Are reporters replaceable? Literary authors produce a daily newspaper

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.