ABSTRACT

A significant part of the interaction between journalists and their sources in political journalism is informal or not mentioned in the media content. Visibility/invisibility and formality/informality are tactical choices applied by journalists and sources. They influence agenda building in the short term and shared interpretations that dominate the public sphere in the long term.

However, the extent to which informal and/or invisible sources participate, what their role is, and why have not been consistently measured. This paper offers a matrix model to map and compare the usage of formal/informal and visible/invisible interactions between journalists and their sources. The data consists of 475 journalist-source interactions in Lithuania and Sweden reconstructed by 33 political journalists.

The results demonstrate how different interactions presuppose different source roles in the news process. Formal invisible sources act as gatekeepers, and informal invisible sources act as agenda setters.

摘要

在政治新闻中，记者与其消息来源之间的互动有很大一部分是非正式的，或者在媒体内容中没有提及。可见性/不可见性和正式/非正式是记者和消息来源采用的策略选择。他们在短期内影响议程建设，并在长期内共享主导公共领域的解释。

然而，非正式和/或隐形来源参与的程度、他们的作用是什么，以及为什么没有得到一致的衡量。本文提供了一个矩阵模型来映射和比较记者与其消息来源之间正式/非正式和可见/不可见互动的使用情况。该数据由 33 名政治记者重建的立陶宛和瑞典的 475 次记者来源互动组成。

结果证明了不同的互动如何在新闻过程中预设不同的来源角色。正式的不可见来源充当守门人，非正式的不可见来源充当议程制定者。