SOURCING THE SOURCES–RECENT TRENDS IN JOURNALISM

Abstract

At the heart of the discipline of journalism lies the relationship between journalists and their sources. Journalists rely on informants for intelligence collection and narrative creation. Simply stated, there will be no news without the sources. A "source" in journalism, as the name implies, refers to a source of information from which the reporter obtains material for writing a story. This includes documentary sources like published papers, social media, and data dumps from websites like WikiLeaks. The reporter's connection to source isn't static. It changes historically, socially, financially and economically. It is also substantially evolving in response to advances in communication technologies. NGOs can create, curate, and publish information, and the audience can. In doing so, relationships between actors and the hybrid network begin to develop as the "create, manipulate, or direct knowledge flows in ways that match their purposes" and "modify, allow, or disable others' agency in the process.