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Reliance on evidence is highly desired in disciplines such as science and law. However, the extent to which daily reporters use it to corroborate or refute sources’ say-so is disputed. To explore how evidence is built into stories in ways that are not entirely obvious from the manifest content, we studied the involvement of evidence in a sample of stories, published by leading print and online Israeli news outlets, using reconstruction interviews with the reporters who authored them. Findings indicate that reliance on evidence is an established news reporting routine found in 42 percent of the items. It is used significantly more often under epistemically-challenging circumstances (conflicts over facts, risky publications and unscheduled events) that attract extra reporting efforts (more sources per item, more verifications and longer reporting hours). To systematize reliance on evidence – as other disciplines strive to – news reporting must move further in their evidentiary genealogy, developing a unified system of guidelines on how all types of evidence should be admitted, evaluated and implemented.

This article presents for the first time longitudinal evidence according to which the role of digital news sources has grown dramatically since 2006. The study includes reconstructions of 1,594 new...

This study exposes a unique model of journalism – “obsessive-activist” reporting. Motivated by a strong sense of justice and a passion to make a significant change, these journalists promote their ...

The article offers a new theoretical model that conceptualizes the “exotic” expertise of journalists and other knowledge-brokers who specialize in particular domains (e.g., teachers, librarians, analysts). The model adapts theories from sociology, pedagogy and philosophy and juxtaposes them against the insights of 14 editors-in-chief from leading Israeli media, in order to validate, refine and illustrate the theoretical generalizations. According to the suggested model, specialized knowledge brokers develop a unique type of expertise that can be modeled across four distinct dimensions: The manifestation of expertise (doing/talking), the mechanism of expertise (interplay between journalistic and domain knowledge), the socio-epistemic position (outsiders/insiders) and the density of expertise (homogenous versus heterogeneous knowledge). Understanding journalists’ expertise is crucial due to the overwhelming assault on experts in “post truth” societies; their role as mega brokers of expert knowledge from all disciplines (outside one’s own expertise) and the ongoing scholarly dispute on the nature of expertise.

This paper summarizes almost two decades of applying the newsmaking reconstruction method for studying numerous aspects of news processes. The suggested methodology can overcome the shortcomings of...

This study uses the case study of journalists to explore the socio-cognitive nature of interpersonal trust in growingly deceptive ecosystems. Journalists are ideal test subjects to explore these issues as professional trust allocators, who receive immediate feedback on right and wrong trust decisions. The study differentiates, for the first time, between source and message credibility evaluations, based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods. Findings show that journalists can distinguish source and message credibility. However, in practice they rely on source evaluations as an “autopilot” default mode, shifting gears to observations of source and message credibility in epistemically complex cases. The proportion between both is close to Pareto distribution. This extreme division challenges both inductive and mixed inference theories of epistemic trust and suggests revisiting the “typification” doctrine of newswork. Data partially support the hegemony and “epistemic injustice” theory, showing that traditional credibility criteria might trigger the exclusion of nontraditional voices.

The media’s capacity to maintain its role as an institution for public knowledge is growingly dependent on its capacity to verify information effectively, especially in times of growing mis/dis and...

Disagreements over facts, in which news sources are leading journalists in opposite directions, are an ultimate test of journalists’ knowledge, forcing them to develop their own understanding of the actual state of affairs. This study focuses on how reporters think, act, and establish knowledge during the coverage of day-to-day disagreements – contrary to former studies, which focused on large-scale scientific and political controversies based on content analysis that narrowed their exposure to the epistemic realities of disagreements. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative reconstruction interviews we show that rather than eliciting an ‘epistemic paralysis’, as widely expected in the literature, disagreements attract significantly greater knowledge-acquisition energy. Findings support the problem-centered approach of epistemology and pragmatics that highlight the complexities of disagreements, rather than the adjudication-centered approach of journalism studies, which push for more journalistic ‘bottom lines’. Maximizing adjudication seems too ambitious and unrealistic for the time frame of daily reporting and the mixed epistemic standards seen in this study.

