Earlier last year I made mention of an article slowly making its way to publication. I was promised, in language seeming to implicitly recognize the general malaise of the approaching REF (thankfully behind us all in the UK … until 2020 which is already being talking about), that it would be out in the final issue of 2013. Well, not quite, but I’m happy to report that ‘The architectures of media power: editing, the newsroom and urban public space’ is now finally available in really, really, proper ‘printed’ form, including proper pagination and all the rest. One silver-lining in the long delay (I think it got lost somewhere in the worlds of typesetting and queuing) is that it’s been bunched up nicely in an issue with a few other articles interested in urban public space, all from rather different points of view. Anyway, I’m pasting (again) the full abstract details below, but you can access the article itself at the link above. If you don’t have subscriber access and are interested, I can provide copies if you email me.

The Architectures of Media Power: Editing, the Newsroom, and Urban Public Space
Scott Rodgers s.rodgers@bbk.ac.uk
Birkbeck, University of London, London, UK

Abstract
This article considers the relation of the newsroom and the city as a lens into the more general relation of production spaces and mediated publics. Leading theoretically from Lee and LiPuma’s notion of “cultures of circulation,” and drawing on an ethnography of the Toronto Star, the article focuses on how media forms circulate and are enacted through particular practices and material settings. With its attention to the urban milieus and orientations of media organizations, this article exhibits both affinities with and also differences to current interests in the urban architectures of media, which describe and theorize how media get “built into” the urban experience more generally. In looking at editing practices situated in the newsroom, an emphasis is placed on the phenomenological appearance of media forms both as objects for material assembly as well as more abstracted subjects of reflexivity, anticipation, and purposiveness. Although this is explored with detailed attention to the settings of the newsroom and the city, the article seeks to also provide insight into the more general question of how publicness is materially shaped and sited