Imagining world citizenship in the networked newspaper: La Nación reports the assassination at Sarajevo, 1914

Abstract

'This paper analyzes La Nación's reporting of the assassination of Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in the week following the event. Analysis identifies the narrative components to these assassination stories, including geographical imaginaries and the places and networks of news production. Particular attention is paid to the mediatized ritual of mourning and succession that takes place in the capital cities with which La Nación's Buenos Aires readers are networked. Analysis is facilitated by some comparison with the coverage of the same event in The Los Angeles Times and The New Zealand Herald (Auckland). La Nación shared copy and sources with these and other newspapers, and printed similar stories about the assassination, but it cultivated its own local readership and its own ideas of citizenship in the wider world. Each editor imprinted his readers as moral citizens of the world, authorizing them to participate in the events as mourners, activists and compassionate observers, but also preconditioning the ways they can imagine assassination and the interactions of the diplomatic world. Analysis reveals expected roles in international affairs for citizens of world cities, which are conveyed as moral lessons and tales, wrapped in imagined communities stretching across the globe, but actualized locally.' (author's abstract)