New technologies, old practices: The conservative revolution in communication between reporters and news sources in the Israeli press

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 82, Issue 3, 2005, Pages 552-570

  Reich, Zvi ^a  

^a BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

COMMUNICATION; MEDIA ROLE;

ASIA; EURASIA; ISRAEL; MIDDLE EAST;

EID: 29744469256     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900508200305     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. Michael Schudson, "The Sociology of News Production Revisited (Again)," in Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Arnold, 2000), 182.
2. Charles R. Bantz, Suzanne McCorkle, and Roberta C. Baade, "The News Factory," Communication Research 7 (January 1980): 45-68;
3. Peter Golding and Philip Elliott, Making the News (London: Longman, 1979), 90.
4. Dan Berkowitz, "TV News Sources and News Channels: A Study in Agenda Building," Journalism Quarterly 64 (summer-autumn, 1987): 512.
5. David B. Sachsman, "Public Relations Influence on Coverage of Environment in San Francisco Area," Journalism Quarterly 53 (spring 1976): 54-60.
6. Dan Caspi and Yehiel Limor, The In/Outsiders: The Media in Israel (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999), 172.
7. Freedom of the Press, 2004, 114, available at .
8. Caspi and Limor, The In/Outsiders, 170.
9. Zvi Reich, "Sources Close to the Reporter's Hip: Pagers as an Unwritten Contract between Journalists and News Sources" (paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, New Orleans, 2004).
10. E.g., Jo Bardoel, "Beyond Journalism: A Profession Between Information Society and Civil Society," European Journal of Communication 11 (September 1996): 283-302;
11. John Herbert, Journalism in the Digital Age (Oxford: Focal Press, 2000), 2;
12. Kevin Kawamoto, "Digital Journalism: Emerging Media and the Changing Horizons of Journalism," in Digital Journalism, ed. Kevin Kawamoto (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 1-29;
13. John V. Pavlik, "The Impact of Technology on Journalism," Journalism Studies 1 (May 2000): 229;
14. Stephen Lacy and Todd F. Simon, The Economics and Regulation of United States Newspapers (Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1993), 163.
15. E.g., Pablo J. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004);
16. Jane Delano Brown, Carl R. Bybee, Stanley T. Wearden, Dulcie Murdock Straughan, "Invisible Power: Newspaper News Sources and the Limit of Diversity," Journalism Quarterly 64 (spring 1987): 45-54;
17. Anthony Delano, "No Sign of Better Job: 100 Years of British Journalism," Journalism Studies 1 (May 2000): 261-72;
18. Herbert J. Gans, Democracy and the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43;
19. Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1973), 192;
20. Carol L. Christopher, "Technology and Journalism in the Electronic Newsroom," in The Electronic Grapevine, ed. Diane L. Borden and Harvey Kerric (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998), 131;
21. Anthony Smith, Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 203.
22. E.g., Jose A García Avilés and Bienvenido Leon, "Journalistic Practice in Digital Television Newsroom: The Case of Spain's Tele 5 and Antena 3," Journalism 3 (December 2002): 355-71;
23. Daniel C. Hallin, "Sound Bite News: Television Coverage of Elections, 1968-1988," Journal of Communication 42 (spring 1992): 5-24;
24. Michael Murrie, "Communication Technology and the Correspondent," in Live from the Trenches, ed. Joe S. Foote (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 94-104.
25. Cited by Murrie, "Communication Technology and the Correspondent," 98.
26. Sigal, Reporters and Officials, 192.
27. Rodney Benson, "Bringing the Sociology of Media Back In," Political Communication 21 (July-September 2004): 275-92.
28. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News.
29. John H. McManus, Market Driven Journalism: Let the Citizen Beware? (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994), 88. The third phase, news selection, is not relevant to this study since it only includes published stories which survived selection.
30. Joseph Alsop and Stewart Alsop, The Reporter's Trade (London: Bodley Head, 1958), 5.
31. Mark Fishman, Manufacturing The News (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980), 144;
32. Pavlik, "The Impact of Technology on Journalism," 229;
