I’ve just learned that, surprisingly rapidly, my article ‘The journalistic field and the city: some practical and organizational tales about the Toronto Star’s New Deal for Cities’ has been published in the urban sociology journal City and Community. When I say rapidly, I mean from the point of acceptance. Otherwise, it has been a long and heavily mutating journey of a paper. Not to mention that I just presented a paper at the Urban Affairs Conference yesterday – which I will repeat at the Association of American Geographers next week – which more or less seeks to get beyond the focus this paper has on Bourdieu by reconnecting field theory with its (arguable) phenomenological roots. That said, I certainly stand by the arguments, and I think the ethnographic story is worth telling. The abstract is below.

This article presents Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory as a way to approach the under-theorized relationship of journalism and the city. The concept of field provides a way to conceive of the conditions of possibility for what journalists do in, through, and in relation to the urban. Bringing this concept together with practice theory and organizational sociology, I examine four practical and organizational tales – two narratives and two episodes – related to the Toronto Star‘s New Deal for Cities campaign. These tales demonstrate how journalistic practices are not only performed in and distinctively oriented towards urban space, but also are at the same time regulated by, oriented towards, and positioned in the journalistic field. I highlight how journalistic practices take place in multiple organizational sites, through changing regimes of managerial authority and legitimacy, and with shifting positioning in and orientations to the journalistic field and other social fields of the city.