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Some theorists argue that the data surrounding the practice of mixed quotation establish that it is not a real form of quotation (and in so doing they present a particular interpretation of (D7) and (D8)). In particular, these theorists argue that quotation marks in mixed quotes can be dropped without a loss of meaning. This chapter examines these data and their various interpretations. It is argued that “impure quotes” do not pose a challenge to a theory of quotation, though they do present a challenge for a theory of the saying relation.

This chapter presents a column published on June 13, 1907, where Dehkhodā introduces another of his specialized types, Meddler, shown here in a first-person composite of the self-interested fixer who, for a consideration, will offer his services to provide a foreigner, the government, or other interested individuals with privileged information or access. His incidental gossip, social contacts, and pious self-justification provide further pretexts for broad social and political satire. The column also includes a piece about an Austrian doctor who invented a steel shield to protect the teeth from falling out, and a reply to a letter dated June 6.

Trumbo’s next important assignment was his most prestigious—adapting Bernard Malamud’s novel The Fixer for Eddie Lewis and John Frankenheimer. Trumbo faced a difficult task, and Malamud did not entirely approve of Trumbo’s approach. The movie was not a box-office success. Nor was Trumbo’s next project—an adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s novel The Horsemen, also for Lewis and Frankenheimer. However, the publication of a selection of Trumbo’s letters, titled Additional Dialogue, received accolades from critics. Trumbo became involved with the black civil rights movement and the anti–Vietnam War movement, but comedian Steve Allen use Trumbo’s political past to blackball him from participating in Tom Bradley’s campaign for mayor of Los Angeles. In February 1970 the Writers Guild of America bestowed on Trumbo the Laurel Award for lifetime achievement. His acceptance speech was highly controversial.

Placing comics journalism in relation to other media such as film, music, and magazines, Jared Gardner analyzes how Sacco manipulates time as both a thematic and a formal device that can pose alternatives to our Western notions of history and synchronicity.

This chapter analyzes how aspiring migrants navigate the world of document fixers, loan sharks, travel agents, lawyers, and state bureaucrats—including consular staff and U.S. immigration officials—in preparation for international migration. It presents accounts of the institutions, technologies, social and cultural forms, and relationships that shape and constrain migrants' efforts. Migrants of provincial and lower-class backgrounds often extend themselves through objects, technologies, and embodied skills to realize their migration projects; they do so with guidance from tramitadores (document fixers) and other service providers in Peru's growing migration industry. The chapter also discusses the complex politics of race and class that underline the historically unequal access to mobility in Peru, and in turn intersects with U.S. racialization of Latin American migrants that begins with their first encounters with U.S. consular staff in Lima.

This chapter spotlights civil collective initiatives which aim to enhance the liveability of urban neighbourhoods. People in the Netherlands are becoming more involved than ever in shaping their own environments and have entered what some researchers have called a ‘third generation of citizen participation'. This third generation is characterised by new sophistication in community organisation, and by a focus on quality of life and urban liveability challenges. It recognises individual inter-dependency and collective independency as conditions for resolving locally-defined challenges. There is an entrepreneurial quality to this third generation, with citizens becoming everyday fixers of local problems. Examined are 14 based projects located in Dutch New Towns, which aimed - through active citizenship - to address issues of community capacity, housing quality, and the quality of the public realm. It shows the origins of active citizenship, but focuses also on the compromises that a shift into planning may require as citizens are drawn into relationships with non-community actors: the Fourth way of governance.

This chapter analyzes the concept of “fixer” and “floater” in classifying countries during the gold standard period. These terms, though archaic, have not ceased to be relevant, and are seen still to draw similar patterns in a small number of countries. The chapter mentions the research of Obstfeld and Rogoff, “The Mirage of Fixed Exchange Rates”, and cites the existence of a significant number of stable, meaningful exchange rate regimes that go against recent research. The chapter delves deeper into the history of fixed, floating and flipping exchange rate regimes in relation to the number of exchange rate spells and questions how these spells have survived, as well as how the reformation of pegs affect stability.

This chapter describes the beginnings of a lucrative trade in Thai sticks on Pattaya Beach, Thailand. The surfer scammers there found a clientele among the hippies and American expats, who shared little more than the fact that the Vietnam War was the defining event of their lives. In the midst of this the scammers took advantage of local norms and customs to build a more hospitable area for these customers in which to facilitate trade of Thai sticks. Among the key players in such ventures were the “fixers”—middlemen who scored deals and won the trust of foreigners, creating that vital link between the local suppliers and their foreign clients.

