What Makes News Newsworthy: An Experimental Test of Where a News Story Is Published (or Not) and Its Perceived Newsworthiness

Previous research has attributed media convergence to, among other things, where the news was originally published. That research, however, has struggled to identify causal relationships between a news item’s publication in a particular outlet and journalists’ perceptions of a story’s newsworthiness. This relationship is difficult to identify because of the correlation between publication in a particular outlet and many other factors that also impact newsworthiness. This paper uses an experiment embedded within a survey of over 1,500 U.S. political journalists to test the impact of a news story’s previous publication history on journalists’ views of the newsworthiness of that news item. Compared with previously unpublished stories, the publication of a news story in a national paper has no significant positive effect on the perceived newsworthiness of a story. The origin of a story in a local outlet, however, causes journalists to perceive that story to be less newsworthy.

(Re)writing history: Examining the cultural work of the obituary and journalists’ construction of a former president’s legacy

This study provides an empirical and analytical look at how obituaries, as a relatively unexplored form of journalism, illuminate the long-term and conscious cultural work that journalists do. Through in-depth qualitative interviews with the elite political journalists who wrote and produced news obituaries for former US President George H. W. Bush, I offer a framework for understanding how journalists rewrite, and ‘recast’, drafts of history and Bush’s legacy. Results show how the obituary form, and the process involved in its creation, functions as a unique opportunity for political journalists – who have, perhaps for decades, covered a politician according to the norms of the profession – to now write about him in a way that they are keenly aware will become part of history. This research illustrates how the role of political or ‘hard-news’ journalism shifts when reporters write their final story about a president.

There is no liberal media bias in which news stories political journalists choose to cover

Is the media biased against conservatives? Although a dominant majority of journalists identify as liberals/Democrats and many Americans and public officials frequently decry supposedly high and increasing levels of media bias, little compelling evidence exists as to (i) the ideological or partisan leanings of the many journalists who fail to answer surveys and/or identify as independents and (ii) whether journalists’ political leanings bleed into the choice of which stories to cover that Americans ultimately consume. Using a unique combination of a large-scale survey of political journalists, data from journalists’ Twitter networks, election returns, a large-scale correspondence experiment, and a conjoint survey experiment, we show definitively that the media exhibits no bias against conservatives (or liberals for that matter) in what news that they choose to cover. This shows that journalists’ individual ideological leanings have unexpectedly little effect on the vitally important, but, up to this point, unexplored, early stage of political news generation.

Political Journalists and Their Social Media Audiences: New Power Relations

Social media use is now commonplace across journalism, in spite of lingering unease about the impact the networked, real-time logic of leading social media platforms may have on the quality of journalistic coverage. As a result, distinct journalistic voices are forced to compete more directly with experts, commentators, sources, and other stakeholders within the same space. Such shifting power relations may be observed also in the interactions between political journalists and their audiences on major social media platforms. This article therefore pursues a cross-national comparison of interactions between political journalists and their audiences on Twitter in Germany and Australia, documenting how the differences in the status of Twitter in each country’s media environment manifest in activities and network interactions. In each country, we observed Twitter interactions around the national parliamentary press corps (the Bundespressekonferenz and the Federal Press Gallery), gathering all public tweets by and directed at the journalists’ accounts during 2017. We examine overall activity and engagement patterns and highlight significant differences between the two national groups; and we conduct further network analysis to examine the prevalent connections and engagement between press corps journalists themselves, and between journalists, their audiences, and other interlocutors on Twitter. New structures of information flows, of influence, and thus ultimately of power relations become evident in this analysis.