News Sources in the Sociology of the Media: A Critical Re-Examination

Abstract

Sourcing practices are among the central research topics within the sociology of the media. Empirical studies have analysed what and who are the major journalistic sources, demonstrating that the selections journalists make not only depend on their subjective choices, but are connected to the norms and routines established in the profession. While invaluable, these studies are primarily media-centric and focused on small-scale investigations, meaning they regularly ignore the social totality in which sourcing is inevitably embedded. Such studies hence also pay too little attention to the external actors that provide ‘information subsidies’ to journalists. By employing the framework of the public sphere, we show that news sources should be viewed as a topic of central social relevance that touches on wider power relations within society. Sociological approaches should thus be complemented with other critical traditions, for instance the political economy of communication. The latter approach’s value is revealed in brief sketches that point to the possibilities of achieving deeper understanding of the topic.

Introduction

The production of news has historically been a central topic in the sociology of the media, with sourcing practices lying at the core of analyses. Numerous studies sought to answer the question: where do journalists get their information from? They analysed what and who are the major sources for journalists, which journalistic routines lead to them being regularly used, the types of relations journalists are embedded in, and who is deemed a credible and legitimate source in journalism. The processes of digitization and algorithmization have diversified and intensified many of the existing patterns and relations, forcing a re-configuring of traditional practices of journalism.

It is beyond doubt that studies, typically performed under the label of the sociology of news, have provided invaluable insights into newsroom relations and the (in)formal rules governing the production of news. They have made it clear that the selections journalists make are not simply a matter of their subjective gatekeeping choices. This has helped lift the veil from an opaque process typically hidden from the public eye. Looking at the relationship between how journalism and other social spheres are working and evolving has also assisted in the empirical concretization of otherwise abstract issues. Still, this choice also has a downside. Namely, many studies focused on small-scale investigations of journalist–source relationships or the practices occurring within newsrooms, thereby too often disregarding the broader social context in which these relations are embedded. While these analyses therefore aptly pursued the sociological aim of analysing ‘individuals engaged in patterned interaction in primarily complex settings’ (Zelizer, 2004: 47), they also understated the impact of the social totality on these patterns. Hence, they ignored the calls made by some media sociologists to take better account of the inequalities in the production and distribution of information (e.g. Benson, 2014: 27; Boyd-Barrett, 1995: 272; Schlesinger, 1990: 92; Tuchman, 2002: 88). This necessarily touches on the role played by external actors, that is, the sources themselves: what motivates them, how they accomplish their goals, and within which structures they operate.

The main aim of this text is to re-examine the dominant sociological approaches to news sources and to complement them with other critical approaches, particularly the political economy of communication. Even though these traditions have informed each other, their interactions have largely been shaped by tensions, especially in relation to the functionalist heritage (Tuchman, 2002: 82). As we demonstrate, adding a critical framework provides a theoretically stronger basis for understanding inequalities in the organization and control of public information flows. The approach taken brings to the fore specific structural constraints and power imbalances arising from capitalist social relations that influence, and sometimes even define, sourcing practices. We argue these practices can be seen as central to democracies.

In the second part, we begin by briefly describing how media sociology has studied news sources, outlining its major contributions and findings. In the third part, we point out some of its shortcomings, notably its excessive media-centrism, and provide a normative underpinning for these issues. The conceptual framework of the public sphere is used to show how important it is that in democracies, all voices and topics of social significance are heard in a satisfactory manner, an issue directly connected to the practices concerned with sourcing. In part four, we embed these issues within the capitalist totality by using the political economy of communication as a macro-level approach. We provide brief sketches and pay special attention to the external actors influencing sourcing practices through ‘information subsidies’. These illustrative sketches shed light on how a critical and holistic approach can lead to a more profound understanding of news sources, while also demonstrating the deficiencies of considering this issue in too narrow a manner.

Sourcing in the Sociology of the Media

Any attempt at an overview of media sociology scholarship will reveal significant epistemological diversity in how scholars have approached news sources and the sourcing practices of journalists, especially through different time periods. In the 1950s and 1960s, sourcing practices in journalism were initially explored in gatekeeping studies (e.g. Snider, [1969] 1995; White, 1950) influenced by Mertonian functionalist sociology. They approached the selection of news by focusing on individual ‘gatekeepers’ and examined their personal views and attitudes. The sourcing practices of journalists were also discussed in the context of role-based newsroom ‘socialisation’ and ‘conformity’ (Breed, [1955] 1995), yet larger societal, institutional, and professional contexts were mostly ignored. Later research started to slowly discard this ‘functionalist legacy’ (Tuchman, 2002: 80). The focus was increasingly placed on social and organizational contexts as the core determinants of news production.

The Heritage of the Sociology of the Media in the Research on Sources

Even though some crucial issues related to sourcing were raised already in the early functionalist phase, most were significantly expanded on in ‘the golden age of media sociology’ (Tumber, 2014) during the 1970s and 1980s. This period started in earnest with pioneering research by Tunstall ([1971] 1995) who, while retaining the functionalist framework, went further in examining journalists’ roles and their networks of sources, revealing the routine management of institutionalized news (Boyd-Barrett, 1995: 273–274). Subsequent newsroom studies (e.g. Ericson et al., [1989] 2008; Fishman, [1982] 1997; Gans, [1979] 2004; Gitlin, 1980; Tuchman, 1978) began to draw on a variety of theoretical backgrounds (e.g. Marxist, Weberian, and Gramscian). They grew ever more critical of journalists’ practices, especially their connections to – and negotiations with – official and elite sources.

According to Tuchman (2002), ‘the common denominator’ of these studies ‘was signaled in the titles of a whole list of influential studies on “making,” “creating,” “manufacturing”, and “deciding” what is news’ (p. 81). As opposed to the supposedly chaotic and random selections made by journalists, then inevitably reflected in the news, studies in the ‘golden age’ highlighted certain identifiable patterns that govern news production and sourcing in general. Journalistic sourcing was closely related to the values, norms, and routines defining the profession that were naturalized in the newsroom. There was also recognition that answering the question of why journalists use certain information in their reporting and not other necessarily presupposes uncovering a relationship between journalism and other social spheres; journalism has never existed in a social vacuum and always relied on ‘inputs from individuals and organisations located outside the formal news organisations’ (Franklin et al., 2009: 202).

