The roles of communication technology in obtaining news: Staying close to distant sources

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 85, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 625-646

  Reich, Zvi ^a  

^a BEN GURION UNIVERSITY OF THE NEGEV   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

INFORMATION; INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY; INTERNET;

EID: 59149088691     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900808500309     Document Type: Article

References (152)

1. Pablo J. Boczkowski, "The Development and Use of Online Newspapers: What Research Tells Us and What We Might Want to Know," in Handbook of New Media, ed. Leah A. Lievrouw and Sonia Livingstone (London: Sage, 2002), 278;
2. Simon Cottle and Mark Ashton, "From BBC Newsroom to BBC Newscentre: On Changing Technology and Journalist Practices," Convergence 5 (3, 1999): 22;
3. Michael Schudson, "The Sociology of News Production Revisited (Again)," in Mass Media and Society, ed. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch (London: Arnold, 2000), 182.
4. John V. Pavlik, New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1998), 2.
5. 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), 123-39;
6. Tom Koch, Journalism for the 21st Century (New York: Praeger, 1991);
7. Mats Ekström, "Epistemologies of TV Journalism: A Theoretical Framework," Journalism 3 (3, 2002): 259-82.
8. Charles R. Bantz, Suzanne McCorkle, and Roberta C. Baade, "The News Factory," Communication Research 7 (January 1980): 45-68;
9. José Alberto García Avilés, Bienvenido León, Karen Sanders, and Jackie Harrison, "Journalists at Digital Television Newsrooms in Britain and Spain: Workflow and Multi-skilling in a Competitive Environment," Journalism Studies 5 (February 2004): 87-100;
10. Emma Hemmingway, Into the Newsroom: Exploring the Digital Production of Regional Television News (London: Routledge, 2008).
11. Despite the primacy of national security issues on the Israeli news agenda and ongoing military censorship, freedom of the press is very high, thanks to the Supreme Court's continuing restrictions on the jurisdiction of censorship, limiting it to a dwindling circle of genuinely sensitive issues. Other characteristics of the Israeli press: small-scale media map; concentration of ownership and geographic dispersal of newsrooms (at the time of this study, there were only three general Hebrew dailies, located in a radius of less than two miles from one another, serving a population of about six million people); hasty transition to a multichannel system and technological literacy of both journalists and the general public, with one of the highest uptakes in the world of broadband technology. The Israeli media map is in constant transition from a Western-European social-democratic orientation to an American neo-liberal orientation of market forces and the culture of ratings, adopting America n formats, journalistic norms, work patterns, writing styles, and marketing methods. See Dan Caspi and Yehiel Limor, The In/Outsiders: The Media in Israel (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 1999), 170-72, 197;
12. Dan Caspi, "The Endless Process of Media Institutionalization in Israel," in Israel as a Modern Society, ed. Uri Cohen, Eliezer Ben-Refael, Avi Bareli, and Ephraim Yaar (Sede-Boker: Ben-Gurion Research Institute, 2006), 241-81 (in Hebrew);
13. Freedom of the Press, 2004, 114, available at http:// www.freedomhouse.org/pfs2004/pfs2004.pdf;
14. Noa Pereg, "The Israeli is the Second in the World in Hours Per Month of Internet Browsing," Globes (December 5, 2007), available at http://www.globes.co.il/serve/globes /docview.asp?did=1000282800.
15. See Bruce Garrison, "How Newspaper Reporters Use the Web to Gather News," Newspaper Research Journal 24 (summer 2003): 63;
16. Pavlik New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives, 2.
17. Frank Russell, "You Had to Be There (and They Weren't): The Problem with Reporter Reconstructions," Journal of Mass Media Ethics 14 (3, 1999): 146-58;
18. 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.
19. Herbert Strentz, News Reporters and News Sources (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989), 59.
20. Christopher, "Technology and Journalism in the Electronic Newsroom," 123-39;
21. Tom Koch, Journalism for the 21st Century (New York: Praeger, 1991).
22. Strentz, News Reporters and News Sources, 59.
23. Zvi Reich, "New Technologies, Old Practices: The Conservative Revolution in Communication between Reporters and News Sources in the Israeli Press," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 82 (autumn 2005): 552-570.