Journalism and media studies lack robust theoretical concepts for studying journalistic knowledge generation. More specifically, conceptual challenges attend the emergence of big data and algorithmic sources of journalistic knowledge. A family of frameworks apt to this challenge is provided by “social epistemology”: a young philosophical field which regards society’s participation in knowledge generation as inevitable. Social epistemology offers the best of both worlds for journalists and media scholars: a thorough familiarity with biases and failures of obtaining knowledge, and a strong orientation toward best practices in the realm of knowledge-acquisition and truth-seeking. This article articulates the lessons of social epistemology for two central nodes of knowledge-acquisition in contemporary journalism: human-mediated knowledge and technology-mediated knowledge.

This article explores how leading Israeli news organizations evaluate the performance of their reporters in an era when evaluations are becoming more intensive and challenging, addressing new measures, pressures, and narrower margins of error concerning editorial employment. Data are based on in-depth interviews with 13 current and former editors-in-chief – the ultimate decision-makers on these matters. Findings indicate that evaluation is mostly impressionistic, informal, and aversive toward the uses of quantitative indicators. These tendencies are anchored in a deep belief that evaluating reporters is an ‘art’ more than a ‘science’. Editors’ evaluations are prone to huge blind spots, ignoring most reporters, who neither excel nor fail on a daily basis, overlooking audiences’ input, and reveal lack of awareness of the need to use evaluations as a public signaling system of quality in journalism.

This article summarizes a longitudinal study on the role of technology in obtaining the information behind print and online news in Israel, across 15 years. Rather than taking the benefits of innovation for granted, knowledge acquisition technologies should be evaluated according to their ‘epistemic bandwidth’, involving the scope of knowledge-seeking opportunities they afford, the convenience of challenging this information, and its verifiability via the same channel. Hence, innovative technologies are very likely to have broader bandwidth when bypassing human agents. However, when human sources are concerned, traditional channels, like face-to-face and telephone, have broader bandwidth. Findings show that telephone is losing its historical dominance and face-to-face is declining in favour of emails and messaging. Even though textualization may afford greater accuracy and less deniability, and emancipate journalists from functioning as ‘oral relays’ of sources, it provides them with less space to interrogate their sources and confront them with interview techniques.

A growing series of news platforms such as live blogging, tweeting, and push notifications are struggling with the extreme pressure of immediate reporting. The current study explores which strategies of knowledge acquisition and knowledge presentation journalists who operate immediate channels are using to address the mounting pressures and enhanced risk of error. It focuses on online news flashes that at least in the Israeli case enable systematic comparison of four types of output: routine and crisis news flashes and routine and crisis final items that follow them. Findings show that news flash editors develop special practices to acquire and present knowledge – the most prominent being minimization of knowledge claims. However, significantly higher use of modality, evidentiality, and source responses (measures for minimizing journalists’ knowledge claims) was found only in crisis flashes. This may suggest that journalists find themselves outside their epistemic comfort zone only under the convergence of crisis and immediacy. According to ‘inductive error’ theory, the studied websites act as responsible epistemic actors, who are so concerned about ‘false-positive’ errors (untrue publications) that they do not hesitate to make ‘false-negative’ ones (delaying publication, minimizing knowledge claims, and sharing them with third parties).

This study explores the potential of an online platform that encourages journalists to post the documents behind their news stories to help restore the deteriorating public trust in news media. Based on content analysis of 200 news items and 315 accompanying documents posted on DocumentCloud, findings indicate that contrary to journalists’ traditional reluctance to rely on documents, the platform succeeds in boosting massive use of documents, both by mainstream and alternative journalists. Findings show that documents serve mainly to support factual claims (in 96 percent of items) and enhance the transparency of news processes, allowing audiences’ unmediated access to raw materials, and greater capacity to evaluate information independently. However, there are no apparent signs that journalists verified the content of the document. The article suggests that DocumentCloud is a unique example of a technology that may succeed where the former technology that promised to serve as a journalistic reference syst...

