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International non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are known to employ freelancers to produce multimedia and to pitch it for them to mainstream news outlets. So it seems odd that research about the blurring of news organizations and INGOs has been largely focused upon the practices of full-time staff at these kinds of organizations. To help fill this lacuna, this article constructs a model capable of interrogating the multiple forms of structure and agency at the heart of such forms of freelancing by blending Critical Realist theory with work by Bourdieu. It then uses this model to analyse semi-structured interviews with six freelancers who were involved in the production of media items about sub-Saharan countries. All of them were found to erode the distinction between INGOs and news organizations through different kinds of commissioning and syndication practices. But this article's main critical contribution lies in its efforts to illuminate why freelancers chose to engage in such liminal work; for the legitimating rationales they employed enabled them to avoid the “inter-role conflicts” experienced by freelancers who work for news outlets and commercial public relations organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses two interactions between journalists and their public relations sources captured on video during ethnographic fieldwork in newsrooms in New Zealand. Through analysis of verbal and non-verbal actions, the paper demonstrates the mixture of resentment, distrust and need that characterises journalists' relations with public relations practitioners (PRPs). It highlights journalists' increasing difficulties in accessing information, even in publicly funded organisations, without going through public relations spokespeople. We already know this is problematic for the quality of the news product. However, this research provides new evidence that it may also be problematic at an individual level for journalists and PRPs, requiring them to adopt a working mode of opacity and duplicity in their dealings. The paper provides empirical evidence of the practice of what a PRP told the researcher was “telling the truth to journalists, but telling it rather creatively”, and how it manifests in actual interactions, both written and verbal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]