24. For more about the limits of e-mail interviews, see Jerry Lanson and Barbara Croll Fought, News in a New Century (Thousand Oaks CA: Pine Forge Press, 1999), 83.
25. Harold Adams Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991);
26. Edwin T. Layton, "Technology as Knowledge," Technology and Culture 15 (January 1974): 31-41;
27. Marshal McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: Signet Books, 1964).
28. E.g., Jo Bardoel, "Beyond Journalism: A Profession Between Information Society and Civil Society," European Journal of Communication (September 11, 1996): 283-302;
29. John V. Pavlik, "The Impact of Technology on Journalism," Journalism Studies 1 (May 2000): 229.
30. E.g. Herbert J. Gans, Democracy and the News (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 43;
31. Leon V. Sigal, Reporters and Officials (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1973), 192;
32. 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;
33. Anthony Smith, Goodbye Gutenberg: The Newspaper Revolution of the 1980s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 203.
34. 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;
35. Michael Murrie, "Communication Technology and the Correspondent," in Live from the Trenches, ed. Joe S. Foote (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998), 94-104.
36. Studies focusing on a limited subset of technologies include García Avilés and Bienvenido, "Journalistic Practice in Digital Television Newsroom: The Case of Spain's Tele 5 and Antena 3," 355-71;
37. García Avilés et al., "Journalists at Digital Television Newsrooms in Britain and Spain: Workflow and Multi-skilling in a Competitive Environment," 87-100;
38. Don Middleberg and Steve Ross, The Seventh Annual Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media in the Wired World (New York: Middleberg Associates, 2000), available at http://www.uni vie.ac.at/stalzer/Online-Mafo/Medien/ Seventh_Annual_Media_in_the_Wir.pdf. Examples of single technology studies: Bruce Garrison, "Newspaper Journalists Use E-mail to Gather News," Newspaper Research Journal 25 (spring 2004): 58-69;
39. Kim Hart, "Inbox Journalism," American Journalism Review 27 (December 2005/January 2006): 58-63, available at http:/ /www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=4005;
40. Helena Sousa, "Information Technologies, Social Change and the Future: The Case of Online Journalism in Portugal," European Journal of Communication 21 (3, 2006): 373-87;
41. Andreas Veglis, George Tsourvakas, Andreas Pomportsis, and Avraam Evagelia, "Adoption of Information Technology by Greek Journalists: a Case Study," First Monday 10 (August 2005), available at http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue10_8/veglis/index.html.
42. David Hachigian and Kirk Hallahan, "Perceptions of Public Relations Web Sites by Computer Industry Journalists," Public Relations Review 29 (March 2003): 43-62;
43. Jae-Hwa Shin and Glen T. Cameron, "The Interplay of Professional and Cultural Factors in the Online Source-Reporter Relationship," Journalism Studies 4 (May 2003): 253-72;
44. Lynne M. Sallot and Elizabeth A. Johnson, "To Contact... or Not? Investigating Journalists' Assessments of Public Relations Subsidies and Contact Preferences," Public Relations Review 32 (2006): 83-86.
45. Reich, "New Technologies, Old Practices: The Conservative Revolution in Communication between Reporters and News Sources in the Israeli Press."
46. Stephen Quinn, Convergent Journalism (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 33.
47. Garrison, "How Newspaper Reporters Use the Web to Gather News," 62;
48. Garrison, "Newspaper Journalists Use E-mail to Gather News," 58-69;
49. Scott R. Maier, "Digital Diffusion in Newsrooms: The Uneven Advance of Computer-Assisted Reporting," Newspaper Research Journal 21 (spring 2000): 95-110;
50. Middleberg and Ross, The Seventh Annual Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media in the Wired World.