Analysing the Source–Journalist Relationship: The Dance Metaphor

The information journalists use does not appear out of thin air, which means looking at who their actual sources were outside of the newsrooms (and why) became of paramount importance. The sociology of news established that the relationship between journalists and their sources was not necessarily one of a conflict or of two completely autonomous social spheres, as often presupposed, but could in fact resemble a balancing act, consisting of the mutual relationship between sources and reporters. There was a certain trade-off in place given that each party could gain from cooperative relations. Sources, for instance, often wanted to amplify their message and find ways to set the public agenda, whereas journalists needed new information and an insider’s view for their stories (Zelizer, 2004: 150–153).

In a well-referenced study by Gans ([1979] 2004), this relationship was described as a dance, where ‘sources seek access to journalists, and journalists seek access to sources’ (p. 116). His research also revealed that in fact it was the sources that were usually ‘leading the tango’, not the reporters, as was often presumed (cf. Franklin, 2003). A decade later, Ericson et al. ([1989] 2008) similarly defined the relationship between news and source organizations as one of ‘convergence’ to the extent they were ‘best viewed as part of each other’ (p. 350). Such convergence has sustained an ‘elite culture that circumscribes the ability of the media to be analytically detached from elite persons and organizations they report on’ (Ericson et al., [1989] 2008: 350).

Most of the early studies on sourcing concentrated on the relationship between politics and the media as a core element of contemporary democracies. This relationship, too, can be seen as one of interdependence. Schudson (2011), for example, noted ‘a complex dance’ where it was ‘not easy to distinguish where one begins and the other leaves off’ (p. 147). Franklin (2003) identified the social phenomenon of the ‘packaging of politics’ based on the pattern of the relationship whereby ‘the two parties are judged to work in complementary, if not collusive, ways’ (p. 46). Besides interdependence and seduction, empirical studies also illustrated (attempts at) manipulation, control, spin, and influence (Schudson, 2011: Ch. 7). It could be claimed that ‘journalists manipulate sources, and sources manipulate journalists’ (Schudson, 2011: 137–138).

Importantly, by positioning actors and institutions ‘within an identifiable set of interactions’ these studies helped to ‘offset the naïve notion that the power of journalists was limitless’ (Zelizer, 2004: 153). They hence managed to put a dent in the commonly held belief that the media are immensely powerful social institutions that operate without any meaningful limitations. Still, there was an epistemological error with this notion: it failed to distinguish between the power of the media as such and the power of the people and the events that journalists were expected to cover since they were deemed newsworthy according to the commonly held norms (Schudson, 2011: 11–13).

Power Inequalities: The Dominance of Elite Sources

The empirical findings of studies focused on the politics–journalism relationship are diverse, especially when considering the local contexts where various political cultures and journalistic norms governed this relationship. Nevertheless, two things are shared by most analyses.

First, there is a broad consensus in the literature that the selection of sources has been highly unequal within society. On the side of the sources, this relationship is typically dominated by what may be considered as elite or authoritative sources. These include government officials and bureaucrats, political elites, consultants, and business leaders; all are able to provide a reliable and constant stream of information that can be portrayed as publicly relevant (cf. Bennett et al., 2004; Carlson, 2016; Curran, 2019: 191; Davis, 2003: 32–35, 2013: 159–160; Franklin, 2003; Macnamara, 2020; Schlesinger, 1990; Schudson, 2011: Ch. 7; Tumber, 2014: 65, 68–69; Zelizer, 2004: 151–152). According to Schudson (2011), there is ‘little doubt that the centre of news generation is the link between reporter and official’ (p. 142). Perhaps surprisingly, research of Internet news sites revealed an even closer connection to the voices of authority, especially those connected to the state (Curran et al., 2013: 886–887).

The sourcing practices of journalists were therefore seen as having an inherent bias towards elite and establishment sources. This has contributed to these voices being amplified through reporting, largely shaping the contours of the debate and thereby assisting in reproducing the status quo. Tuchman (1978: 209–217) emphasized that news were resources of knowledge and power, arguing that constructions of facticity through the ‘news net’ define centralized information sources, ‘objectifying’ sites of news gathering and ‘legitimating sources of both information and governance’ (Tuchman, 1978: 210). This problem was also recognized by Gans ([1979] 2004) as it was only in theory that sources could come from anywhere, ‘In practice, their recruitment and their access to journalists reflect the hierarchies of nation and society’ (p. 119). The sole way the powerless could obtain access was by resorting to civil disturbances. In another classic study, Gitlin (1980) similarly asserted that in cases of policy conflicts between journalists and sources as well as with editors and publishers, these are ‘played out within a field of terms and premises which does not overstep the hegemonic boundary’ (p. 263). Fishman ([1982] 1997) likewise noted that news is principally shaped by the contexts in which ‘bureaucratically organised agencies’ present and package events for journalists (p. 226). According to his observational study, journalists employed the same ‘schemes of interpretation and relevance’ as these agencies and their officials. ‘While this similarity of perspectives allows journalists to ‘see’ some things as events, it also makes invisible a specific class of occurrences as newsworthy happenings. These become nonevents’ (Fishman, [1982] 1997: 226).

These findings were recently reconfirmed by Ryfe (2006) in his newsroom ethnography. He revealed that journalists responded with confusion, indignation and, finally, rejection of their editor’s call to attend less closely to the public agencies that formed part of their ‘beats’. They retreated to the established functional and symbolic traits of daily journalism, with officials remaining the most prominent sources. Other recent research (see Macnamara, 2020: 346–348) also noted the increasing reliance of journalists on PR, with the lines becoming further blurred. As we argue in a later section while applying a political economy approach, a strong case can be made that these power inequalities in the sourcing practices in fact structurally mirror and in many ways are a result of the inequalities inherent to capitalist society itself.