In the age of spirited debates about the mediating role of technologies, the other side of the coin is the state of direct experience in contemporary news production, that is, cases in which news reporters still rely on traditional channels such as “legwork,” “firsthand witnessing,” or “shoe-leather reporting.” The present study is a systematic attempt to identify journalists’ reasons for engaging in legwork, by recreating item by item the work processes and reasoning behind hundreds of individual news reports produced in the digital age, across Israeli print, television, radio, and online news outlets ( N = 859). Insofar as legwork can serve as a proxy for painstaking journalism, journalists’ decisions make some difference in determining if more or less legwork will ensue. The data avail an opportunity to explore scholarly musings about journalists’ motivations behind legwork: be they knowledge related, medium related, or event related. We find support for all three possibilities and discuss the implications of these findings.

In order to gain an understanding of journalists’ conceptions of what being factual means, the present work supplements the existing insights of journalism studies and the sociology of knowledge and philosophy with data about journalists’ beliefs regarding the importance of detached observation and reporting things as they are, spanning 62 countries (N = 18,248). In essence, our goal is to contribute to a future theoretical account of why journalists possess the beliefs that they do vis-a-vis truth-seeking and knowledge-acquisition. Data point to a significant relationship between reporters’ level of freedom and their conceptions of knowledge and reality. We discuss the implications of these findings for the debate about the possibilities of universality and context-dependence of journalistic fact-finding.

The broadening reliance on algorithms to generate news automatically, referred to as “automated journalism” or “robot journalism”, has significant practical, sociopolitical, psychological, legal and occupational implications for news organizations, journalists and their audiences. One of its most controversial yet unexplored aspects is the algorithmic authorship. This paper integrates a multidisciplinary theoretical framework of algorithmic creativity, bylines and full disclosure policies, legal views on computer-generated works, and an empirical study of attribution regimes in pioneering organizations that produce journalistic content automatically. Fieldwork included quantitative content analysis of automated stories on 12 websites and interviews with key figures from seven of the organizations that agreed to be interviewed, despite the general reluctance of news organizations to be identified with such an endeavor. The study detects major discrepancies between the perceptions of authorship and creditin...

This paper examines the anatomy of leaking in the age of megaleaks based on a series of reconstruction interviews with 108 Israeli reporters, who recreated a sample of leaked versus non-leaked items (N = 845). Data show that leaking remains a journalistic routine, encompassing one in six items; however, they cease to be the sole game of senior sources, involving substantially more non-seniors. Despite new technologies and the mounting number of channels that enable their exposure, leaks remain an oral practice, exchanged mainly over the telephone. On the journalists’ end, there is little change: leaks are the prerogative of more senior and experienced reporters in print and television news; they are still accompanied by more sources, more cross-checking and more consultation with editors than regular items. These findings concur with theories that perceive the relationship between megaleaks and traditional leaks as co-existing rather than disruptive.

Journalists apparently maneuver between their inability to validate every single bit of information and the ramifications of publishing unverified reports. This study is the first attempt to uncover and characterize the reasoning which underlies the journalistic journey from skepticism to knowledge. We draw on the philosophical field of the ‘epistemology of testimony’ and analyze a robust data set. Data consist of detailed cross-verification measures – a reification of journalistic skepticism – underlying a large sample of individual news items in Israeli print, radio, online, and television news ( N = 847), following a reconstruction of work processes. Far from being passive recipients of second-hand information, we theorize that reporters make systematic use of ‘evidence of (sources’) evidence’ – a common but previously unarticulated evidence type.

This paper suggests that news media remain distinct despite increasingly converging news environments. Print, online, radio and television constitute not only unique packing and distribution houses of similarly obtained raw materials, as suggested by the generic approach, but also unique manufacturing houses of news, as suggested by the particularist approach. The study compares for the first time the news practices across all four media in national leading Israeli news organizations, based on face-to-face reconstruction interviews, during which a sample of 108 reporters recreated how they obtained each of their randomly sampled, recently published items (N = 859). Medium differences were not only statistically significant but also cut across all studied aspects. Patterns of reporting were much less meticulous and more source-dependent in the immediate media (online and radio) compared to daily media (print and television). Contrary to its infamous reputation, the most complex and rich reporting patterns ...