51. Koch, Journalism for the 21st Century;
52. Gans, Democracy and the News.
53. Thorsten Quandt, Martin Löffelholz, David Weaver, Thomas Hanitzsch, and Klaus-Dieter Altmeppen, "American and German Online Journalists at the Beginning of the 21st Century," Journalism Studies 7 (2, 2006): 171.
54. Mark Deuze, "What is Multimedia Journalism?" Journalism Studies 5 (2, 2004): 144.
55. John H. McManus, Market Driven Journalism: Let Citizen Beware? (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1994).
56. Pavlik, New Media Technology: Cultural and Commercial Perspectives, 2;
57. Middleberg and Ross, The Seventh Annual Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media in the Wired World;
58. Garrison, "How Newspaper Reporters Use the Web to Gather News," 63.
59. Hachigian and Hallahan, "Perceptions of Public Relations Web Sites by Computer Industry Journalists," 43-62;
60. Quandt et al., "American and German Online Journalists at the Beginning of the 21st Century" 171;
61. Barrie Gunter, News and the Net (Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum, 2003).
62. Reich, "New Technologies, Old Practices: The Conservative Revolution in Communication between Reporters and News Sources in the Israeli Press," 552-70;
63. Zvi Reich, "The Process Model of News Initiative: Sources Lead First, Reporters Thereafter," Journalism Studies 7 (August 2006): 497-514;
64. Zvi Reich, "The Anatomy of Leaks: Tracing the Path of Unauthorized Disclosure in the Israeli Press," Journalism 9 (August 2008): 555-81.
65. The criteria for choosing the organizations were as follows: (1) National news organizations; (2) Leaders of their medium in terms of readership or audience; (3) Employers of dedicated reporting staffs. Beat selection criteria: (1) Mainstream beats in each of the nine news organizations; (2) Output published primarily in news and business sections or editions; (3) Covered bv full-time reporters; (4) Reporters rely primarily on sources rather than on secondary use of mass media (e.g., international news reporters); (5) Reporters publish at least twelve items per month. As most beats are covered by one reporter, revealing selected beats would expose the identity of the reporters interviewed, violating the confidentiality they were promised. The final selection, however, included political, domestic affairs, and business affairs beats proportional to their over-all share of reporting personnel. The market reaches of the specific organizations at the time of research were as follows: Print: Yedioth Aharonoth (40% of readership), Ma'ariv (20%), Haaretz (6%); Online: Ynet (44%), nrg (23%), Haaretz online (12%); Radio: Kol Israel (46%) Galey Zahal (44%) and Channel 10 Radio (unspecified). Globes, 30/10/2006, July 19, 2006; The Marker, August 8, 2006.
66. The Web sites were visited at 6 a.m., 12 noon, 6 p.m., and 12 midnight, following the suggestion of "The State of the News Media" (2006), http://www.stateofthenewsmedia.com/2006/ narrative_online_contentanalysis.asp?cat=2&media=4. The burden of sampling three Web sites, four times a day, over a one-month period was heavy yet bearable by one research assistant, thanks to its focus on a limited number of reporters whose beats were randomly chosen before the sampling period. Three steps were taken to confirm that virtually all relevant items were downloaded and printed: First, during each visit, the Web site was scanned carefully for stories bearing the selected bylines; second, subsections typical of specific writers, such as national news or business news, were visited as well; finally, an active search was conducted daily (during the midnight shift) for each of the sampled reporters using the Web sites' own search engines.
67. D-statistic is calculated as the difference between percentages divided by the pooled estimate of the standard deviation. See Jacob Cohen, "A Power Primer," Psychological Bulletin 112 (1, 1992): 155-59.
68. The number of reporters did not amount to ninety, since ten of the reporters represented both Haaretz and Haaretz Online. As expected, the oldest and the most senior were print journalists whose average age was 39.3, with 16.2 years of journalistic experience. The youngest and least experienced journalists, however, were not Web reporters (35.9 years old, 12.8 years of experience) but radio reporters (33.5 years old, 11.7 years in journalism), thanks to the young cadre of soldier-reporters employed by Galey Zahal during their compulsory service.