Reproducing the Status Quo: Standardization, Homogenization, and Recycling

The second finding shared by empirical studies may be directly related to the first, albeit the bureaucratized and standardized news production reveals even more troubling implications. Studies based on diverse approaches and methods showed strong news homogenization tendencies, including the casual use of information subsidies, desk-bound journalism, and the high propensity for recycling news.

Some of these findings were already reflected in Breed’s study of standardization of the news process. He revealed how editors systematically acknowledged the ‘aid of other papers’ in ‘playing’ their news (Breed, 1955: 278). ‘The influence goes “down,” from larger papers to smaller ones, as if the editor is employing, in absentia, the editors of the larger paper to help “make up” his page’ (Breed, 1955). By exploring this “arterial processs,” Breed (1955: 283–284) identified highly standardized practices of editors and journalists alike. These included “clipping and pasting,” where items were clipped from other papers for “reworking,” or “chopping” the wire stories from the bottom for space reasons in the process of reproducing them verbatim.

Tendencies of homogenization have not gone away with digitalization, only intensified. Several sociological studies of online news production in different traditions and organizational contexts (e.g. Boczkowski, 2004; Deuze, 2007; Macnamara, 2020; Paterson and Domingo, 2008: 346–348) found that under the increasing pressure of immediacy and frequency online journalists had adapted by reproducing content from in-house news departments, press agencies, and other media. They often relied on ‘shovelware’ and copy-paste practices, marginalizing original news in their outputs and, in turn, degrading the production to secondhand journalism.

A popular account of this issue is provided by Davies (2008) in his book Flat Earth News, where he denounces it as ‘churnalism’, noting how journalists increasingly needed to rely on press releases, PR stories, press agencies, and copy-paste practices to fill in the media space. He stressed that journalists were unable to perform the ‘simple basic functions of their profession’ and were reduced to being ‘passive processors of whatever material comes their way, churning out stories, whether real event or PR artifice, important or trivial, true or fake’ (Davies, 2008: 58). Davies’ term gained traction and his findings were largely corroborated by other studies (Davis, 2013; Franklin, 2011; Franklin et al., 2009: 96; cf. Macnamara, 2020).

It should be stressed that although journalists may speak directly to their sources, who seek to influence them, their reliance on powerful actors is often more passive, with journalists merely (re)using materials like press releases, as noted in this section. In a sense, sources are thus the materials produced by these actors, not necessarily the actors themselves. This may be viewed as a reactive relationship that journalists hold with their sources, which has been speculated to be one factor that makes the self-perception of journalists so deceptive (Macnamara, 2020: 343–348). In a denialist manner, they, for instance, regularly underestimate the extent to which they rely on public relations and continue to view their relationships with their sources in an antagonistic way.

The rise of digital platforms has seen the tendency of ‘piecing together bits of firsthand (and secondhand) information that have been published already’ and ‘repackaging them into new forms’ (Coddington, 2019: 38) being substantially strengthened. As Carlson (2016: 244–245) states, online media and digital platforms have pushed journalists to rethink their sourcing practices in relation to these always-on and omnipresent currents of potential news(worthy) items. Although digitization has importantly reshaped the production and delivery of news, the established practices and conventions of crafting news have largely endured (Carlson, 2016: 240). The ‘second-order newswork’ (Anderson, 2013: 56) or ‘news aggregation’ (Coddington, 2019) has emerged as a ‘derivative imitation’ of news production, continuously evolving beyond the legacy media and proliferating within social media-oriented news organizations or algorithmic feeds of digital platforms like Google News (cf. Coddington, 2019: 8–34).

These two findings common to empirical research may suggest that the balance of power between journalists and their sources has shifted even more dramatically to the dominant external actors and institutions. Still, what is sometimes interpreted as an outcome of technological changes or journalistic norms (e.g. the immediacy imperative) should, as is argued below, equally be seen as a product of more intense commercial pressures.

Constraints of Media-Centrism: Rethinking the Sociology of News Sources

Attempts have been made to emphasize the limitations of the different approaches to the sociology of the media and reconsider the key divisions among them (Schudson, 2011). Still, in the past few decades, journalism research has only rarely based empirical research on new theoretical work. As explained above, there are notable exceptions, as can be identified while revisiting the research on sourcing practices by key authors, but they all operated within their familiar theoretical frameworks (Zelizer, 2004: 79). We can identify similar trends in the work of contemporary authors who revisited established approaches to news production, most saliently the gatekeeping model (e.g. Shoemaker, 2020). Even though it is rarer for contemporary scholarship to focus specifically on journalistic sources (cf. Carlson, 2016), its inquiries into journalism and digitization deal with the related issues of the re-configured organizational constraints of news production, journalistic authority, and the boundaries of journalism (e.g. Anderson, 2013; Boczkowski, 2004; Carlson, 2017; Coddington, 2019).

Nonetheless, in academia, journalism has mostly been ‘approached in pockets’ (Zelizer, 2007: 20), addressing isolated aspects and phenomena, strengthening ‘compartmentalization’ (Zelizer, 2007) that works against clarifying the complexities of journalism, whereas efforts in a variety of disciplines have failed to build the ‘shared knowledge crucial to academic inquiry’ (Zelizer, 2007). This trend also resonates in key sociological inquiries into sourcing. Power inequalities in sourcing and news (re-)production are not at the centre of these inquiries, much less the wider social relevance of this topic, meaning that these highlights must be systematically and deliberately extracted from the literature. While existing studies on sourcing therefore provide invaluable insights into how news is made, they generally remain focused on the micro or at best meso-level and pay scant attention to the wider social context and how it influences the production of news. Moreover, it is with few exceptions that authors have directly asked whether these issues are of any real importance for democratic societies.

