Stringers and the Journalistic Field: Marginalities and Precarious News Labour in Small-town India

This book is one of the first ethnographic works on small-town stringers or informal news workers in Indian journalism. It explores existing practices and cultures in the field of local journalism and the roles and spaces stringers occupy.

The book outlines the caste, gender, class, and region-based biases in the production in Indian-language journalism with a specific focus on stringers working in Telugu dailies in small towns or ‘mofussil’ areas of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, states in south India. Further, it captures their daily work and processes of news production, and precarious lives they often lead while working in small towns or ‘mofussils’. The author, by using Bourdieu’s field theory introduces the journalistic practices of stringers working on the margins and how they negotiate the complex hierarchies that exist within the journalistic field and outside it.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of ethnography, media sociology, journalism and media studies, labour studies and Area studies, especially South Asian studies.