News production theory and practice

Abstract

This paper considers notions of agency, interaction and power in business news journalism. In the first part, we present a bird’s eye view of news access theory as it is reflected in selected sociological and anthropological literature on the ethnography of news production. Next, we show how these theoretical notions can be applied to the study of press releases and particularly to the linguistic pragmatic analysis of the specific social and textual practices that surround their transformation into news reports. Drawing on selected fieldwork data collected at the business desk of a major Flemish quality newspaper, we present an innovative methodology combining newsroom ethnography and computer-assisted writing process analysis which documents how a reporter discovers a story, introduces it into the newsroom, writes and reflects on it. In doing so, we put the individual journalist’s writing practices center stage, zoom in on the specific ways in which he interacts with sources and conceptualize power in terms of his dependence on press releases. Following Beeman & Peterson (2001), we argue in favor of a view of journalism as ‘interpretive practice’ and of news production as a process of entextualization involving multiple actors who struggle over authority, ownership and control.

Elimination of Ideas and Professional Socialisation

“…This is part of a recent change in research focus towards discursive practices taking place in the news production process (Catenaccio et al, 2010;Clayman and Reisner, 1998;Cotter, 2010;Jacobs et al, 2008;Perrin, 2006Perrin, , 2010Peterson, 2001Peterson, , 2003Van Hout and Jacobs, 2008;Van Hout and Van Praet, 2011).…”

“…These newsroom meetings provide a forum for introducing, reviewing, negotiating, selecting, following up on and assigning ideas for news stories for the next day's paper (Clayman and Reisner, 1998;Cotter, 2010;Van Hout and Jacobs, 2008). Thus, the newsroom meeting is a setting for decision-making leading to inclusion and exclusion of ideas for new news stories and thereby it performs a gate-keeping function (Golding and Elliott, 1979).…”

Civil Society Organizations at the Gates? A Gatekeeping Study of News Making Efforts by NGOs and Government Institutions

“…These consist not only of press releases but also include personal relationships and other more subtle contacts between the two parties. As PR professionals want to present their information subsidies as original journalistic content that serves the public interest instead of a form of free advertising in favor of specific private interests, we can state that source efforts are more successful when information subsidies are presented as the result of independent journalistic news gathering and production (Davies 2008; Davis 2000; Van Hout and Jacobs 2008). Reich (2010), for instance, found that PR practitioners are identified as information sources in no more than 11 percent of the observed cases as their presence in the news is mostly covered in what he calls a “smokescreen of anonymity” (p. 811).…”

Natural selection: Empiricist discourse in the talk of broadcast journalists

“…This level of detail can show the construction of the story both in the writing but in the handling of the social situations in the newsroom. Van Hout and Jacobs also utilise key stroke technology to look at how a story is identified and developed as well as participant observation and interviews -following Peterson's (2001) idea of news, moving away from structures to a more contingent, 'interpretive practice' (Van Hout and Jacobs, 2008). Peterson himself attempts to capture a different area of discourse -that of spoken contact with sources.…”