69. Most e-mails are source-initiated or PR-initiated; see Garrison, "Newspaper Journalists Use E-mail to Gather News," 58, 62, 67;
70. Shin and Cameron, "The Interplay of Professional and Cultural Factors in the Online Source-Reporter Relationship," 253-72.
71. Hachigian and Hallahan, "Perceptions of Public Relations Web Sites by Computer Industry Journalists";
72. Shin and Cameron, "The Interplay of Professional and Cultural Factors in the Online Source-Reporter Relationship";
73. and Sallot and Johnson, "To Contact... or Not? Investigating Journalists' Assessments of Public Relations Subsidies and Contact Preferences."
74. Lance Bennett and William Serrin, "The Watchdog Role," in Institutions of American Democracy: The Press, ed. Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 183;
75. John V. Pavlik, "The Impact of Technology on Journalism," Journalism Studies 1 (2, 2000): 229;
76. John V. Pavlik, Journalism and New Media (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001): 81.
77. Russell, "You Had to Be There (and They Weren't): The Problem with Reporter Reconstructions";
78. Zelizer, "Where Is the Author in American TV News? On the Construction and Presentation of Proximity, Authorship, and Journalistic Authority."
79. Hachigian and Hallahan, "Perceptions of Public Relations Web Sites by Computer Industry Journalists," 50.
80. Cited by Bennett and Serrin, "The Watchdog Role," 183.
81. Boczkowski, "The Development and Use of Online Newspapers," 270;
82. Pablo J. Boczkowski, Digitizing the News (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005);
83. John Carey and Nancy Hicks Maynard, "The Future of News, The Future of Journalism," in Institutions of American Democracy: The Press, ed. Geneva Overholser and Kathleen Hall Jamieson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);
84. Mark Deuze and Christina Dimoudi, "Online Journalists in the Netherlands: Towards a Profile of a New Profession," Journalism 3 (1, 2002): 96-97.
85. Timothy E. Cook, Governing with the News (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), 78.
86. Richard V. Ericson, Patricia M. Baranek, and Janet B. L. Chan, Negotiating Control: A Study of News Sources (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989);
87. Pierre Bourdieu, On Television (London: Pluto Press, 1998);
88. Cook, Governing with the News, 81;
89. Kevin Kawamoto, ed., Digital Journalism (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 25;
90. David Croteau and William Hoynes, The Business of Media (London: Pine Forge Press, 2000), 18.
91. Garrison, "How Newspaper Reporters Use the Web to Gather News," 71;
92. García Avilés and Bienvenido, "Journalistic Practice in Digital Television Newsroom: The Case of Spain's Tele 5 and Antena 3," 365;
93. Kevin Kawamoto, "Conclusion" in Digital Journalism, ed. Kevin Kawamoto (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 167.
94. Data concerning Web use in 2001 was published in Reich, "New Technologies, Old Practices: The Conservative Revolution in Communication between Reporters and News Sources in the Israeli Press," 559-60.
95. Israelis browse the Web about 1.5 hours per working day; Pereg, "The Israeli is the Second in the World in Hours of Per Month of Internet Browsing."
96. Middleberg and Ross, The Seventh Annual Middleberg/Ross Survey of Media in the Wired World. See also Garrison, "Newspaper Journalists Use E-mail to Gather News," 58-69;
97. Hart, "Inbox Journalism," 58-63;
98. Lanson and Fought, News in a New Century, 83.
99. Martha Stone, cited by Quinn, Convergent Journalism, 145.
100. Andrea Bustos, Practices and Routines of Chilean Journalists (M.A. thesis project, to be submitted at Department of Communication Studies, Ben Gurion University, autumn 2008).
101. E.g., Sousa, "Information Technologies, Social Change and the Future: The Case of Online Journalism in Portugal";
102. Veglis et al., "Adoption of Information Technology by Greek Journalists";
103. Maier, "Digital Diffusion in Newsrooms,";
104. Scott R. Maier and Twange Kasoma, "Information as Good as Its Source: An Examination of Source Diversity and Accuracy at Nine Daily U.S. Newspapers" (paper presented to Journalism Studies Division, International Communication Association, New York, 2005).
