Everybody Knows Everyone Here: Proximity, Precarity and Political Challenges of Being a Local Journalist

Abstract

Precarity can be conceived as a fundamental condition of present-day journalism. This notion has primarily been utilized to describe the transformations that occurred with changing employment conditions, market flexibilization, and financial insecurity. While this has become the norm, it often overlooks nuances of precarity that journalists face, such as its bodily and political aspects. In this paper, I explore the extent to which proximity to the events and individuals journalists report on configures their experience of political precarity. To that end, I employ the concept of affective proximity, which refers to how locals navigate and reconcile their emotional and embodied entanglement within events in their country and community. The profession of journalism has traditionally been thought of as predicated on distance. However, this is not often the case for local journalists, who are not only working in but also representing and participating in the community they report on. Being physically present and belonging to that community, these journalists encounter the people they write about in streets, grocery stores, and restaurants. This paper will be based on ten semi-structured, in-depth interviews with journalists working in local media in Serbia. Centered around questions of journalists’ status in the community, the research will shed further light on the perils and risks to their political and social personhood.