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Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?: Space, Place and Brussels’S Online News

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Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?: Space, Place and Brussels’S Online News See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322341778 Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?: Space, place and Brussels’s online news Article in Journalism Studies · January 2018 DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052 CITATIONS READS 3 36 2 authors: Victor Wiard Fábio Henrique Pereira Université Saint-Louis, Bruxelles University of Brasília 24 PUBLICATIONS 10 CITATIONS 63 PUBLICATIONS 124 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Media Cluster Brussels View project ALG-opinion : Filter bubbles and the formation of opinions on social media View project All content following this page was uploaded by Victor Wiard on 17 April 2018. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. Journalism Studies ISSN: 1461-670X (Print) 1469-9699 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjos20 Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City? Victor Wiard & Fábio Henrique Pereira To cite this article: Victor Wiard & Fábio Henrique Pereira (2018): Bad Neighborhoods in a Good City?, Journalism Studies, DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052 Published online: 09 Jan 2018. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjos20 Download by: [Victor Wiard] Date: 09 January 2018, At: 03:47 BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? Space, place and Brussels’ online news Victor Wiard and Fábio Henrique Pereira Within the context of the ongoing discussion on how the media represents spaces and territories to audiences, this pilot study proposes a methodological approach to investigate how diverse online news sources (national and regional legacy media, local public institutions, hyperlocal and commu- nity media, etc.) cover a territory—in this case, Brussels. Through a transversal analysis of the con- tents produced in 152 news items from as many sources, the paper aims to examine how online media ascribes particular meanings to spaces, which in the end might affect audiences’ perceptions. To assess how Brussels and its municipalities are represented, positive and negative values are assigned to news items describing its social problems. Results show that the complexity of Brussels’s institutional structure is an issue for the Belgian media, which has difficulty describing the territory it covers. Furthermore, the contents produced about Brussels indicate that online news producers may consistently portray poorer areas of the city as hosting more social problems than richer areas, hence stigmatizing these places. Finally, results suggest that the methodology presented and tested is viable to study place-problematizing. KEYWORDS Brussels; content analysis; online media; place-naming; place-problematizing; social problems; territory Introduction: Local News, Space and Place in a Digital World Over the last few decades, questions have arisen in academia regarding the pros and cons of digitization and convergence. If journalism scholars often highlight the posi- tive potential of digitization to create a more networked and globalized society, others warn that this phenomenon could hypothetically threaten local(ized) news institutions, making their future uncertain (Nielsen 2015,1–26). However, it seems that local news is Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 still of interest to many, as demonstrated by the number of local news producers online. In many countries, consumption is at an all-time high. In France, for example, there is (still) a strong regional press—the PQR1—which competes online with local “pure players”2 (Bousquet and Smyrnaios 2012). In the United States, a dense network of local television channels (Nielsen 2015) shares audiences with local newspapers, as well as a variety of websites and online blogs (Anderson 2013). In the Netherlands, growing numbers of hyperlocal news ventures indicate a rebirth of local news (van Ker- khoven and Bakker 2014). In the United Kingdom, the BBC, which broadcasts national and international news, as well as regional and local news, is again competing with local news- papers and more than 300 hyperlocal news websites (Williams, Harte, and Turner 2014). This serves to show that national, local and regional news producers and outlets— which are still very much geographically embedded and geographically embedding their productions in this “glocalized” media space (Reese 2016)—are being joined by new actors on the internet. On the one hand, this could be problematic in the sense Journalism Studies, 2018 https://doi.org/10.1080/1461670X.2017.1417052 © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group 2 VICTOR WIARD AND FÁBIO HENRIQUE PEREIRA that professional (and institutionalized) local news have to compete with new actors in small markets. On the other, professional news outlets were never the only source of local information, even prior to digitization. The call to examine the variety of producers of local(ized) online news is being answered by researchers who have taken an ecosyste- mic approach to news production, which allows them to study the variety of actors (jour- nalists, politicians, activists) participating in the construction of stories on specific territories (see Anderson 2013; Firmstone and Coleman 2015; Le Cam and Domingo 2015; Domingo and Wiard 2016). This body of research demonstrates how a diversity of individuals and institutions interacts to create news content. In the present paper, we propose to analyze the contents this diversity produced collectively. In this regard, one of the ways local news is especially important to democracy is in its depiction of specific spatial and political territories. We live in socially and politically constructed worlds (territories); our perceptions of which are very much influenced by news (Bousquet and Smyrnaios 2012; Noyer, Paillart, and Raoul 2013). Until recently, the institutional characteristics of journalism had encouraged researchers to study how professional journalists and legacy media institutions covered specific topics and terri- tories (Bernstein et al. 1990; Bendix and Liebler 1999; Avraham 2000; Gasher and Klein 2008; Gasher and Klein 2008, 2009;Howe2009; Gutsche 2014a, 2014b). But besides the media—as creators and disseminators of news—a number of other social actors also assign meanings and values to territories. One of the main ways this happens is when certain territories are portrayed as problematic—as being vessels for a set of social pro- blems (Blumer 1971; Schneider 1985; Ettema and Peer 1996; Best 2007). This paper’s approach goes beyond the study of how a social group is represented by the media and it tries to set up a methodology to understand (1) how the media constructs images of cities or neighborhoods by associating these places to a set of social problems and (2) how such images could potentially influence perceptions and various spatial decisions made by communities (Avraham 2000). To understand these processes, we turn to news geography with the conviction that news mapping can afford us a better understanding of news (Gasher and Klein 2008; Lindg- ren and Wong 2012). As rich as news mapping can be, however, it has so far only been done in a transversal way with a focus on how few news producers cover any given territory in depth. Following both arguments aforementioned—(1) news is the result of a diversity of online producers and (2) news content turns spaces into places—we crafted a methodo- Downloaded by [Victor Wiard] at 03:47 09 January 2018 logical pilot study inspired on the concepts of news place-naming and place-problematiz- ing to discuss place-representation by news producers. It is based on the analysis of news items from 152 producers identified through online monitoring. This approach seemed par- ticularly pertinent to study an object whose collective definition as a territory is itself con- troversial: Brussels. Brussels is fertile ground for our research since it is an aggregate of places (with hundreds of neighborhoods) and territories—an ensemble of 19 municipalities with their local governments, at once a city and region, as well as the self-proclaimed capital of Europe. Following this reasoning, this paper sets out to explore how online media describes the “region” of Brussels and its 19 municipalities. In so doing, the study takes place within the context of the ongoing academic discussion regarding the place of local news in an increasingly digital, networked and globalized context. Finally, as a pilot study testing a methodology to approach the diversity of news producers online, we assess whether it is a viable approach. BAD NEIGHBORHOODS IN A GOOD CITY? 3 Literature Review Space, Place and Representation in Local News To understand how online news producers assign specific meanings to Brussels and its municipalities, it seems fitting to approach these political territories with geographical notions. For a long time now, human and social geographers have problematized the many social and political components of spatial entities (Lefebvre 1974; Tuan 1979; Cress- well 1996; Di Méo 1999, 2008; Jones et al. 2015). They usually distinguish two main types of interrelated and co-dependent entities: space and place (Tuan 1979). Space is generally understood as something that can be located—that relates to physics and geometry because
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