ABSTRACT
In the following six chapters we will journey into the news network to observe and experience the complicated world of news practice, using Actor Network Theory (ANT) as our exploratory tool. As the analysis of ANT in the previous chapter hinted, we should not be expecting to stumble across astonishing or hitherto unknown discoveries, but to open our eyes instead to the ordinary, mundane and everyday routines that occur all around us. You may ask how this journey can be worthwhile. How will it lead us anywhere new or show us anything we might consider significant, noteworthy or illuminating? How can such a tedious journey, rooted as it is in the dull soil of the everyday, reveal anything remarkable or miraculous? This is where we must take that leap of faith mentioned at the beginning of the book and take our eyes off those vast media landscapes of the global, the economic or the political, to turn the handle of a smaller door into what may seem at first to be the more limited world of regional news production. Once we adjust our eyes, and begin to properly observe and to understand this world, getting to grips with the complex entanglements of all the humans, machines, objects, routines, constructions and performances that define news work, we will find our vision will become more clearly focused, more illuminating and, crucially, more helpful to us when it’s time to leave that newsroom to travel through those grander landscapes once again.
