Symbolizing Place: Journalistic Narratives of the City

As scholarship in a variety of disciplines acknowledges the power of symbolic systems to shape human conception, geographical research has increasingly scrutinized popular culture texts as repositories of spatial understanding. The newspaper particularly repays such study because it is tied functionally and symbolically to conceptions of place and describes characteristic inflections of the narrative of city life. Strategies in news narrative typically mediate between the newspaper's economic self-interest in regional development and the journalistic ideal of public service. A rhetorical analysis of stories announcing a redevelopment project demonstrates how conventions of journalistic representation can work subtly to present, yet subordinate, critical views of urban redevelopment.