Analyzing Spatialization in Newspapers’ Production: A Case Study of Guadalajara’s Daily Press

Abstract

From 1990 to 2010, Mexican newspapers’ ownership structure changed because of globalization, digitization, and financial crises. This process coincided with the technological convergence of newsrooms. Thus, this case study employs the concept of spatialization to investigate how digital technology was used to concentrate resources and thus, to concentrate Guadalajara’s (Mexico) newspapers industry. Drawing on semistructured interviews with media workers, this article suggests that the use of digital technology allowed 1) smaller newsrooms with fewer workers, 2) the creation of new advertisement markets, 3) the development of virtual newsrooms structured by journalists working in real time in different cities, and 4) the transformation of a distribution system that in the past was mainly supported by hawkers. This research couples the concepts of spatialization and value chains, and it explains that media create, modify, and eliminate social spaces to improve the control of time and space in their production. An outcome of these processes (i.e., spatialization) is economic concentration.