JOURNALISM, NEWS SOURCES AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

Abstract

The manufacture of news, unlike other forms of production, relies on inputs from individuals and organisations located outside the formal news organisation in which production takes place (Franklin 1997, pp. 19-21). They are not paid in the usual sense of that word for their contribution and they are not subject to managerial authority. And yet they are vital to the news production process. Their cooperation and participation in the processes of news gathering and reporting is the outcome of negotiations and bargains struck implicitly or explicitly between them and journalists. They are the news sources on which all journalists rely for their livelihood. The relationship between the two groups is complex, shifts across time and particular settings and has been the subject of considerable scholarly attention (Ericson et al. 1989; Gans 1979; Larsson 2002). An understanding of the relationship between journalists and their sources sits at the heart of journalism studies. In the UK, the expansive public relations sector has become an increasingly significant source of news-serving not only as an agenda setter but actually providing stories which inform journalists’ copy. Declining newspaper circulations and falling advertising revenues have prompted a crisis of protability, job cuts within journalism and journalists’ growing reliance on public relations materials to fill newspapers’ editorial pages (Lewis, Williams and Franklin 2008a and 2008b). Davies describes PR as one of the two “primary conveyor belts” (the other being news agencies) feeding “the assembly line in the news factory” with the “raw materials” which journalists use to construct the national news (2008, p.74). This recent recognition of the resulting “Flat Earth News” has scholarly precedents. Thirty years ago Cutlip (1976) claimed 45% of newspaper stories originated in PR materials, while Golding and Elliot’s (1979) classic study identified broadcast news as little more than “a passive reflection of the information provided by the information producing strata” (1979, p.169). But the argument here is that the recent rapid growth in public relations across the 1990s,in tandem with the stasis in the number of journalists engaged in news production, has impacted on journalists’ news room practice, transforming them into mere processors rather than originators of news. This increasingly signicant role for PR in shaping news agendas has triggered what has variously been described as ‘churnalism’ (Davies 2008), ‘McJournalism’ (Franklin 2005) and ‘newszak’ (Franklin 1997). This chapter examines the shifting ‘editorial balance’ between journalism and public relations and the impact of the latter on journalists’ products and professional practices in both the national and local press. We begin by considering briey how scholars have understood the relationships between journalists and public relations.