Brian Ekdale

Associate Professor, Journalism & Mass Communication, University of Iowa

Academic, Blog, Highlights, Publications

New Article: Indonesia’s English-Language Press

Last year John Carpenter, a PhD student in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, asked if I would be interested in working with him on a project about English-language journalists in Indonesia. John had just spent six weeks in Jakarta observing and interviewing journalists and editors at privately owned news organizations that publish in the English language.

John’s interest in English-language journalism in countries where English is not the primary language meshed well with my interest in global imaginaries. The result of our collaboration is an exploration of how English-language journalists conceive of public service when their audience is local, regional and global. The resulting manuscript, “Service at the Intersection of Journalism, Language, and the Global Imaginary,” is available online in Journalism Studies.

Here’s the abstract:

Drawing on interviews with journalists who work in Indonesia’s locally owned-and-operated English-language press (ELP), we argue English’s status as the language of global and regional imaginaries informs how ELP journalists negotiate their understandings of public service. This study contributes to research on the contextual negotiation of professional ideologies of journalism by considering how publication language—here, English in a country where it is a foreign language—shapes the ways journalists conceive service to their various publics.

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