,” (5 April 2010). But making the

site “always morning” requires careful handoffs for this globally-accessible

online product. Similarly, some information does actually vanish because of

the networked efforts, and more significantly, there is a human cost to this

24-7 operation.

The markets story—the chart of the rise and fall of markets across the world--

offers insight into the kind of global handoff required for information to

flow from node to node. Each day, the markets story begins in Hong Kong. But

the Hong Kong reporter must be focused on New York. “I check my Blackberry

while still in bed…” she explained. She continued to detail the continuous

updating process: “I write about how New York finished [indicates] how Asia

will do… literally I’ll do that as my first thing- I’ll keep readers informed

about the market sentiment and as the day progresses I’ll make updates, and

the Asian markets all close at different times.” During this time, she and her

editor are in touch with New York, where it is the middle of the night. Yet

even online, information loses currency as it moves across the globe—and

across time. The reporter explained, “For European editions it needs to be

more Europe focused, and by the time we progress to the U.S. markets whatever

Asia has done has been rendered irrelevant” (personal communication, 14 June

2010).

Then in Paris, journalist David Jolly picks up the market story that the Asia

reporter has been working on all day. He begins again constant Web updates,

filling the nytimes.com Web site with news of the latest jitters in the

European marketplace in pre-trading hours. Jolly explained his mandate: “There

is a constant appetite from New York for us to produce whatever we can

produce…” This process then continues in New York, with reporter Javier

Hernandez taking over the story for pre-market trading. But even before he

gets to work, his editor, Mark Getzfred, prepares for the New York day

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deleting most of the Asian markets information, and topping the Europe markets

information with new paragraphs about U.S. premarket trading. In an effort to

keep up with the global flow of finance, older information is dropped from the

story in favor of updated information focused on each trading sphere. Because

this information is edited online, it also dies online. If a New Yorker wanted

to look online in the afternoon about how the Asian markets performed that

day, that information simply wouldn’t exist on nytimes.com – even though it

had been there just hours ago.

The hand-offs are well-coordinated but require considerable communication,

with editors from two time zones always in touch with each other during the

few hours they overlap. The Asia editor touches base with the Europe editor

who touches base with New York editors who then prepare to be in touch with

the Asia editor again. For the periods of overlap, the editors chatter back

and forth about reporters on duty, where stories are in the system, and what

each has been able to catch about the next opening market to help that editor

and reporter start their day.

At the end of the U.S. day, Hernandez is responsible for providing an overall

recap for what has happened across the markets. The goal, according to

Getzfred, is to provide a thorough, more analytical look at what happened

rather than the moment by moment—a take-out story. But Hernandez’ story is a

U.S. markets story, with nary a mention of Europe or Asia, and this,

ultimately is the story that lives online. But this means that Jolly and the

Hong Kong reporter rarely see a byline. As Jolly put it: The Times ultimately

treated his Europe story as “wire copy…they can do whatever they want to it.”

And for him, that meant real consequences. “I will be working on a story all

day and sometimes not even receive a contributing line for it…and that kind of

stuff happens with depressing frequency” (field notes, 27 April 2010).

From the perspective of journalists working on the story, those attached to

the information they have gathered and created, this disjuncture of

information and ownership over the story means something to them. For

Hernandez, the byline remains his. But for the Hong Kong writer and for Jolly,

their efforts are lost to the global exchange. This is an illustration of

perhaps something forgotten about global information exchange: through

information churn, people whose work has intellectual value to them may get

lost in the global shuffle for the desire for fast, efficient information.

The human cost goes beyond just bylines and disconnect from intellectual

effort, though. Answering to a 24-7 operation that can be focused across

entirely different global zones is simply physically exhausting for a

journalist. The online and print coordination of The NYT and the IHT for a

breaking story illustrated this difficulty – made especially more demanding by

the need to also meet hard physical deadlines.

New York Times reporter Keith Bradsher consults with the IHT and NYT Shanghai

bureau chief for direction on stories. He shared with me the process of

working on a breaking story of a rare protest march of Chinese workers

striking at a Honda plant in Zhonghsan, China. On June 10, 2010, Bradsher

arrived in the evening at the site of the strike and sent an email “revised

25

Bradsher whereabouts” and told his editors at 8:33 p.m. Zhongshan time that he

planned to file for the IHT late print deadlines. He got an email back 20

minutes later from New York, with an editor asking him to file as soon as

possible. Bradsher replied, “Yes, my plan is to file in one hour from now. I

have a lot of writing to do to hit that goal, however.” He then began filing

the story for New York, updating the story after finding out new information

about an independent union (rare in China). Bradsher noted:

This additional information meant that I kept rewriting and expanding

the story in my laptop. New York waited a couple hours for me to refile

before deciding to go ahead and putting the IHT version up on the web

without waiting for me any longer.

Though Bradsher was pleased to have the story go up, the pace of the process

illustrates the intensity of his work. The NYT posted the story at 10 p.m.

Zhongshan time. Bradsher updated the story again at 11 p.m. his time. He gave

more information in to New York at 12 a.m., or roughly 12 p.m. EST. He told me

about the process:

I finally went to sleep at 3:40 a.m., then got up at 6 a.m. to go

through New York's edited version and have breakfast. The web had posted

my full story with the 8 a.m. protest march at about 4:45 a.m. That was

too late for other reporters in Hong Kong to make it to to Zhongshan in

time for the march. I went back out to the strike around 7 and called in

to New York with updates from the protest march and brief confrontation

with riot police. I was the only reporter at the march who was on

deadline.

The email traffic he shared with me showed a conversation between him and the

New York copy desk at 5:24 a.m. and 6 a.m. Zhongshan time respectively.

