Sahana Udupa, “Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics” (Cambridge UP, 2015)

What role does Bangalore’s private news culture play in shaping the southern Indian metropolis’ ongoing urban transformation? Sahana Udupa‘s new book Making News in Global India: Media, Publics, Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2015) answers this question through a fascinating and fine grained ethnography of the city’s bi-lingual news media. Exploring differences amongst the English language and local language press, class-based civic activism, novelties in news room practices and layers of journalistic identities the book shows the ways in which a certain type of aspiration that has come to characterize some news outlets, conflicts and contends with the visibility of local urban cultures and the struggle for dominance amongst different actors in the news field.