33. John D. Peters, "Witnessing," Media, Culture, and Society 23 (November 2001): 707-724.
34. Gaye Tuchman, Making News (New York: Free Press, 1978), 6;
35. Dan Berkowitz and James TerKeurst, "Community as Interpretive Community: Rethinking the Journalist-Source Relationship," Journal of Communication 49 (summer 1999): 125-36.
36. Louis Leung and Ran Wei, "More Than Just Talk on the Move: Uses and Gratifications of the Cellular Phone," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77 (summer 2000): 308-320.
37. Leon V. Sigal, "Sources Make the News,"in Reading the News, ed. Robert Karl Manoff and Michael Schudson (NY: Pantheon, 1986), 15.
38. García Avilés and Bienvenido, "Journalistic Practice in Digital Television Newsroom: The Case of Spain's Tele 5 and Antena 3," 365.
39. By the end of the twentieth century, almost half of the American journalists made daily use of the Internet according to one source (Don Middleberg and Steven S. Ross, The Sixth Annual Middleberg and Ross Print Media in Cyberspace [New York: Middleberg Associates, 1999]) cited by Pavlik in "The Impact of Technology on Journalism," 230.
40. Another source estimates that the figure is closer to two-thirds: Bruce Garrison, "Diffusion of Online Information Technologies in Newspaper Newsrooms," Journalism 2 (August 2001): 227.
41. Doug Underwood, When MBA's Rule the Newsroom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 118.
42. Paul Manning, News and News Sources (London: Sage, 2001), 48.
43. Since most beats are covered by one reporter, revealing the beats actually selected would expose the identity of the reporters, violating the confidentiality they were promised. Therefore, the actual list of beats cannot be detailed here.
44. The criteria for choosing the beats were as follows: (1) Mainstream beats which existed in each of the three papers. (2) Their stories are published mainly in the news and the business sections. (3) Covered by full-time reporters, with no secondary domains. (4) Reporters rely mainly on sources rather than on secondary use of mass media (as do international news reporters). (5) Produce at least twelve published items per month. The final beats were chosen according to these criteria and according to considerations of centrality and representativity. In the few cases where at least two reporters covered a beat, the senior or central one was chosen. The geographical beat, which included 12-14 sub-beats according to region, was represented by three reporters from one city of medium size.
45. Ideally, independence between items could only be maintained by sampling one item per reporter. However, during the prior negotiations with the reporters, it was established that a minimum of fifteen items was needed to allay any concern by the reporters that the author would be able to match their descriptions with the items described.
46. Two reporters out of thirty refused to participate and were replaced in one case by a junior reporter of the same beat and in the other by a reporter from a related beat. In four out of 448 items the reporters refused to answer some of the questions.
47. Although freshness was obviously not a material consideration for the 1981 sample, it was for the 2001 sample. Thus, the use of a four-week period has the advantage of recognizing the need for comparability in future research. Its use is likely to be regarded as appropriate for future studies, by this author or others, when the purpose is to make comparisons across cultures (rather than across time).
48. Sigal, Reporters and Officials, 125.
49. Jacob Cohen, "A Power Primer," Psychological Bulletin 112 (1, 1992): 155-59.
50. A "combined" contact contains components of both phases. It contains a discovery component since the reporter knew nothing about the item prior to that contact and since the essence of the item may first appear either at the initiative of the source (e.g., a press release headline) or at that of the reporter, who is trying to judge the news value of an item before going into detail (and continuing with the news gathering). The idea of a double-function contact is seen also in the high involvement of public relations practitioners in these items - 35% of the contacts compared to only 21% in items which began without a "combined" contact (D-statistic=-0.33). This may suggest that the compression of both phases into one transfer of information is a kind of "subsidy," which lowers the journalistic cost of this information.