Bradsher was covering a breaking story with many moving parts: a big protest

out China. But he was coordinating between filing for a print deadline before

the IHT-Asia deadline, and then working with NYT editors after the IHT finished

up for the evening. He focused on the IHT version of the story for the Web

version at first, and then put up a full version later on the next morning.

This meant he slept just over 2 hours to keep this constant flow of

information going. The global flow of information was coming 24-7 from a

single person, not from multiple nodes in the network. And this was not even

an A-1 story for New York.

So here is the cost that seems especially trenchant: for the global flow of

information to proceed smoothly, something material must be sacrificed. It may

not be a product like content, but human capital. In this case, the global

flow of information would not have been possible without one reporter sleeping

2 hours to make sure the story had the most updated information for both sides

of the world. The demand for content made Bradsher a central node in the

network offering a constant flow of news. But Bradsher is just one person – up

for 24 hours. Someone could always be working with him, and he always had a

way to distribute information to a global audience.

27

This human toll of labor asked of the “flexible worker” (Harvey, 1991) is

something we may miss if we focus too much on the information itself rather

than the process. Global flows (or microflows) of information through a single

person are more likely when the person has a continued and coordinated

potential for the distribution of his or her news content. But 24-hour

coverage seems unreasonable even if it is possible. The desire for the news

organizations to be constantly updated creates physical wear and tear on the

people producing the content, whether it be tired night editors in Hong Kong

making sure that the early morning New York markets editor really has a clear

sense of the wrap-up or the reporter on the scene filing for multiple web and

print deadlines. In this way, global flows are deeply rooted to the material;

people create the content for instant information access, and the networked

society may require a mental and physical sacrifice from workers whose

organizations make money from offering this information.

Space, Time and Global Information Flows of Information in News Production

This article has aspired to shed light beyond the language of global flows to

explore more specifically the production processes and people behind the

information society, and to explore the relationship between their local

situation and their place in the global information ecology. Castells offers

an important starting point to begin this inquiry because he aptly provides a

framework to understand the transfer of information across the globe in near

instant time through the networked society as a series of flows that displace

the importance of physical space in favor of process, larger and smaller

nodes, and the de-emphasis of time bound by space as a way to experience the

information society.

From the perspective of an information-seeker, the existence of 24-7 readily

available news from all over the world seems to embody the reality of these

global information flows. And while Castells has applied his analysis equally

to finance and to manufacturing, what we know less about is the experience of

the actual production that enables this information ecology. The case of The

Times and the IHT underscores the complicated relationship between production

and global demands for information; time, and time zones in particular, play a

significant role in the physical coordination of material production. Content

creation across the U.S., Europe, and Asia underscores the importance of

making information locally relevant, and reveals that particular nodes in the

information environment may take on possibly more hegemonic positions due to

their capacity to create content. And while online coordination across a 24-7

global news landscape is facilitated by the networked society, this may mean

the actual loss of information. More significantly, there is a real human cost

to this 24-7 production.

Castells suggests that global flows render time as disembodied from space. Yet

when it comes to journalism—a critically important source of information in,

well, the information age – time does matter. The news cycles still follow a

diurnal process that begin and end according to when the day begin and ends in

a particular time zone. The Times produces content that can fill its global

offshoots, but the centrality of New York as the key source of information

29

means that both IHT-Europe and IHT-Asia must follow its lead. The size and power

of this node as a key producer of information means that it dominates the

resulting physical transfer of information to the Paris and Hong Kong

newsrooms. This suggests a more hegemonic perspective of global information

transfer: one node can dictate the availability of news to another node in the

network. The exchange of information is not so easily facilitated.

Content creation, too, raises larger issues about the relationship between

global and local. Other scholars (perhaps most notably Appadurai, 1996) –

notes that global hegemonic constructions become deeply imbedded in the local

imaginary, adapted for consistency but nonetheless bearing the stamp of the

point of origin. In a networked society, Castells does suggest that certain

centers will become the central source for information, but that this

information will be easily shared across and through networks, enabling

greater connections where location is less important than the knowledge

itself. Yet content, as we see here, is not disembodied from location. New

York has an American audience; the content it offers must be recreated for

European and Asian audiences – and at times the original content may make

little sense when distributed across global nodes.

The market stories reveal the actual disappearance of locally created

information from Europe and Asia in favor of the end of day New York story.

Ultimately, the existence of a content management system organized and based

in New York that dictates the presentation of the Web and the final archiving

of the stories means that global information available to the world through

networked space is ultimately processed through one information hub. This

suggests the need to understand content creation in a more nuanced way that

addresses where information comes from and how it is distributed rather than

looking at the process through which people are able to access this

information.

Finally, what has been under explored and needs further consideration are the

consequences of the networked society on individual workers. Harvey’s (1991)

assessment of flexible workers begins to address some of the demands placed on

workers in a post-Fordist world, displaced from traditional institutions and

organized, time-bound workflow. But this article offers some insight into just

how difficult it is for workers to be actually bound to the demand for

constant information in a 24-7 information cycle; Bradsher’s work on China

illustrates that the worker is expected to be divorced from time and location

in order to respond to the demand for global information flow from multiple

nodes in The Times and IHT online and print network. And psychic demands for

credit and ownership over content creation are subsumed across the larger

information environment. Some have addressed the constant 24-7 multiplatform

demands of journalists (c.f. Deuze, 2007); this global demand for information

may go one step beyond.

When thinking broadly about global information flows, the networked society

offers rich potential for information exchange that can, indeed, be widely

dispersed and disaggregated from place and time. But this does not mean that

the actors themselves engaged in this information creation are also swept up

31

by the ease of global information flows; for them, as we see in the case of

news production, material considerations matter, physical space matters, and

time matters. This complicates what we know about the people and processes

behind information distribution and begs additional study.

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