The relationship between the ownership form of news agencies and their independence has long figured centrally in debates about the quality of news agency operations. Drawing on a discursive institutional framework, this article explores how national news agency executives in Europe perform a narrated role in the discursive construction of their organizations’ internal and external independence. We set out the concept of independence discourse, which we define as the variety of ways in which news agency executives use claims about the economic independence and the internal and external autonomy of their organizational operations. Based on a discourse analysis of elite semi-structured interviews with 20 European news agency executives, we identify three discursive modes for the institutional construction of independence: (1) abnegation, (2) accommodation and (3) affirmation. These discursive modes represent a set of public and private approaches to discursively negotiating the power of both state/government and shareholders/owners. We conclude by arguing for an expanded concept of independence, one which offers an account of the complex array of forces shaping news agency operations today.

This article conceptualises the role of audience agency in the performance of American conservative identities within a hybridised outrage media ecology. Audience agency has been under-theorised in the study of outrage media through an emphasis on outrage as a rhetorical strategy of commercial media institutions. Relatively little has been said about the outrage discourse of audiences. This coincides with a tendency to consider online political talk as transparent and "earnest," thereby failing to recognise the multi-vocality, dynamism, and ambivalence—i.e., performativity—of online user-generated discourse. I argue the concept of recontextualisation offers a means of addressing these shortcomings. I demonstrate this by analysing how the users of the American right-wing partisan media website TheBlaze.com publicly negotiated support for Donald Trump in a below-the-line comment field during the 2016 US presidential election. These processes are situated with respect to the contested, dynamic, and creative construction of partisan identities in the contemporary United States.

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