Amateur Sources Breaking the News, Meta Sources Authorizing the News of Gaddafi's Death: New Patterns of Journalistic Information Gathering and Dissemination in the Digital Age
Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
Standard
Amateur Sources Breaking the News, Meta Sources Authorizing the News of Gaddafi's Death : New Patterns of Journalistic Information Gathering and Dissemination in the Digital Age . / Mortensen, Mette; Kristensen, Nete Nørgaard.
In: Digital Journalism, Vol. 1, No. 3, 2013, p. 352-367.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
Harvard
APA
Vancouver
Author
Bibtex
}
RIS
TY - JOUR
T1 - Amateur Sources Breaking the News, Meta Sources Authorizing the News of Gaddafi's Death
T2 - New Patterns of Journalistic Information Gathering and Dissemination in the Digital Age
AU - Mortensen, Mette
AU - Kristensen, Nete Nørgaard
PY - 2013
Y1 - 2013
N2 - This article takes its point of departure in the thesis that today’s global, digitalized and conver- gent media environment has promoted new patterns of information gathering and dissemina- tion within journalism, and war journalism in particular, which involve changing forms and various degrees of interplay between elite and non-elite sources as well as media professionals and amateur sources. On account of their proximity to unfolding events, amateur sources often break the news by means of raw and fragmented bits of visual and verbal information. Elite sources rarely possess the same exclusive access to information from war zones, but are instead brought in to comment on, validate and grant legitimacy to amateur sources as a form of explicit source criticism that we would like to term metasourcing. This new pattern of information gathering and sourcing within war reporting manifests itself most clearly in cases of major international news events, which render visible the multitude of sources and the speed of information production and distribution. A recent example is the capture and subse- quent death of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sources included by selected newspapers to report on this event, the current article investigates the following research questions: Which types of sources are brought into play in the news coverage of Gaddafi’s death, and which forms of interplay between sources in today’s globalized and convergent media landscape are indicated by this case?
AB - This article takes its point of departure in the thesis that today’s global, digitalized and conver- gent media environment has promoted new patterns of information gathering and dissemina- tion within journalism, and war journalism in particular, which involve changing forms and various degrees of interplay between elite and non-elite sources as well as media professionals and amateur sources. On account of their proximity to unfolding events, amateur sources often break the news by means of raw and fragmented bits of visual and verbal information. Elite sources rarely possess the same exclusive access to information from war zones, but are instead brought in to comment on, validate and grant legitimacy to amateur sources as a form of explicit source criticism that we would like to term metasourcing. This new pattern of information gathering and sourcing within war reporting manifests itself most clearly in cases of major international news events, which render visible the multitude of sources and the speed of information production and distribution. A recent example is the capture and subse- quent death of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sources included by selected newspapers to report on this event, the current article investigates the following research questions: Which types of sources are brought into play in the news coverage of Gaddafi’s death, and which forms of interplay between sources in today’s globalized and convergent media landscape are indicated by this case?
KW - Faculty of Humanities
KW - global media
KW - war journalism
KW - metasourcing
KW - amateur images
KW - amateur sources
KW - breaking news
KW - death of Gaddafi
KW - elite sources
U2 - 10.1080/21670811.2013.790610
DO - 10.1080/21670811.2013.790610
M3 - Journal article
VL - 1
SP - 352
EP - 367
JO - Digital Journalism
JF - Digital Journalism
SN - 2167-0811
IS - 3
ER -
ID: 44959957