Contrary to the scholarly literature frequently associating digitization with external threats to professional photojournalists, this study focuses on internal factors: the new routines and practices of digital photojournalism, embedding them in the broader context of growing threats to cultural industries and labor markets. Using a longitudinal perspective, and based on in-depth interviews with 15 Israeli photojournalists with experience of both the chemical and digital eras, we suggest that digitization has had much wider ripples than just accelerating the speed and efficiency in which news photos are taken, transmitted, selected, manipulated, stored, and retrieved. Although not “causing” the crisis in the employment and work conditions of professional photojournalists, the implementation of digitization created a negative synergy between their old and new weaknesses. Further new routines may help restore the supremacy of professional photographers if they succeed in emphasizing their reskilling and upskilling enabled by new technology.

The article summarizes three consecutive studies (2001, 2006, 2011) in which national Israeli press reporters detailed how they obtained random samples of their recently published items ( N = 1003): first, in order to explore the public interest in whether the standards of news production are deteriorating, improving or staying put; second, to indicate whether journalists adjust to the transforming news ecosystem; and third, to resolve the theoretical dilemma regarding the openness of news practices to change. While showing a general trend of conservatism, data indicate some statistically significant changes across time, not always in the expected directions. Reporters rely more often on ordinary citizens (who remain a marginal source), and public relations practitioners intervene more broadly in their items. They not only question their sources’ credibility more often, but also rely on slightly more sources per item and more cross-checking, mainly thanks to older contacts rather than to new voices.

For the first time, this paper studies the evolution of photojournalists' bylines compared to reporters' bylines, which proved a sensitive barometer of longitudinal changes in reporters' status, professionalism, creativity and authorship. Based on a sample of 8800 photographs and news items published across the twentieth century in five quality national dailies: New York Times, The Times of London, Le Figaro, Irish Times and Ha'aretz, this paper shows that photojournalists were discriminated against substantially, consistently and internationally throughout the entire century, lagging not only behind reporters, but also behind the growing centrality of their own photographs. This paper suggests that attribution of photojournalists was hindered by the perception of photography as an objective reproduction of reality that has a weaker claim to attribution; by publishers being attributed of photographic authorship; by the efforts of textual journalists to preserve their superior jurisdiction over news report...

The present study is the first systematic attempt to examine the role of time constraints in journalists' daily routines and practices, at the level of individual news items. Long-standing concerns about journalism's “stopwatch culture” and the negative impact of time pressures on newswork have been exacerbated in the digital age by growing demands for multi-platform technological proficiency, resulting in “hamsterization” of journalistic work. Through the step-by-step reconstruction of work processes underlying over a thousand discrete news items (N = 1023), this study traces statistical correlations between the amount of time at the reporters' disposal and the extent and complexity of journalistic work, across Israeli television, radio, print and online news outlets, outlining the implications of three temporal segments (pre-assignment, work duration, filing-to-publication) for all four media types. Consistent with the received wisdom among scholars we found, inter alia, that in cases of time shortage, ...

The degree to which journalists realize their most basic societal role and provide fact-based accounts has been a point of contestation between several camps. While adherents to the notion of the social construction of reality have infused scholarly discourse with far-reaching doubts about journalists' ability to report facts, emphasizing the arbitrariness of their practices, pragmatic theorists of knowledge and realists, a minority among journalism scholars, have distinguished between practices more and less conducive to the goal of truth. The current paper presents findings from an exploratory study conducted in Israel, in which news-gathering practices are directly observed at controversy-laden press conferences. This arena avails a thorough observation of journalist–source exchanges, without breaching the principle of source confidentiality. The practices observed are juxtaposed against the news products, alongside reporters' own comments on their work and reasoning. We suggest that a pragmatic concep...