The Normative Relevance of News Sources in the Public Sphere

Considering what is stated above, we could take a step back and legitimately ask: Does the problem of news sources even matter in the broader context? What, if any, is the social importance of this topic? For Franklin et al. (2009), the ‘relationship between journalists and their sources sits at the heart of journalism studies’ (p. 202). Taking this premise seriously would essentially mean that sources are of vital importance while analysing the value of journalism in society. Although some authors have been reluctant to make direct links between journalism and democracy (see Schudson, 2011: Ch. 11), we believe this topic is indeed crucial exactly in this context.

Existing research seems to quite unequivocally state that certain topics and voices are underrepresented in news, whereas others are amplified, even if unintentionally. This should not be seen as a marginal remark because this situation potentially leads to flawed democracies. Baker’s (2007: Ch. 1) democratic distribution principle, for instance, presupposes that the basic normative standard for democracy is ‘a very wide and fair dispersal of power and ubiquitous opportunities to present preferences, views, visions’ (Baker, 2007: 7) in public discourse. Since the public sphere influences the formation of public opinion and consequently voting decisions, it should have the capacity to enable the equal visibility of diverse voices. The media of course play a critical role in the public sphere by, among others, mediating between the public and the state; normatively, they should therefore be based on egalitarian democratic values. Even though Baker connects his democratic distribution principle to the need for the wide dispersal of media ownership, it can also be extended to the issue of sources.

Habermas’ (2009: Ch. 9) normative model of deliberative democracy builds on similar assumptions. The public sphere is crucial in the formation of considered public opinions and acts as both ‘a sounding board for registering problems which affect society’ and ‘a discursive filter-bed’ (Habermas, 2009: 143) for identifying relevant issues. On one hand, the public sphere’s task is to bring opinions back to the citizens for them to consider while, on the other hand, it is to put these topics into the formal political process. It is only through the ‘vibrant and maximally unregulated circulation of public opinions’ (Habermas, 2009: 143) that deliberative democracy can lead to reasonable decisions. In this setting, Dahlberg (2018) argues that the ‘visibility of a dissensus’ is the first condition of any public sphere (p. 3). Differences and disputes should not only be recognized, but encouraged as well. Yet media have often been criticized for providing ‘stylised versions of disagreement that obscure some voices while normalising dominant discourses and power relations’ (Dahlberg, 2018: 3).

As Bennett et al. (2004) argue, relevant publics gaining inclusive access to the media still does not meet the normative criteria for a properly functioning public sphere; such publics must also enjoy equal discursive space (recognition), with the possibility of proper dialogue (responsiveness) being another criterion. Access, however, is an unavoidable and indispensable first step regarding which journalists are already failing. This was also made clear in their empirical study of reporting on the World Economic Forum, which had led to a highly managed public sphere (Bennett et al., 2004).

If parts of society are indeed systematically overlooked in news production, one may claim that this is bringing about a deeply deficient public sphere. That would mean that the public as a social category is systematically excluded, with its visibility being ‘eclipsed’ (cf. Splichal, 2010). This is quite certainly the case if powerful actors can bring ‘manipulative publicity into the public sphere by subsidizing information and setting the agenda of public issues and framing public discourse’ (Splichal, 2010: 33), as occurs today. These normative dimensions of the media and democracy add weight to Curran’s (2019) observation that reliance on elite sources is blurring ‘the difference between the media in authoritarian and democratic countries’ (p. 191). It has ‘circumscribed democratic debate’ by undermining ‘the mission of core media to bring antagonistic groups into communion with each other’ (Curran, 2019: 191).

Moving Beyond Sourcing Practices as a Small-Scale Research Topic

Sociological studies of sourcing practices have generally focused on small-scale procedures of news production or personal interactions within or between institutional settings. Such efforts help to better understand organizational constraints and the bureaucratization of news production as defining factors of sourcing. They have also concretized ‘the abstract nature of the linkage between politics and journalism’ (Zelizer, 2004: 151). By putting actors and institutions in identifiable settings and relations, researchers were able to empirically navigate otherwise overly theoretical and speculative issues, for instance questions of journalistic power, authority, and autonomy in specific contexts.

While sociological studies are therefore invaluable for understanding sourcing practices, we may claim that they understate the impact of the social totality on how news is produced, thereby ignoring Benson’s (2014) call for media sociology to pay attention ‘to inequalities in the distribution of resources, material as well as symbolic’ (p. 27). It is also telling that some of the most critical inquiries analysing sourcing come not from within the sociology of the media, but from critical cultural studies (Hall et al., 1978), political science (Sigal, 1973), and the political economy of communication (Gandy, 1982). This narrow focus, which prevails in sociological scholarship, proves to be a stumbling block if we consider who are the dominant sources or how much recycling is occurring in journalism. Often, only vague clues as to why this the case are provided.

Acknowledging these issues, Tuchman (2002) stresses the need to examine not only the organizational enactment and textual articulation of news, but its ‘political-economic preconditions’ and the wider material realities of news production as well (p. 88). Boyd-Barrett (1995) similarly underscored that sociological inquiries should not ‘marginalize the contexts’ (p. 272) – apart from those determining the information supply to journalists and the media, also ‘the degree of dependence’ of the media ‘on external as opposed to its own internal resources’. Both appeals largely follow Schlesinger’s observation (1990) that the core problem of the existing sourcing research is its ‘excessive media-centrism’ (p. 61). In his view, studies place too little focus on the perspective of sources themselves; namely, which interests they have, how and why they seek access to journalists and thus news, and which strategies they employ to successfully influence flows of information. As he noted, sources incessantly compete for access in the media, yet they do so in ‘an imperfectly competitive field’ (Schlesinger, 1990: 77) because they work with unequally distributed material and symbolic resources. Accordingly, the work on source strategies ‘inevitably takes us into broader questions about the nature of information management in society by a variety of groups in conditions of unequal power and therefore unequal access to systems of information production and distribution’ (Schlesinger, 1990: 82).

