In what must be surely the fastest turnaround from final manuscript submission to publication I will ever experience, a paper of mine has just been published in JOMEC Journal. Originally a book chapter in a unpublished edited book, this paper has now been significantly revised before as well as after peer review, just in time for the June 2013 issue. The paper is freely available at the link just provided: another big plus with this journal is that it’s open access, making this article a ‘Gold Route’ open access publication without paying a publisher a penny. Many thanks to JOMEC Journal for their professionalism and quick turnaround. The abstract is below.

Circulating cities of difference: assembling geographical imaginations of Toronto’s diversity in the newsroom

Abstract:
This paper concerns the relationship between media and the framing of ethnic diversity as a central condition of contemporary urban life. Rather than focusing on how media represent ethnic diversity, this paper relies on a conceptualisation of news media as cultural forms which become entangled in the various interpretive communities partaking in their circulation. Examining the practical milieus of news editors at the Toronto Star, the paper focuses on a case example of editors’ work on a special section related to Toronto’s projected ethnic diversity in 2017. The main argument of the paper is that the relationships between sites of mainstream media production and urban publics are more complex and contradictory – as well as more banal and everyday – than conventionally acknowledged. This suggests we take seriously the ongoing importance of increasingly fragile, unified mediated public forums through which different groups might encounter one another in and across contemporary cities.