Biography
Lindsay Palmer is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at UW-Madison. She studies global media from a qualitative perspective, especially focusing on the cultural labor of conflictcorrespondents in the digital age. Though Palmer looks at numerous questions inspired by conflict reporting in the 21st century—questions of translation, representation, and political domination, just to name a few—she is particularly interested in the economic and political structures that inform news organizations’ policies on their correspondents’ safety in the field. Palmer has recently published a book on this topic, entitled Becoming the Story: War Correspondents after 9/11 (University of Illinois Press, 2018).
Palmer is also interested in the local news employees who assist the foreign reporters visiting their nations. The translators, stringers, and “fixers” who guide the foreign press through cities like Beirut or Kiev are crucial to the practice of war reporting; yet, far too often, the journalists who depend upon “fixers” the most end up disavowing or erasing their contributions. Because of this, Palmer is writing another book (Oxford University Press) that focuses solely on the cultural labor of local “fixers,” examining their crucial participation in informing transnational publics about conflict in the present moment.