Research on sourcing practices should branch out to consider how external institutions and actors strive to organize, define and control public flows of information in their attempts to influence news reporting. However, this also means looking at the power relations and the ways that access is limited by structural constraints in wider society, an issue not adequately addressed since Schlesinger’s appeal (with some notable exceptions, see Cottle, 2003). One way of doing this is by supplementing existing research with other critical approaches like the political economy of communication. The normative stance found at the heart of theories dealing with the public sphere is also a basic characteristic of political economy when it considers the communicative inequalities and hierarchies in a generalist manner, especially in terms of their social consequences.

News Sources in Capitalism: A Political Economy Approach

In previous sections, we established that the problem of news sources ought to be related to the question of the (equal) distribution of visibility within the public sphere and the issue of inequalities in public communication, as affected by actors and institutions that seek to pursue their particular objectives. Accordingly, this problem on one side touches on the wider power relations within society and, on the other, holds direct consequences for the normative premises of the media in a democratic polity. It can be claimed that reconsidering this issue in such a manner attests to the fundamental social relevance of news sources as a research topic.

Nevertheless, setting such a general analytic framework also means the subject matter should be studied as part of the capitalist social totality. Streeck (2012) advocated for a sociology that would take this broader context into account and was critical of the existing scholarship for having failed to do so. As he noted, modern society is inevitably a capitalist society in the sense that the economy and society are so deeply interrelated that studying particular social relations requires ‘a conceptual framework that does not separate the one from the other’ (Streeck, 2012: 2). With the economy tendentially dominating over previously non-capitalist relations through constant attempts of commodification, these issues impact all facets of social life. In our opinion, failing to take how capitalism influences and delimits sourcing practices into account risks ignoring some of the central tendencies arising from this historical social formation.

In communication studies, this sort of framework is theoretically employed by critical approaches, notably the political economy of communication. Yet, with few exceptions (Gandy, 1982), this tradition has generally ignored the issue of news sources. This seems peculiar given that it could offer a fertile starting point for further analyses and provide theoretically stronger foundations, which could shed light on existing tendencies concerning sourcing practices. Since a comprehensive political economy of news sources is beyond the scope of this article, we offer a few illustrations in the sections below to make the value of this approach evident. Such a holistic approach does not assume that the capitalist social context predetermines certain sourcing practices, even if the tendencies at play are difficult to overcome. Still, it does presume that capitalism sets certain limits and constraints within which actors and institutions operate willy-nilly. The fact that sourcing predominantly occurs within capitalist social relations and profit-seeking media industries means that this tendentially sets the stage for particular types of outcomes.

The Elephant in the Room: Capitalism and Journalism-as-Labour

Throughout the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th century journalism developed from being a craft to a vast industry (Bösch, 2015), which was on par with other capitalist sectors where commodities were produced by waged labour for profit. One of its distinguishing characteristics was that it produced not one, but two commodities; the media started to compete in what media economics today calls a dual market. As first noted by Smythe (1977), commercial mass media were not merely – or even primarily – making content for their subscribers, but in fact produced audiences. Advertising money represented the bulk of their revenue. During the 20th century, this was especially the case for newspapers in capitalist countries, but extended to radio and TV during the 1980s. With the advent of neoliberalism, local media markets opened up to global competition, and take-overs became a norm. Media systems have since undergone processes of commercialization, privatization, and deregulation, followed by the creation of large media chains and market concentration (Hardy, 2014; McChesney, 2008; Pickard, 2020: Ch. 3; Thussu, 2006: Ch. 4; Golding and Murdock, 2022: 36–38).

While these changes initially merely meant the constant repackaging of serious news into infotainment (Thussu, 2008), in recent decades, news media have witnessed the almost complete collapse of their dominant business model, which relied on advertising (Golding and Murdock, 2022: 37; Petre, 2021: Ch. 1; Pickard, 2020: 74; Reese, 2021: 19–20). Today, commercial media are increasingly fighting a losing battle against digital platforms, search engines, and entertainment media that are better equipped to directly cater to advertisers’ interests. These processes have been analysed elsewhere and can hardly be seen as inconsequential for news gathering since the media ‘have attempted to compensate for lost revenues by ruthlessly cutting costs’ (Pickard, 2020: 77).

As expected, this short-term tactic has brought negative consequences for journalism. When criticizing the practice of ‘churnalism’, Davies (2008) noted that this was due to the profit pressures, with journalists living on ‘a production line in a news factory’ (p. 56). Newspapers have sold out to corporations whose ‘primary purpose simply and uncontroversially is to make money’ (Davies, 2008: 16). For Davies (2008), these shifts created new pressures and became ‘the greatest obstacle to truth-telling journalism’ (p. 16). The result was a lack of time to investigate news and constant pressure to accept readily available information. Time pressure, however, is hardly a new development. Instead, it can be viewed as an intensification of long-standing trends. Market struggles between the media-as-industries made the speed of reporting one of the key prerequisites of modern journalism (Phillips, 2012; Rantanen, 2009). With the value of a news item dropping when it is transmitted, ‘the speed of transition’ becomes a ‘factor in the trading of news as a product’ (Phillips, 2012: 81). Time pressures have grown further with the competition for ‘breaking news’ in the 24/7 news cycle of electronic media, leading to instant news and increased homogeneity in reporting (Phillips, 2012). This certainly has a direct influence on the sourcing practices of journalists.

With commercial journalism firmly embedded in the capitalist mode of production, journalism-as-labour has needed to continuously renegotiate its position through the never resolved conflict between the corporate goals of media management to economically rationalize the news production on one hand, and journalism’s public (cl)aims based on the ideas of communication rights, critical publicity, and occupational professionalism on the other (e.g. Cohen, 2016; Örnebring, 2010; Petre, 2021). As these recent studies on journalism-as-labour (Cohen, 2016; Örnebring, 2010; Petre, 2021) indicate, there is virtually a causal relationship that runs from the capitalist drive for profits, which pushes towards technological innovations in the news production, often constraining, rationalizing and intensifying journalistic labour process. An earlier study by Marjoribanks (2000) showed that technological innovations and corresponding workplace reorganizations are influenced by larger societal, ideological, and institutional contexts, where the managerially directed transformation ‘came about through consent, but it was consent shaped by the real possibility of the successful use of coercion’ (Marjoribanks, 2000: 590). The concurrent rise of neoliberalism and digitalization continues this historical link (see Nerone, 2022), for instance by managerial strategies introducing metrics-driven labour discipline akin to neo-Taylorism as a way of offsetting the financial squeeze (Petre, 2021). These processes are exposing journalists to intense and intertwined processes of commercialization and pauperization as part of the ‘creative destruction of journalism’, which is ‘making it much more productive but less and less – journalism’ (Splichal and Dahlgren, 2016: 8–9).

