Between the newsroom and the pub: The mobile phone in the dynamics of everyday mainstream journalism practice in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This article uses an ethnographic case-study approach to investigate the deployment of the mobile phone by Zimbabwean mainstream print journalists in the dynamics of their daily professional routines and practices. The study’s theoretical and conceptual framework draws on social constructivist approaches to technology and the sociology of journalism to provide a direction for conceptualizing the interplay between journalists, their immediate context of practice and the wider socio-political and economic milieu that collectively structure and constrain the appropriation of the mobile phone. The findings suggest that the technology has assumed a taken-for-granted role in the routine operations of journalists and, in particular, that it is redefining traditional newsmaking practices. The article concludes that the cultural and social appropriations of the mobile phone by Zimbabwean mainstream journalists suggest that the technology has acquired new meanings in the social context of its appropriation. Its pervasiveness in everyday life has facilitated the blurring of the boundaries between the work and the private life of journalists.