Sourcing the News: Key Issues in Journalism - an Innovative Study of the Israeli Press

* Sourcing the News: Key Issues in Journalism- An Innovative Study of the Israeli Press. Zvi Reich. CresskUl, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009. 244 pp. $59.95 hbk. $26.50 pbk. 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 the study is. Surely show-don' t-tell appUes 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 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 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. 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. 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 journalistsource 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. …