Based on measurements across the past decade, this paper challenges common wisdom about new technologies’ transformative impact on news reporting. The telephone still reigns as queen of the news production battlefield, while use of the Internet and social media as news sources remains marginal. In face-to-face reconstruction interviews, news reporters at three leading national Israeli dailies detailed reporting of recently published items. Findings conform to the Compulsion to Proximity theory, in which technological impact on professional and lay actors is restrained by the need to maintain richer interactions based on copresence.

Credit attribution for journalists represents a crucial development in journalism, with numerous organizational, legal, political and literary implications. This article explores the rise of bylines and authorship in the French press during the last 250 years, as an alternative to the Anglo-American model, on which studies have focused. Findings show that bylines not only emerged much earlier in France but also represent different driving forces, functions and dynamics. While the Anglo-American rise of bylines reflected an occupational and organizational phenomenon, in which bylines were considered professional rewards, in the French case, the evolution of bylines was dependent on exogenous factors, mostly political forces that tried to discipline adversarial writers. Thus, in contrast with the quasi-linear progress of Anglo-American bylines, the French case is characterized by ebbs and flows, due to the continuous power struggle between the emerging journalistic field and the literary and political fields.

This study focuses on the performance of female and male reporters in various news processes for which little systematic research has been accomplished. It is based primarily on a series of reconstruction interviews with 60 Israeli reporters in parallel beats and on the ways in which they obtained material for a sample of their recently published items (N=494). Findings challenge the accepted theoretical wisdom which suggests that male and female reporters obtain news differently. Regrettably, female reporters do not diversify the overwhelmingly restricted and male-hegemonic source pool. Female journalists show some greater journalistic initiative and greater time pressures. Gender discrimination migrated to less observable arenas: female reporters experience more editorial involvement in their news work and a greater news beat overload. Together with reduced emphasis on exclusivity and newsroom presence, these factors endanger the status that female journalists achieved in a long and exhausting struggle.

Journalists' ability to capture and deliver factual information is central to their sense of professionalism and to their societal and democratic functions. The need to understand journalists' dealings with facts becomes especially pronounced in an age when news organizations face an economic crisis and journalism's exclusive jurisdiction over the supply of news information is challenged by new and old forces. This study—part of the “Worlds of Journalism” research project—attempts to analyze fact-related beliefs among 1800 journalists from 18 different countries, and test their associations with a wealth of individual, cultural and organizational variables. The study draws on a rich reservoir of data from diverse regimes, institutional and national backgrounds, types of news organizations, ownership and media, as well as different genders, years of journalism experience, education and seniority. Our research appears to be well placed to evaluate journalists' degree of awareness to the challenges of realit...

This article seeks to map systematically predictors of journalists' perceived professional autonomy. On the basis of survey responses of 1,800 journalists from 18 countries, the study tests the extent to which journalists with different backgrounds and jobs, who work for different media and organizations, under different kinds of ownerships and pressures, in democratic and nondemocratic regimes, can perform their roles as society's main providers of information. We demonstrate that predictors of professional autonomy are twofold: comprising journalists' perceived influences on news work, and objective limits of autonomy that exist beyond journalists' perceptions. The latter reside on 3 levels: the individual journalist level, the organizational level, and the societal level. Journalists' subjective perceptions of political, organizational, procedural, professional, and reference group influences proved to be strongest predictors of professional autonomy. Of the hypothesized objective determinants of journ...

This article offers a theoretical framework for understanding journalistic expertise, based on a revision of Collins and Evans' model. While their model maintains that a small elite of experienced and diligent journalists can become “interactional experts” in the respective specializations of their news sources, the current paper suggests that experienced journalists develop different degrees of bipolar “interactional expertise,” specializing in interactions with their sources on one hand and audiences on the other. The audience pole not only limits their expertise and fits it to the constraints of the news environment but also drives and legitimizes their focus on information that is simple and quick to obtain and convey and is ostensibly interesting and important for their audiences.