Newark’s uprising set in motion a cycle of protest and persuasion that broke through some impasses. But the city’s decline and officials’ proclivity for reneging on agreements required strategies of the sort fixers like Gustav Heninburg provided. Heningburg joined with established and emerging black leaders, such as poet and black nationalist Amiri Baraka, to organize African Americans and Puerto Ricans, register voters, and elect the city’s first black mayor, Kenneth GIbson. He helmed the Greater Newark Urban Coalition (GNUC) through which corporate, union, and civil rights leaders urgently sought to relieve the urban crisis. Around Heningburg, people with conflicting ideologies briefly mobilized to advance black self-determination: the black cultural nationalism advocated by Baraka; a petit bourgeois conservatism favored by the Nixon administration; an understanding of the ghetto as an internal colony rooted in Marxist and Pan-African thought; and a radical black self-help ethos. Heningburg worked with corporations, public officials, and unions to achieve unprecedented integration agreements in the building trades and rebut federal efforts to dilute them. The support of his corporate allies waned as they sought to restore their influence. But Heningburg consistently advocated for black power in the form of parallel institutions, black capitalism, unionization, and electoral challenges.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the devolutionary politics of the New Federalism chipped away at the New Deal order, shifting funds from federal urban programs and undermining any attempt to sustain a coherent urban policy. At the same time, CDCs proliferated across the urban United States, straddling the line between public and private, left and right. Often, they acted as a parallel—and sometimes competing—arm of municipal government. In so doing, CDCs have institutionalized some aspects of the civil rights and antipoverty movements while defanging others. Though CDCs are relegated to the footnotes of historical scholarship, I argue that their victories, defeats, and compromises are keys to understanding the complex legacy of the 1960s and what was saved and discarded as neoliberal political transformations unfolded. The unfinished struggle of Newark residents to shape development, to build and prosper from the economic engines of their city, is briefly illustrated in the history of the Newark Collaboration Group, an effort funded by foundations and initially supported by private and public sector alike to involve communities in shaping Newark’s redevelopment over the 1980s.

This chapter examines two novels by Filipino American writers: Brian Ascalon Roley’s American Son and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao. These novels document the lives of Filipino immigrants facing prejudice, racism, and alienation. They also reveal a number of common negative effects of globalization on young Filipino Americans: the overvalorization of and desire for wealth, First World products, and material goods; overdetermined and unattainable ideals based on Hollywood models of masculinity and beauty; and emotional and psychic transnationalism. The 1.5-generation children who grow up in these situations often resort to violence, fraud, and trickery in order to validate their sense of self, to gain acceptance into the dominant culture, and to obtain what they perceive to be the rewards of those who pursue the American dream.

The introduction to this book begins with a detailed description of what news fixers are and how their work has evolved over time. Since the book focuses primarily on news fixing in the 21st century, the introduction historicizes the figure of the fixer, illuminating the fixer’s connections to the interpreters or guides hired by explorers, missionaries, and anthropologists of past centuries. This brief but necessary historicization is firmly rooted within the critical framework of postcolonial studies, a theoretical lens that helps me explain the deeply entrenched tradition of colonial dependence on regionally specific knowledge—knowledge that unfortunately did not prevent the misrepresentation and exploitation of the people living in these other places. The introduction then moves to an examination of the news fixers’ current role within the larger ecosystem of international reporting. Building off the rich literature found in the field of journalism studies, which examines the various elements of the labor of foreign correspondence, the introduction will show that a space must be made within journalism scholarship for the study of news fixers. What is more, the field of global journalism ethics also has much to gain from a closer examination of these locally based media employees.

This chapter focuses specifically on the labor of conceptualizing the story. When news fixers describe this element of their work, they tend to emphasize three things: (1) their role in anticipating and successfully getting the story that the journalist originally wants, (2) their role in suggesting new story ideas to journalists who either do not know which events to cover or whose story ideas have not panned out, and (3) their role in educating visiting journalists on the political, social, and historical background knowledge that they sometimes very sorely lack. While some might argue that this element of news fixers’ labor points to their dubious efforts at slanting the story in a “biased” direction, the chapter argues that news fixers’ narratives about conceptualizing the story instead illuminate the fact that there is rarely one, immutable story to be found. From fixers’ perspectives, the journalistic story is an effort at lending coherence to a much more complex reality, one defined by competing angles and experiences. The chapter also shows that without the news fixers’ more extensive background knowledge, visiting journalists run the risk of grossly misrepresenting the people and places being covered.

