Linguistic Capital and the Production of Vernacular Digital Journalism: The Case of Malayalam-Language News

Abstract

The transition of vernacular language newspapers from print to digital formats has been largely overlooked in journalism studies. I suggest that studying this transition can help us better understand, from a production standpoint, the prevalence of both print and digital newspapers in the Global South. This article examines vernacular news production in the Global South by focusing on Malayala Manorama (MM), one of the most widely circulated Malayalam-language newspapers in both India and the Middle East. Using Bourdieu’s notion of “linguistic capital,” I unravel the technological and cultural challenges that MM faced during its transition from print to digital formats and the ways in which MM journalists addressed those impediments to produce online news in a multilingual media environment. Through multi-sited fieldwork, I argue that the journalistic accumulation and circulation of linguistic capital—alongside cultural, symbolic, and economic capitals—were crucial in overcoming the challenges of vernacular news production in the digital era. MM journalists developed language-specific fixes that were just as important as the broader technological advancements in the digital industry. Theoretically, this article demonstrates that the differentiation between cultural and linguistic capitals and the latter’s deployment in journalism studies can enhance our understanding of vernacular news production.