Photographs of newsrooms: From the printing house to open space offices. Analyzing the transformation of workspaces and information production

Evolving from a small room at the heart of the printing house to a large, mobileopen office, the newsroom is a concept that allows us to contemplate the changesthat have transformed journalism over the past century. This article proposes apreliminary analysis of a corpus of photographs of media newsrooms in France,Canada, and Belgium at various points in history (from the end of the 19th centuryup to today). The analysis of newsroom photographs is necessarily multidimensional.It allows us to conduct a socio-historical study of how workplaces are created andstructured and how information is produced. It paves the way for an analysis of themedia’s modes of representation within the logic of external communication (toestablish and promote its brand image through videos or pictures). It also permitsus to make inferences while analyzing the organizational and managerial aspects of acompany, and reveals the value of examining the objects used by journalists in theirtrade. Our goal is to clarify the various indicators and avenues for research thatemerge from this corpus. This step will allow us to defend a specific approach toanalyzing the material dimension of journalismSCOPUS: ar.j