The Importance of Place

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this article examines how changes in investigative journalism have taken place in two Chinese provincial newspapers—the Dahe Daily and the Southern Metropolis Daily—in the period from 1997 to 2006 and what such changes mean for investigative journalism in the country as a whole. Investigative journalism started almost simultaneously in the two newspapers in the late 1990s but developed along different trajectories in the following 10 years. The differences are the result of interaction between investigative journalists, news organizations, and the varying local and national social contexts in which investigative journalism takes place. The practice of investigative journalism benefits from the institutionalized choice of journalistic values in a given social context. Chinese journalism within news organizations reflexively looks for an appropriate position in the social space of the locale where it operates and seeks to construct a proper social identity to join in the production of culture in that space. These dynamics have generated various levels of journalistic autonomy in different places across China.