The result of the intensifying commercial pressures and austerity in the news industry has been occasional mass layoffs, a declining number of jobs, lower-paid employment with fewer benefits, along with hollowed out newsrooms. As the ‘pressures of proletarisation re-emerge’ (Cohen, 2016: 77–78), the unstable position of journalism has been accompanied by various methods ‘to phase out’ standard employment in exchange for freelancing, internships, and even algorithms (Pickard, 2020: 84). Outsourcing and precarity as a management strategy have largely been normalized and are now viewed as a ‘natural part of journalism’ by journalists themselves (Örnebring, 2018; cf. Örnebring and Conill, 2016), similarly to the increasing control made possible by metrics applied (Petre, 2021).

In recent years, the journalistic labour process has been chopped up into micro tasks and intensified to place additional pressure on the reduced workforce to multitask and reskill to ensure continuous news production on diverse platforms, based on highly standardized sourcing akin to ‘churnalism’ (e.g. Golding and Murdock, 2022; Örnebring, 2010). Specific to digital capitalism, these tendencies have a direct influence on sourcing practices, with journalists losing even more control over their own work. New, wide-ranging constraints are imposed concerning the way they produce news and seek sources, and ever greater pressure being put on the remaining journalists to produce more news in less time (Davis, 2013; Franklin, 2011: 96; Golding and Murdock, 2022: 36–38; Pickard, 2020: Ch. 3). What some refer to as the ‘hamsterisation’ of journalism (Pickard, 2020: 84) or ‘iterative journalism’ (Nerone, 2022: 45) in practice means fewer possibilities for journalists to acquire knowledge about the subjects they cover, create a meaningful relationship with their sources, and produce original stories. It is therefore the tendencies specific to commercial media that are largely responsible for the fact that news output on various platforms is chiefly reproduced, unverified, and reliant on ready-made packages of news to satiate the voracious demands of the 24/7 cycle.

News Agency Copies as Information Subsidies

The processes described above have profoundly degraded journalists and further undermined their prospects. It should come as no surprise that their dependence on subsidized information produced by promotional intermediaries has increased (Davis, 2003, 2013: 96–98). Gandy (1982: Ch. 4), who coined the concept of information subsidies, underscored they simply operated by economic rules, namely, as a way of reducing the cost of producing stories by shortening the time needed to make news. Journalists used this ready-made information as they faced time constraints and the constant need to produce newsworthy information. It has been structural constraints associated with cost–benefit rationalization that have made journalists vulnerable to subsidies from various private and public actors, not their individual deficiencies.

A typical feature of such a rationalization mechanism in journalism has been growing dependency on the information produced by news agencies. Both national and transnational news agencies have been a staple of the division of labour within media industries since the late 19th century (Rantanen, 2009; Thussu, 2006: Ch. 1) and today ‘most news organizations would find it difficult to function without the outsourcing services they provide’ (Örnebring and Conill, 2016: 211). The media’s reliance on agencies has been naturalized in journalism (Örnebring and Conill, 2016) and may be considered to be a ‘legitimate’ recycling practice. Yet, this does not make this practice any less problematic in the context of sourcing. It further contributes to both the homogenization tendencies and the amplification of some voices over others (Franklin et al., 2009: 206–208), given that only a handful of news agencies produce information deemed relevant by journalists.

International news is an especially problematic case in point. A long line of criticism has been levelled at the global news agencies and the role they played in the reproduction of the unequal exchange of information in the 20th century. These agencies were considered as one of the central issues in the cultural imperialism thesis and subsequent demands for a New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) that emerged in the 1970s that called for more equity in international information flows (Thussu, 2006).

Only three news agencies dominate on the global scale today, meaning that the gathering and distribution of international news is highly concentrated, with a handful institutions exercising a substantial influence on the narrative and frames of many global events and processes (Artz, 2017). The cost-cutting measures described in the previous section have hit foreign correspondents in the news media the hardest, given that they are the most expensive journalistic posts. As a result, these agencies are now ‘the primary sources’ of international news for many media establishments (Artz, 2017: 60–61; cf. Franklin, 2011: 92), further narrowing the range of sources that manage to break through in the coverage and interpretation of most international events. Moreover, these agencies depend similarly on outsourcing, freelancing, and other casual work arrangements, leaving their journalists in a similar or even worse position than those working elsewhere (Örnebring and Conill, 2016).

Information Subsidies Reign Supreme: The Impact of Promotional Intermediaries

Even though the issue of news agencies can be discussed in the context of information subsidies, Gandy’s (1982: Ch. 4) treatment of this concept mainly focused on the activities of actors external to news organizations (cf. Schlesinger, 1990). Their aim was to influence the public agenda and thus also public interpretations of socially relevant issues. They supplied information subsidies on purpose since this could enable them to indirectly manipulate private and public decision-making processes, while maintaining a veneer of disinterestedness. This would enable these actors to preserve the credibility of the information supplied (Gandy, 1982: Ch. 4).