51. For example, the land-line, telephone, which was a central work tool in the early period, had severe limitations according to interviews with reporters and spokespeople who worked during both periods. The two parties had to be present at the same time at given locations; any deviation led to transmission delays, or even to items being completely lost. Reporters who used to call their sources several times a day to check what had happened since the last call, only managed to minimize the damage [interviews by the author with Zecharia Mizruzky, former spokesperson of Bezeq, the national telecommunications company (12 March 2000);
52. Lieutenant Colonel Ofer Lefler, Israel Defence Forces spokesman (13 February 2000);
53. and the reporters Amnon Barzilay from Ha'aretz (4 July 2002) and Haim Broida from Yedioth Ahronoth (24 May 2002)].
54. Frank Russell, "You Had to Be There (and They Weren't): The Problem with Reporter Reconstructions," Journal of Mass Media Ethics 14 (1999): 146-58;
55. Barbie Zelizer, "Where Is the Author in American TV News? On the Construction and Presentation of Proximity, Authorship, and Journalistic Authority," Semiotica 80 1/2 (1990): 37-48.
56. Everett M. Rogers, Communication Technology - The New Media in Society (New York: Free Press, 1986), 52.
57. Christopher, "Technology and Journalism in the Electronic Newsroom," 124.
58. See note 35.
59. The New York Times Committees Report, 49, available at .
60. Cited by Herbert Strentz, News Reporters and News Sources (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), 59.
61. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1964), 214.
62. Strentz, News Reporters and News Sources, 59.
63. Jeremy Tunstall, Journalists at Work (London: Constable, 1971), 127;
64. Tuchman, Making News, 65.
65. Manning, News and News Sources, 105.
66. Public relations practitioners are the only source whose involvement in an item is highly correlated with textual communication both in the discovery (r = 0.67; p = 0.00) and gathering phases (r = 0.45; p = 0.00). The involvement of other human sources is negatively correlated with the use of textual communication in the discovery (r = -0.47; p = 0.00) and gathering phases (r = -0.41; p = 0.00).
67. Tom Koch, Journalism for the 21st Century: Online Information, Electronic Databases and the News (New York: Praeger, 1991), 91.
68. See note 33.
69. Statistical Yearbook 48 (New York: United Nations, 2004), 122, 123, 126, 127.
70. John V. Pavlik, Journalism and New Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 81.
71. Bruce Garrison, Computer Assisted Reporting (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1995), 5;
72. Pavlik, "The Impact of Technology on Journalism," 232;
73. Middleberg and Ross, 1999, cited by Pavlik, Journalism and New Media, 36;
74. García Avilés and Bienvenido, "Journalistic Practice in Digital Television Newsroom," 362.
75. García Avilés and Bienvenido, "Journalistic Practice in Digital Television Newsroom," 365;
76. Pavlik, Journalism and New Media, 61, 81.
77. The State of the News Media, 2005, available at .
78. Gans, Democracy and the News, 42.
79. Koch, Journalism for the 21st Century, 118.
80. An overwhelming majority of news data is based on human sources: 79% of the news discovery and 86% of the news gathering (the rest includes documents not attributed to a specific person, mass media, Web sites, and direct observations).
81. The reliability of contacts was enhanced after the introduction of portable devices (pagers and especially cellular phones) which - for the first time - allow both parties to establish communication wherever they might go and whenever they might wish.
82. Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001).
83. Pavlik, "The Impact of Technology on Journalism," 230;
84. Manning, News and News Sources, 79.
85. Philip Gaunt, Choosing the News (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990);
86. Thomas E. Patterson, "Political Roles of the Journalist," in The Politics of News, The News of Politics, ed. Doris Graber, Denis McQuail, and Pippa Norris (Washington: CQ Press, 1998), 17-32;
87. David H. Weaver, "Journalists Around the World: Commonalities and Differences," in The Global Journalist, ed. David H. Weaver (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1998), 455.