105. George Sylvie and Patricia D. Witherspoon, Time, Change and the American Newspaper (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002).
106. Gunter, News and the Net, 101.
107. Leopoldina Fortunati, "Mediatization of the Net and of The Mass Media," Gazette 67 (1, 2005): 27-44;
108. Garrison, "How Newspaper Reporters Use the Web to Gather News," 65, 72;
109. Gunter, News and the Net, 95,101;
110. Maier, "Digital Diffusion in Newsrooms," Pavlik, Journalism and New Media, 61, 63, 81.
111. Reich, "The Process Model of News Initiative: Sources Lead First, Reporters Thereafter," 497-514.
112. Gunter, News and the Net, 100;
113. Sylvie and Witherspoon, Time, Change and the American Newspaper, 142.
114. Fortunati, "Mediatization of the Net and of The Mass Media," 38;
115. García Avilés and Bienvenido, "Journalistic Practice in Digital Television Newsroom: The Case of Spain's Tele 5 and Antena 3," 362;
116. Garrison, "How Newspaper Reporters Use the Web to Gather News," 65;
117. Garrison, "Newspaper Journalists Use E-mail to Gather News," 59.
118. Bryan Pfaffenberger, cited by Gunter, News and the Net, 100.
119. Quinn, Convergent Journalism, 181.
120. Gunter, News and the Net, 99;
121. Sylvie and Witherspoon, Time, Change and the American Newspaper, 142;
122. Quandt et al., "American and German Online Journalists at the Beginning of the 21st Century," 178;
123. Pavlik, New Media Technology, 230.
124. McLuhan, Understanding Media, 214;
125. Tony Harcup, Journalism: Principles and Practice (London, Sage 2004), 98;
126. Gaye Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, (New York: The Free Press, 1978), 65;
127. Jeremy Tunstall, Journalists at Work (London: Constable, 1971), 127.
128. Roger Fidler, Mediamorphosis (Pine Forge Press, 1997), 32-34;
129. Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (London: Methuen, 1982).
130. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 104, 107.
131. Starkey Duncan Jr., "Interaction, Face-to-Face," in Folklore, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments, ed. Richard Bauman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 21.
132. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 40, 42, 75, 101.
133. Ong, Orality and Literacy, 101.
134. Duncan, "Interaction, Face-to-Face," 22.
135. Allan Bell The Language of News Media (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1991);
136. Oscar. H. Gandy, Jr., Beyond Agenda Setting (Norwood: Albex Publishing, 1982).
137. Tuchman, Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality, 46;
138. Daniel Berkowitz and James TerKeurst, "Community as Interpretive Community: Rethinking the Journalist-Source Relationship," Journal of Communication 49 (summer 1999): 125-36.
139. Cook, Governing with the News, 114;
140. Sigal, Reporters and Officials, 189.
141. Michael Schudson, "Question Authority: A History of the News Interview," The Power of News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 72-93.
142. Steve Barnett and Ivor Gaber, Westminster Tales (London: Continuum, 2001), 131.
143. Tunstall, Journalists at Work, 209.
144. Reich, "The Anatomy of Leaks: Tracing the Paths of Unauthorized Disclosure in the Israeli Press";
145. Silvio Waisbord, Watchdog Journalism in South America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 103.
146. Daniel Ellsberg, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (New York: Viking, 2002), 402.
147. Simon Cottle, "Rethinking News Access," Journalism Studies 1 (August 2000): 427-48;
148. Philip Schlesinger, "Rethinking the Sociology of Journalism: Source Strategies and the Limit of Media-Centrism," in Public Communication: The New Imperatives, ed. Marjorie Ferguson (London: Sage, 1990), 61-83.
149. James A. Anderson and Geoffrey Baym, "Philosophies and Philosophic Issues in Communication, 1995-2004," Journal of Communication 54 (4, 2004): 604.
150. Harcup, Journalism: Principles and Practice, 97, 103;
151. Bell, The Language of News Media, 207 09.
152. Daniel Golden, cited by Hart, "Inbox Journalism."