This paper feeds into public and academic discourses about declining quality standards in print journalism, in particular the claim that newsroom pressure for increased productivity invariably yields low quality journalism or churnalism, the churning of ready-made source materials into news articles. Drawing on ethnographic data collected at the business newsdesk of De Standaard, a Flemish quality newspaper, I illustrate how business journalists actually write news from corporate and agency sources by tracking the news production process from story entry to (pre-final) publication. My data provide detailed empirical evidence for the discursive intricacies of reproductive newswriting, i.e. writing from sources. Specifically, my data highlight how churnalism (i) forces attention to the materiality, creativity and domain knowledge of journalists; (ii) prompts news frames which enable journalists to write fast and efficiently; (iii) is a journalistic genre in its own right. Taken together, these findings contribute to a more empirically grounded discussion of sourcing practices in a globalized journalism.

1. Quality Churnalism:
Ethnographic Insights into
Business News Production
Tom Van Hout
NewsTalk&Text
Ghent University
Journalism in the 21st Century: Between Globalization and National Identity
July 16-17, 2009 | University of Melbourne | Melbourne, Australia

2. Two faces of journalism: ‘new’ media
Technological innovation
A digital revolution in journalism
New journalistic practices
Cultural shifts in news production
and consumption
Audiences: from passive consumers
of news to active producers of news
(aka ‘produsers’ or ‘prosumers’)

3. Two faces of journalism: ‘old’ media
Mainstream media are struggling
with the print to online migration
Declining numbers: circulation,
audience figures, advertising
revenue, staff count and market
capitalization are down
Print journalism in particular has
been bleeding red ink
Interinstitutional news coherence
and news isomorphism

4. Churnalism: rip and read journalism
journalists have become news
processors instead of generators
market demands force smaller
workforces to produce more
journalists have become less weary
of PR copy
decreased editorial independence
in UK newsrooms
Source: Lewis, Williams & Franklin 2008

5. Source reliance: news agencies
“approximately half (49 per cent) of news stories published in the quality
press and analysed for this study were wholly or mainly dependent on
materials produced and distribute [sic] by wire services with a further fifth
(21 per cent) of stories containing some element of agency copy.”
Lewis, Williams & Franklin 2008: 29-30

6. Source reliance: PR sources
“similarly striking with almost a fifth (19 per cent) of stories deriving
wholly (10 per cent) or mainly (9 per cent) from PR sources. A further 22
per cent were either a mix of PR with other materials (11 per cent) or
mainly other information (11 per cent) while 13 per cent of stories
appeared to contain PR materials which could not be identified.”
Lewis, Williams & Franklin 2008: 30

7. Content analysis & source transparency
“textual precedents to news
articles”
Keyword-based content analyses of
two single-week samples
comprising 2,207 newspaper
stories of UK domestic news and
their respective public relations and
news agency source materials
Source: Lewis, Williams & Franklin 2008

8. The process of print news production
Batch vs. Real Time Processing, Print vs. Online
Journalism: Why the Best Web News Brands Will
Never Look Like The New York Times
Cody Brown - http://codybrown.name

9. The process of print news production
“The messy, opinionated, incomplete, rumorladen, shit-
show that is actual news production is hidden away.”
Cody Brown

10. Analyzing the news process
Follow the story:
entry – negotiation – writing

11. Case study: Gazprom

12. Story entry and assignment
Gaz de France (GdF) press release announcing new
contract between Gazprom and GdF
News agency feed: spotted by the desk chief
Assigned to Steve during an editorial conference

13. Story production
Gazprom process product differential
Total number of characters 1879 1592 287
Total number of words 328 291 27
Production time (in minutes) 32.10 / /
Pause time (in minutes) 15.47 / /
Total duration of writing process (in minutes) 47.58 / /

14. Story production

15. Story production

16. Selecting and organizing source texts
Copying news agency feeds
first of all they’re in Dutch ... and also because [the Belga
feed was based on] AFP and DPA and we’re not directly
subscribed to these…this was relevant in this case because
I had read in the papers that a number of French
journalists followed Gaz de France to Moscow’.

17. Selecting and organizing source texts
Reducing source material
I start scanning...starting systematically at the top, seeing
what’s most important and having seen how much space I
am given (to write the news story) and then I select what’s
important in this story and start deleting everything I think
is not useful for the story.

18. Writing the lead

19. Findings
Reproductive writing
– Source reliance on PR and press agency copy
– Interpretive creativity in revision strategies
– Materiality of digital writing: space constraints
Churnalism as a process of entextualization
Transformation of various news discourses into a
unified, narrative account of news event
Comprising interpretation, creativity, domain
knowledge and reproduction

20. Conclusions
A linguistics of news production:
Offers detailed description of situated agency
Illuminates the practice of reproductive news writing
Documents the institutional trajectories of news
Contributes to a more nuanced understanding of
news work in a globalized journalism

21. Further information
– Tom Van Hout
– Ghent University
– tom.vanhout@ugent.be
– NewsTalk&Text
– http://www.ntt.ugent.be
– http://aloxecorton.wordpress.com
– http://twitter.com/tomvanhout