ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 sees us extend our thinking around other important concepts such as proximity and distance in the context of place-making given their integral relationship to news values and journalism. We contend that existing scholarship on news proximity tends to bypass one of the most important dimensions of them all – proximity to power (both physical and imagined) in changing physical and digital contexts. Here, we pay particular attention to what we term “performative proximity,” which reinforces media power in places of meaning in the digital age. By performative proximity we mean the coming together of powerful elites in physical and digital and virtual space to not only reinforce the significance of an event or issue but to reinforce the legitimacy of those who are “there” – and, in effect, those who are not. In discussing proximity, we also extend upon three other elements – socio-ideological proximity, temporal proximity, and the way audiences perceive journalistic proximity to places.