While the issue of information subsidies was an enduring problem four decades ago, in all likelihood it has today become a central – even if often overlooked – issue in public communication. One decade-old research by Franklin et al. (2009; cf. Franklin, 2011; Macnamara, 2020) already described the considerable reliance of journalists on what they called ‘public relations subsidies’, with corporate and governmental voices enjoying ‘extensive and unrepresentative access to the public debating chamber which newspapers provide’ (p. 206). Moreover, PR texts were also encoded in the agency copy, which served ‘as a Trojan horse for PR materials’ (Franklin et al., 2009: 207). Similarly, in their study of sourcing in local journalism, O’Neill and O’Connor (2009) identified the ‘passive journalist’, whose passivity is leading ‘to an over-reliance on single sources, excluding certain views and issues relevant to the readership, and allowing routine sources to dominate the news agenda and frame subsequent stories’ (p. 498). The situation in politics with the omnipresence of political spinning, marketing, and ‘think tanks’ is similar. This field has seen the naturalization of trivialized, spectacularized, and commercialized political communication, with promotional politics aiming to manage public opinion by influencing the news media (e.g. Allern, 2011; Davis, 2013; Savigny, 2008: Ch. 8). Political marketing was identified as an important symptom of post-democracy by Crouch (2004) in his early discussion of the concept. In his latest analysis, Crouch (2020: Ch. 2) added ‘think tanks’ to his analysis and ascertained that above all, it is wealthy actors that provide them with funding to promote neoliberal policies as part of their lobbying pressures (Crouch, 2020: 26–28). Success with such efforts can ‘bring increased profits to the business’, which means they simply ‘constitute an investment’ (Crouch, 2004: 18). Via such mechanisms, wealth can be used to manipulate the opinions of ordinary people in clandestine ways and even produce the illusion of civil society action through ‘Astroturf’ social movements or social network micro-targeting campaigns (Crouch, 2020: Ch. 2; cf. Davis, 2013: 94–95).

These changes should be considered in the wider context of the increasing centrality of promotional culture permeating organizations, professions, and institutions across society, persistently encroaching even upon formally non-promotional and non-commercial spheres. As Davis (2013) demonstrated, promotional imperatives ‘have become absorbed into day-to-day culture’ (p. 3) and now influence behaviour, practices, decisions, and strategies on different levels and in a range of social relations. Golding and Murdock (2022: 39–40) distinguished three types of highly active sources of ready-made news: public relations, political spin, and ‘think tanks’, with the latter usually just being ‘well-funded and ideologically rooted lobbyists’ for political actors or commercial interests (Golding and Murdock, 2022: 40). All of these industries of persuasion have seen a relentless expansion in recent decades and mostly outgrown journalism by size and financial might. Although the influence of public relations and other promotional industries on journalism is long-standing and extensive (see Franklin, 2011), PR has now ‘swollen to unprecedented levels’ and become ‘monumental’ (Golding and Murdock, 2022: 39). Furthermore, influential former politicians often become PR consultants and lobbyists (Allern, 2011) in what has become known as a revolving door system (e.g. Crouch, 2020: 58–60).

This gives credence to the premise that considerable inequalities exist in the production of information subsidies and influence on public political communication because actors with superior resources are at a clear advantage when employing promotional intermediaries (Allern, 2011; cf. Crouch, 2020; Davis, 2013: 158–162). As emphasized in critical accounts, ‘promotional intermediaries are employed primarily to fulfil state and corporate objectives. Their activities manipulate publics into acting against their own self-interest’ (Davis, 2013: 8). This can lead to the further centralisation of power since powerful actors seek to influence both the political process and, through information subsidies, also public opinion. While political influence and corporate financial power do not automatically translate into favourable news coverage and political decisions, because these relations are dynamic and often conflictual (see Davis, 2003, 2013: Chs. 7 and 9; Franklin, 2003), they undoubtedly take place on highly unequal grounds and in many ways mirror the wider inequalities of capitalist society. With the blurring of the lines between news, advertising and propaganda on digital platforms, it can be argued that inequalities are even easier to weaponize online.

Digital Platforms as the New Gatekeepers

The proliferation of online social networks has both reinforced and reinvented the established routines of news production, extending the practices in place for sourcing and disseminating news. The notions of interaction and participation have not only defined how journalism research has approached the blurred boundaries between journalists, their sources and the public (Singer et al., 2011), but also how newsrooms have adapted their skillsets to the always-on and omnipresent networks (Carlson, 2016). The ‘old’ processes of aggregating news have become a ‘new’ gateway not only to continuously feed news to the longed-for audiences, which are dispersed across digital platforms, but also for resource-strapped news organizations to optimize news production by adapting to the algorithmic logic of platforms (e.g. Coddington, 2019: 27; Golding and Murdock, 2022: 40). Sociological studies analysing these processes (e.g. Bouvier, 2019; McGregor, 2019; Paulussen and Harder, 2014; Zhang and Li, 2020) have generally focused on the selection, verification, presentation, and dissemination of news. They concur that platforms like Facebook, Twitter (renamed X in 2023), and YouTube are widely used in journalists’ routine, day-to-day practices, functioning as sites for gathering information (Paulussen and Harder, 2014: 549). They ‘both replace and complement existing channels of sourcing’ (Zhang and Li, 2020: 1193). With these changes, some basic features of journalistic engagement with sources, such as verification and contextualization, have been eroded in favour of what is ‘trending’ as a ‘news definer’ (Bouvier, 2019: 212). Journalists are readily taking ‘the pulse of public opinion’ from their own social media feeds, and in this sense have granted legitimacy to the digital platforms to create and steer information flows to the media and journalists (McGregor, 2019: 1081–1082). Social networks are thereby increasingly serving as a complementary tool for reaching out to the sources as well as the semi-automated verification of information. At the same time, they also nourish the tendency to replace the existing ways of sourcing and verification due to their easy-access and low-cost engagement with ready-made and handy sources and due to their potential to harvest, analyse, and visualize large amounts of data and information online (McGregor, 2019: 1196).

