Jonathan Ilan

• PhD
• Senior Lecturer at Bar Ilan University

This paper addresses the ways new entrants and mobile technologies have become significant challenges to the old news' legitimacy models by focusing on pseudo-professional WhatsApp news groups from a journalistic authority standpoint. Based on a comparative textual analysis of how a breaking news event was handled by a leading Israeli pseudo-profes...

This chapter tackles news production from the less common vantage point of glocalization. It illustrates the ways glocalization performs as an established business strategy that is adopted by international, global, national and local news organizations alike so as to increase audiences and profits. Yet, at the same time, glocalization is also made...

This study investigates the interconnections between digital live broadcasting technologies and participating strangers in the news context, from a sociotechnical perspective. This is done by focusing on the LiveU Solo device, designed for live broadcasting by produsers on social media. Based on a thematic analysis of users’ comments on three leadi...

This paper sets out to provide fresh insight into the case of liveness in news media by exploring a particular live-news technology – LiveU’s digital, cellular-based, live broadcast technology, and its implementation in professional TV news broadcasting. Based on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with nine TV news and LiveU’s professionals...

This paper sets out to investigate the interconnections between digital live broadcast technologies and the engagement of news media produsers – the “prodnewsers”, from a socio-technical perspective. This is done by focusing on the particular case of a widely used digital live-news technology that has been designed by LiveU, a leading private compa...

This chapter tackles news production from the less common vantage point of glocalization. It illustrates the ways glocalization performs as an established business strategy that is adopted by international, global, national and local news organizations alike so as to increase audiences and profits. Yet, at the same time, glocalization is also made...

This paper focuses on news photos’ glocal production mechanisms as they are produced in Israel by the three largest international news agencies (Thomson Reuters, AP and AFP). Designed to make locally manufactured news photos internationally appealing, these mechanisms are required by the agencies if they are to survive in a complex business environ...

This paper follows the news routine of the daily evening news broadcasts of the two Israeli commercial TV channels. It is about a very particular and significant moment in national TV news – the making and gatekeeping process of the national TV news filler, also known by the Israeli news people as the shelf item. Based on a thematic analysis of in-...

How are events turned into news pictures that define them for the audience? How do events become commodified into pictures that both capture them and reiterate the values of the agencies that sell them? This book looks at every stage of the production of news photographs as they move to and from the ground and are sold around the world. Based on ex...

The complex relations between words and images are debated in various disciplines and have been in a variety of modes a thorny issue for centuries. Words are constantly used to represent or embody images (conceptualized as ekphrasis) and vice versa. At the same time, however, words are also considered not sufficient to represent the visual sign, wh...

This article is about the unique word–image relations as these appear in international news production. This is achieved by analysing the labour of a particular team – the keyword team – in the news picture production routine at the powerful Thomson Reuters international news agency. By analysing the daily work of keyworders at Thomson Reuters, I e...

What makes death-related news events internationally appealing? How is the visual coverage of grief tailored for the needs of the international market? And how are the mechanisms for such coverage operated in the field by international news agencies’ photographers? In this article, I conduct an interpretive analysis of the funeral of an Israeli off...

In this paper I explore the process of access as it was gained, and sometimes denied, during an extensive ethnographic research made on a surprisingly overlooked strand in news production—the international production processes of news pictures. Through an interpretive analysis, I demonstrate the various access challenges “second-wave” news ethnogra...

This article explores intertextuality and the way it connects to international news organizations' production routines as complex moments and sites of conflict. I demonstrate the unique connection by analyzing a specific event covered by an Israeli Reuters photographer, in which a suicide bomber killed an Israeli officer in an attack near the city...

Reuters established a picture service after its competitors. So why did it enter the picture market when it did? What advantage did late entry give it? How did this new technologically driven business model based on pictures offer the key bridge to the contemporary multimedia company Reuters is today? In this article, the story of the Reuters pictu...

In this research the production process of news pictures at Thomson Reuters international multimedia news agency is examined along its ‘local’ and ‘international’ key moments and sites, and the career of Reuters photographs - from the moment they are conceived as ideas to their purchase - is followed and explored at the ways that at every stage the...