This chapter examines the labor of navigating the logistics. A central tenet of this chapter is the news fixers’ suggestion that logistical labor is skilled labor; this type of work requires creativity and cultural savvy. The work of navigating the logistics requires the fixer to guide journalists through challenging sociopolitical environments, helping clients to meet their deadlines while also keeping the local authorities satisfied that they are following regional laws. Sometimes visiting journalists and documentarians try to enter a country without the proper permits for their equipment or without the proper work visa. In these cases, news fixers try to find creative ways to smooth things over and gain access for their clients, despite the fact that their clients have not respected the laws of the spaces they are trying to enter. Time and space are revealed to be relative, depending on who has the most power in a given situation. In the process of helping their clients to navigate the logistics, then, news fixers are ultimately helping them to navigate competing cultural notions of time and space.

This chapter investigates the labor of networking with sources. News fixers indicate that their networks of potential interviewees are perhaps the most lucrative thing they can offer a visiting reporter. Because of this, they spend years cultivating trust with a variety of contacts, some of whom are dangerous people to displease. Parachute journalists might try to buy fixers’ local contacts, showing little regard for the years of emotional labor that led the fixers to build trust with people who might pose a threat to both the journalist and the fixer. Once the journalist arrives and the news fixer draws upon his or her contact list, another problem emerges: the fixer must ensure that the client does not upset the valuable contact by showing cultural ignorance or insensitivity. This can become a complicated dance of playing to both sides, something that many of my interviewees say is necessary in order to keep the contact for future jobs, while also helping the journalist get the interviews needed to tell the story.

This chapter looks at the labor of interpreting unfamiliar languages. Fixers place great emphasis on their role as translators, but they echo much of the recent scholarship on translation by indicating that the task of translating and interpreting is not a passive process. The very act of standing at the crossroads between two (or more) languages places news fixers in the role of cultural mediator, demanding that they live simultaneously within more than one linguistic expression of culture. Though some news fixers certainly conceptualize translation and interpreting as the process of building a bridge, they also suggest that the act of translation is fraught with moments of disconnection and miscommunication. Sometimes, the fixer might choose to translate a journalist’s question rather differently than the journalist intended, for instance, in order to assuage the anxiety of a source or an authority figure. Sometimes the fixer might leave some of the source’s response out of the translation, or paraphrase instead of translating word for word. Throughout the entire process of interpreting unfamiliar languages, the news fixer makes active decisions about what to say and how to say it. These decisions are typically guided by the fixer’s own understanding of both the source’s cultural identification, and the journalist’s. From news fixers’ perspectives, interpreting is much more than translating words—it is also a process of actively and creatively interpreting “culture,” however complex culture may be.

The chapter explores the labor of safeguarding the journalist. Fixers represent themselves as playing a vital role in keeping foreign reporters out of harm’s way, most especially when these reporters’ status as racial, national, and even gendered Others might put them at risk. Sometimes the fixer must speak on behalf of the journalist, smoothing things over with a suspicious police officer or an angry crowd. Other times, the fixer might give the journalist advice on how to safely navigate the complex sociocultural landscape, imploring female journalists to dress conservatively in certain areas, and recommending certain neighborhoods that no foreign reporter should visit alone. For these reasons, news outlets tend to conceptualize fixers as a key element of the security measures they must take to keep their journalists safe in the field. Yet, the chapter closes by showing the flip side of this labor—the possibility that the news fixers themselves will be injured or killed. Notwithstanding this danger, news organizations rarely provide their fixers with safety equipment, hazardous environment training, or medical insurance.

The conclusion to this book examines the labor of relinquishing the story. Despite their active role in conceptualizing the story at its beginning and assisting with the construction of the story at every turn, fixers say that they are denied ownership of the final product in any significant sense. Sometimes, the journalist or news organization will invoke the very fact that the fixer is getting paid in order to justify the separation of the fixer from the final product of his or her labor. Some of my interviewees suggest that this especially seems to happen when a fixer takes issue with the journalist’s interpretation of what is “true” or what is most newsworthy. Once the story is finished, news fixers rarely receive substantial credit for their role in reporting the story. Some of my interviewees say that this does not bother them, while others assert that the inability to get a byline hurts their chances for upward mobility in the international reporting industries. Still, very few news fixers appear to feel comfortable with actively contesting this problem. Thus, the conclusion of this book argues that the labor of relinquishing the story is also the moment in which the fixer—sometimes willingly and sometimes unwillingly—acquiesces to his or her own erasure from the practice of international news reporting.