The dominance of institutional sources and the establishment of non-elite ones: The case of Italian online local journalism

Abstract

This article presents findings from a 1-year-long ‘online news ethnography’ and 20 semi-structured interviews conducted in Italian local newsrooms. It explores journalists’ practices in their relations with sources throughout the entire process of news production: discovering, gathering, and writing news. The relation between institutional sources and journalists sees the former acquiring increasing importance for the latter. At the same time, journalists guarantee access also to a limited array of non-elite sources. The result is what can be called the ‘pluralization’ of primary definers: the extensive and unframed use of a wide range of sources (mainly institutional, but also non-elite). Whether this asymmetrical coverage reinforces or weakens conceptions of political, social, and cultural power should be investigated further, but the work of journalists as watchdogs appears to be in danger.

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