Nevertheless, digital platforms are not only sites of journalistic news negotiation, as is generally analysed in sociological studies but also private corporations embedded in the broader relations of production and distribution. These ‘technology companies’, as they label themselves, now play an ever more central role in social and political life and thus in public communication. Since these now count among the largest corporations in the world, with only a handful of platforms having a real influence in the highly monopolized networked communication, newsrooms are hardly ‘equal partners’ in this relationship. Indeed, there is ‘a dramatic imbalance of power between platforms and publishers’ (Petre, 2021: 108), with newsrooms increasingly forced to engage in networked communication, both if they wish to maintain their relevance in public communication, and if they want to retain their audiences, as they depend significantly on these actors as distribution channels to gain traffic. Journalists must therefore constantly monitor streams as sources for potential news snippets and stories, intuitively adapt their work to the platform logic to reach the dispersed attention of audiences, while simultaneously becoming growingly dependent on ‘algorithmically constructed source material’ (Golding and Murdock, 2022: 40). Within newsrooms, incentives that value views and clicks are often developed that put pressure on journalists (Caplan and boyd, 2018: 8; cf. Petre, 2021). News production is hence increasingly defined by ‘coercive, mimetic, and normative pressures, influenced through algorithmic prioritization of content determined through metrics’, transforming selection and sourcing in newsrooms; this prioritizes not only what is relevant for the public, but ‘how the value of this coverage is communicated to a wide range of actors communicating value through metrics’ (Caplan and boyd, 2018: 8; cf. Petre, 2021).

These adjustments indicate that the balance of power has shifted. The media and journalists are losing their once hegemonic position in curating public debates to digital platforms, whose attention-seeking practices are often closer to the negation of normative standards of the public sphere than their promotion (see cf. Benkler et al., 2018; Dahlberg, 2018; Reese, 2021). In this context, Shoemaker (2020) argued that online social networks have evolved into ‘supra-gatekeepers’, performing a macro-level gatekeeping function by curating, altering, and combining ‘unknowable amount of information from an unknowable number of sources’ (Shoemaker, 2020). As such, they hold ‘more power to define reality than any previous journalist or social media user – or all of them combined’ (Shoemaker, 2020).

The dominance of online social networks, which operate almost without public scrutiny, is directly linked to the general processes of the commercialization of communication mentioned above, with serious political implications. Their unprecedented growth, enabled by large injections of venture capital and supportive (de)regulation, is ideologically fuelled by the lofty ideals of the interactive and participatory potential of the Internet, but materially reinforced by the commodification of user data, exploitation of unpaid labour, and opaque algorithmic curation (Fuchs, 2014; Fuchs and Mosco, 2016). Considering them in the context of news production, it is critical they are examined as corporations with an active role in the surveillance-industrial complex, undermining the legitimacy of taxation on capital and profits, interfering with communication rights, and altering relations within the public sphere, because it is often actors with the greatest financial resources that end up being heard (Fuchs, 2014; Fuchs and Mosco, 2016). The role of quality journalism is gradually being diminished in networked communication and replaced by various forms of unsolicited propaganda that feed on the attention economy (e.g. Benkler et al., 2018). Digital platforms should not merely be explored as gatekeepers in this context, but in addition as political and economic actors in their own right. Their lobbying successes in accomplishing policy goals reflect digital platforms’ ability to maintain and expand their power, while the public interest is subsumed under corporate objectives (Popiel, 2018). Furthermore, these large technology companies go beyond promoting their services and facilitating advertising as they are actively engaging in the political process, especially during campaigns when they serve as ‘quasi-digital consultants’, shaping digital strategies, their content and execution (in the short run) and building relationships in the service of their lobbying efforts (in the long run) (Kreiss and McGregor, 2018).

Conclusion

News sources can be viewed as a research topic of great importance for democratic societies. The selections that journalists make distinctly define both the visibility and diversity of voices and topics within the public sphere. Even in an age of online social networks and the Internet, institutional news media remain a vital amplifier of political opinions (Benkler et al., 2018), with the choices made by journalists largely setting the contours of the public debate. Sourcing practices have nonetheless received little attention outside of the sociology of the media where studies have uncovered worrying trends. These include, most notably, journalists’ excessive reliance on elite sources and the growing tendency for news homogenization and the recycling of ready-made information. The existing crisis of institutional journalism and particularly its loss of credibility in parts of the population (see Reese, 2021), should at least partly be also attributed to these long-standing shortcomings. Even though they seem obvious from the empirical research, these problems are missing from the actual self-understanding of journalists, who still view journalist–source relationships as an antagonistic struggle between light and dark.

Although the sociology of the media has undoubtedly provided invaluable insights into journalistic sourcing, most studies encountered difficulties explaining why such sourcing practices exist and why they have evidently been intensifying. As we argue, wider power relations within society must be taken into account to understand them better. This is where critical approaches, for instance the political economy of communication, can provide valuable theoretical support. They can assist by identifying and explaining the crucial fault lines of journalism-as-labour and the tendencies of commercial media at the present historical conjuncture, while explicating general patterns of communication inequalities and hierarchies in capitalist society, which in many ways are connected to the growing dominance of information subsidies in public communication. Each of our admittedly brief sketches uncovers some of the internal and external processes influencing sourcing practices and all of them should be developed further in the future.

Commercial journalism is facing a profound crisis of the business model that sustained it throughout the 20th century, leaving journalists in an ever-worsening position of instability and with mounting demands on their productivity. With professional journalism as such being ever more impoverished, these trends have been likened to its ‘creative destruction’ (Splichal and Dahlgren, 2016: 9) due to its material deterioration. This is certainly not the case for all media since some of the largest institutions continue to thrive; still, in a winner-take-all digital environment, this seems to be a hegemonic pattern. There is a bigger possibility that quality journalism will only be available to those who can afford it, with everyone else being left with information scraps and propaganda (cf. Pickard, 2020: 88–90). The normative foundations of journalism, which ought to be grounded on critical publicity, are accordingly crumbling under the conditions of digital capitalism. This has a direct impact on the sourcing practices of journalists. They are more reliant on copy-paste recycling and readily available streams of information provided by ever more influential producers of subsidized information, which clearly favours those in power. At a time when we need critical journalism the most, journalism is increasingly materially circumscribed from providing it.