Sourcing the News: Key Issues in Journalism — An Innovative Study of the Israeli Press. Zvi Reich. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. 244 pp.
As a cynical academic, I admit I become suspicious when an author feels compelled to use the subtitle of his/her book to state how original or “innovative” the study is. Surely show-don’t-tell applies to academic writing, too? In this case, however, the book fully lives up to the title. This is truly an innovative study, and it tackles one of the key issues of journalism studies — journalist-source relations — in a comprehensive, never-seen-before fashion.
Journalist-source relations are notoriously difficult to study in-depth because of anonymity concerns: it would be ethically impossible for the researcher to be present to observe journalist-source interactions directly. This has left researchers either having to infer source data from content (e.g., looking at how many/what kinds of sources are quoted in articles), or doing interviews with journalists and sources separately about their interactions in general. As Reich points out, both those methods lack specificity—in the case of content analysis more sources may have been consulted than are quoted in the article, and in the case of interviews, we know that there is always a big gap between what journalists say that they do and what they actually do (the same is of course true for sources).
Reich’s methodological solution is quite ingenious. He picked ten different news beat reporters from three leading Israeli newspapers and identified all news stories published by them during a four-week period. Then Reich conducted ”reconstruction interviews,” where the journalist randomly sampled a number of stories from the ones published over the four weeks, without the interviewer knowing which stories were selected. The reconstruction interview then asked general questions on each article sampled about how many sources were used, how the journalist was contacted, if the journalist contacted the source, and so on (the full interview manual is available in an appendix), thus maintaining source confidentiality while at the same time eliciting suprisingly detailed information on how journalists work with their sources. The methodology is described in full in chapter 2.
Using this material, Reich provides a solid empirically grounded analysis of many key areas of journalist-source relations: the oft-recurring question of who has the initiative in this relationship, the journalist or the source (chapter 4); the number and types of sources typically used by journalists (chapter 5; one of the sections is aptly subtitled “The lure of spokespersons”); the anatomy and mechanics of leaks (chapter 6); the question of how new technologies change journalist-source relations (chapter 7—the answer is “not very much,” as the telephone remains the key tool for communicating with sources); and how different types of journalists use sources differently. A foreword by Elihu Katz helps put the work in context.
This is a very rich book and there is no doubt in my mind that the analyses and results presented here have a general relevance. There is no reason to believe that journalists elsewhere would act very differently compared to the ones Reich has studied in Israel.
Overall, Reich frames journalist-source relations in terms of negotiating organizational imperatives in an everday work context. Interactions with sources become a game of logistics where the object is to get the maximum information return with a minimum investment of time and effort. Some examples: the study highlights the relatively narrow scope of sources used by most journalists; describes the routinized and non-dramatic nature of leaking; and provides a very interesting analysis of the organizational imperative not to leave the newsroom unless you have to, despite the lip service paid by journalists and editors to the virtues of “old-fashioned shoe leather reporting.”
As in many studies of journalistic work, Reich’s book ends up being not very flattering for journalists. But then, it is not the object of journalism studies to be flattering for journalists—rather the opposite. And Sourcing the News is an excellent example of a study showing how empirical reality contradicts the mythologized self-image of journalism. Just as it says on the cover, this is an innovative study, empirically grounded and highly critical. It deserves a global audience and should be considered a new core text on journalist-source relations.
HENRIK ÖRNEBRING
University of Oxford