One of the questions dominating discourse on the changing face of the news industry and the future of journalism concerns the extent to which professional news reporters may be replaced by a series of new human and technological agents, such as bloggers, citizen journalists, user-generated content, offshore reporters and news-story composing algorithms. This article addresses a ‘quasi-experimental’ case study in which a group of international and Israeli book authors reported the news for two special issues of an elite Israeli daily, replacing the regular reporting staff. It maps authors’ weaknesses as news gatherers, describes the means the newspaper employed to mitigate these weaknesses and stipulates the challenges the paper faced nonetheless. Findings suggest that professional reporters remain largely irreplaceable, although for less predictable and less ‘heroic’ assignments.

This study analyzes a journalistic community's interpretation of an experiment in which authors (primarily fiction writers) and poets replaced the reporters of a major Israeli newspaper and produced the news in two special issues. Using a mix of methodologies—content analysis, interviews with journalists and authors, a survey among journalists and analysis of readers’ responses—the study shows that the journalistic community reacted conservatively to this exceptional project and framed it as a “deviation” to be rejected as “not real journalism.” This may suggest that the journalistic communities’ reflexive protection of their familiar routines is so strong that it may endanger their ability to survive unfolding threats.

This article seeks to explore whether political reporters present more meticulous, complex, and active standards of news reporting—justifying their special role as enablers of informed citizenry—and to help resolve the theoretical ambiguity regarding news beats as distinct domains of practice. The sample comprised reporters from three beat clusters—political, financial, and territorial—in nine national Israeli news organizations, who were asked to describe, source by source, how they obtained a sample of their recently published items ( N = 840), addressing sourcing patterns, news practices, and communication technologies used. As expected, reporting was found to be distinctive across beat clusters, with political reporters employing significantly and consistently higher standards although financial reporters, in contrast to expectations, were not found to be the weakest link in the reporting chain. Despite the substantial differences, the studied beats embody a united community of practice following a similar media logic.

This paper compares how eighty reporters from three media—print, online, and radio—obtained a sample of their items, seeking to establish which of two schools of thought is closer to reality: scholars who contend that each news medium embodies a unique “regime” of content creation, or those who argue that the different media maintain similar news reporting standards. A series of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters from nine leading Israeli national news organizations suggests that the three media are not unique factories of news, but rather unique packing and distribution houses of similarly obtained materials.

The extent to which information sources, that stand behind virtually all the news, are perceived by journalists as credible is a key determinant of the likelihood of their obtaining news access and public voice. The nature of source credibility judgment in journalism, however, is disputed between two major schools: while the “visceral” camp contends that it is highly subjective, intuitive and biased, the “discretional” camp perceives it as a far more reasonable and legitimate journalistic tool. The present study attempts to uncover evidence of both “visceral” and “discretional” judgment by studying the conceptual credibility (trustworthiness ratings) and practical credibility (practices indicating trust or skepticism, such as cross-checking and attribution) and the congruence between the two in a sample of 840 news items based on 1870 news sources. Findings were gleaned in face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters from nine leading Israeli news organizations, who reconstructed, source by sourc...

As news environments become more fragmented, public relations grows more sophisticated and editorial systems weaken, the impact of PR on news becomes greater and more diverse. Its scope and intensity, however, can hardly be grasped by traditional newsroom-oriented and press release-centered approaches that try to reduce PR impact to a single bottom line. The present study proposes a multifaceted approach to studying PR impact on the news. It examines textual and oral PR–media exchanges flowing inside and outside newsrooms that reach reporters personally or through their respective newsrooms and affect published news both directly and indirectly. The study adopts an innovative method: a series of face-to-face reconstruction interviews in which reporters representing nine leading Israeli news organizations detailed, contact by contact, any type of PR involvement or contribution to a random sample of their freshly published items. PR impact was found to be richer, more complex and broader than suggested by f...

