Picturing the World's News: News Photography, Cultural Production, Thomson Reuters and the International Process of News Making

In this research the production process of news pictures at Thomson Reuters international multimedia news agency was 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 – was followed. The way they were used, chosen, sold and processed as Reuters products was explored at every stage. Based on an extensive fieldwork that included participant observation in the field, the Jerusalem bureau and the global pictures desk in Israel, Singapore and the UK, in-depth interviews with significant Reuters pictures professionals and observations conducted at the Guardian’s pictures desk in London, the findings in this project pointed to a wide cultural production infrastructure hidden from – and yet also nurtured by – the consumer's eye. From the camera's lens to the daily work of the photographer, the editor, the producer, the chief of the department, administrators, graphic designers, sales and marketing, the international news agency, the different news outlets, different media and other institutions and their audiences, who are all responsible for the representation of one reality and the production of another. Focusing an ethnographic eye on production processes of news pictures at Thomson Reuters, and drawing from cultural studies and approaches of the political economy of communication, this was an attempt to uncover what news is in its photographic form, and the ways that such unique process of production illustrates the overall production of newsworthiness.