Location, Location, Location: Citizen-Fan Journalists’ “Set Reporting” and Info-War in the Digital Age

Recent work on popular media cultures has emphasised the growth in “film-induced tourism”, both on-location and off-location — that is, at theme parks (see Beeton, 2005). However, such work has typically focused on practices of fan pilgrimage, which follow on from the broadcast and consumption of specific media texts (see Hills, 2002). This approach is resolutely “post-textual” in terms of seeking to consider how some audiences re-enact favoured media images (see Kim, 2010), and thus it misses the significance of pre-textual audience engagements with popular media (Gray, 2010: 120), such as the advice for fans given above. In the case of pre-textual interactions with media space, fans enjoy following details of filming in miniscule detail, as well as staking out and visiting locations while filming is in progress, along with following reports and images of this filming disseminated online via social media and forums. Fans of popular media are thus no longer just reactive to official news of film and television franchises. Instead,