The proliferation of bylines characterized the news as an imperfect, all too human account of reality, opening the way towards journalistic stardom, altering power relations within the news industry and shifting news organizations from a position behind the news to one behind the people who gather and compose it. Focusing on The New York Times as the chief case study and The Times of London as a supplementary one, findings show that the bylining process extended throughout the 20th century at a far slower pace than indicated in previous research. Bylining was a four-stage process: 1) initial avoidance of bylining, thereby fostering an anonymous, authoritative voice; 2) bylines promoting organizational goals only; 3) bylines accorded to a select few staff writers, leading to inconsistency in attribution policy; and 4) papers lose control over selective crediting due to journalists’ pressure for public acclaim. Using a multidisciplinary approach combining legal theory with the sociology and history of journalism, the article concludes that news reporters are constrained authors whose limitations are set chiefly by organizational, legal and commercial forces. These limitations not only delayed and slowed down their attribution but also continue to characterize their authorship to this day.

Initial research findings concerning seven leading Israeli national authorities and the communicative practices they use or plan to use during emergencies show that public authorities facing emergencies tend to develop four areas of professional and ethical weakness that require attention: (1) The theory vs. practice conflict, in which spokespersons for public authorities do not migrate automatically from their routine promotional orientation to one directed at saving lives; (2) Interorganizational differences between the impressively high standards of the Home Front Command and the remaining authorities studied; (3) Intraorganizational differences—while emergency staffs and their managers dedicate themselves to saving lives, spokespersons continue their focus on the image of their authorities and (4) Professional differences—information personnel such as emergency campaign managers, webmasters, information officers etc. dedicate themselves to saving lives more easily and thoroughly than spokespersons.

A systematic study of day-to-day practices of citizen reporters, compared to their mainstream counterparts, suggests that ordinary citizens can serve as a vital complement to mainstream journalism, however not as its substitute. The paper develops a version of the “news access” theory, which sees citizen journalists as hindered by their inferior access to news sources, unlike mainstream journalism, where the problem is seen as the superior access of some of their sources to extensive and favored coverage. There are several symptoms for citizen reporters’ limited news access: their modest use of human sources; the high proportion of one-source items; their reluctance to interactively negotiate versions with sources; and their contacts with sources tend to be ad hoc exchanges, rather than long-term role relationships. On the other hand, citizen reporters have adopted several mechanisms that help them make up for their comparably limited access. They are much more likely to pursue stories at their own initia...

An innovative methodology of face-to-face reconstruction interviews with the reporters who had authored a sample of news items allowed wide and systematic research access to one of the most sensitive and virtually unapproachable spheres of journalism — leaks. The main findings were that (1) leaks were highly prevalent — each fifth item involved the sensitive practice; (2) the dominant leakers were senior sources; (3) the favorite channel for leaks was the telephone; (4) leaked stories were initiated equally by reporters and sources; and (5) leaks were cross-verified with additional sources much more frequently than non-leaked items. The study, which took place in Israel, focused on national daily press reporters and their contacts with news sources.

This study proposes a framework for a theory of epistemological technologies in news sourcing, based on research on communication channels (technology-mediated and non-mediated) used to acquire information for stories published or aired by nine Israeli news organizations, employing face-to-face reconstruction interviews with reporters. Findings reveal only marginal differences among media in use of various channels. Technology enables distant coverage while keeping close contact with human sources. Nearly all news information is technology-mediated, transmitted primarily via oral channels. Although reporters use the Internet extensively, their reliance on the World Wide Web as a news source is negligible, even among online reporters.

The role of reporters and sources in the initiation of the news is neither unilateral as claimed by models of “hegemony” and “adversarial journalism”, nor reciprocal as suggested by the models of “exchange” and “role relationship”, but rather a combination of the two. According to the process model developed and examined here, the initiative passes from one side to the other in the course of the acquisition of information. In the discovery phase, during which reporters learn about the existence of a potential new item, it is the sources who initiate most of the contacts (0.70). However, during the gathering phase, in which the reporters obtain further information, it is they who initiate most of the contacts (again 0.70). The study, which focused on the Israeli daily press, used an innovative methodology of face-to-face reconstruction interviews, during which reporters detailed how they obtained each of the stories in the sample, determining the instigating party according to the technology used for each ...