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Based on interviews with 215 conflict journalists and 315 reconstructed articles, this article explores the way conflict coverage comes into being. The study used retrospective reconstruction to investigate the genesis of news through the journalists’ recollections of decisions and considerations made during the process of news production. The analysis specifically focused on story ideation, story narration and story presentation in the context of coverage about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the civil war in Syria, as well as about Kosovo, Macedonia, Burundi and the DRC. The study found that, when invited to speak about their jobs, many conflict journalists cling to a professional narrative suggesting that they are reporting ‘just the facts’ and that it is the ‘reality’ that tells the story. The story reconstructions demonstrate, however, that journalists deliver an intellectual reconstruction of ‘reality’ by actualizing the factual evidence that speaks best to the central narrative of a story and that best ‘exemplifies’ what they think has ‘really’ happened. Furthermore, journalists’ habitus of routinely digesting social media and leading news outlets explains why conflict coverage is often so self-referential.

Post-conflict societies are subject to other societal forces than non-conflict or conflict societies. As a result, news production might differ between these three societal forms. In conflict, news is influenced either by the affiliation with a conflict party or at gunpoint. In non-conflict, it is shaped by manifold influences that are mostly connected to journalistic routines. In addition, post-conflict news production can be characterized by a high relevance of the conflict context and an emerging importance of routines. This article analyzes how journalists perceive self-censorship as an influence on post-conflict news production. It conceptualizes self-censorship as an analytic category and introduces different forms of self-censorship. Finally, the authors demonstrate the relevance of self-censorship as a force in post-conflict news production with the help of qualitative interviews conducted with journalists in Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia.

When the new country of Kosovo declared its independence in 2008 it received extensive, but fleeting, international news coverage. This study seeks to provide insight into how an international news event was orchestrated by participants and how news coverage was planned and implemented by international media. We do so by investigating factors initiating, enabling, shaping, and limiting the global news coverage of this story. Particular attention is paid to the close relationship between local ‘fixers’ and media representatives, which is instrumental in most international news coverage, but which has received little scholarly examination; and to the influential role of the UK-based international television news agencies.

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