INTRODUCTION

This book offers three opportunities. The first – Journalism and journalists – is to provide an update on the subject and its practitioners today. The second opportunity – Journalism and location – is that of obtaining an overview of journalism in different cultures, in this case the USA, India, the Arab world, China, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Europe. The perceptive reader will immediately bridle at the idea of a chapter on journalism in Europe without Poland1 or one on Africa without the Maghreb, or of trying to do justice to a region as complicated as Latin America in single chapter, but we hope that the writings themselves will prove that the experiment has value. If nothing else, the combined message is that, despite similarities, there are great differences. The similarities are relatively easy to enumerate, but what is really interesting are the differences, however we account for them, and it is that theme which distinguishes this book.