Question: What rules are implemented and practiced in the leading news media regarding the selection and in-house processing of news items?
News selection
All the journalists in the study work very similarly when it comes to news selection. The most important thing, which everyone addresses, is that you must keep up with the media landscape, what is happening daily and keep track of the other news outlets. A journalist needs to be up to date on the news. This applies to both other news media and social media. One journalist talk about how she has regular routines to keep up with the news. She watches specific programs throughout the day and especially in the morning before coming to work. When she starts her day, there is a meeting with the whole newsroom where everyone talk and discuss what subject or case they plan on focus on that day.
When selecting news to report, it is important that it is material concerns many people, is relevant, important and interesting. These are typical criteria that were repeated in the interviews. Every journalist talked very much about the same kind of selection and what is important for news to be categorized as news.
One of the journalists managed the front page of the newspaper online and therefore worked a lot with relevance and selection news article. This is how she explained this process:
“I have control of our front page, so I always prioritize relevance. Of course, we prioritize based on what is like the big, relevant news topic of the day and we also prioritize our own cases. If we have a revealing case, it gets good priority. And we try to have a mix of different subjects.”
A big part of how the journalists select news is connected to a journalistic regulation poster called Vær Varsom-plakaten.
Social media sources
Like there is caution about the use of sources in journalism, it seems that all journalists are extra cautious when it comes to sources from social media. Nothing is referred to unless the journalist have contacted and obtained permission from the person who have shared a story or is the person behind a case. This is the most important criteria and rule for using social media-sources. By extension, it is important to check profiles who are potential sources. The possibility of a false profile is legitimate, and this must be thoroughly investigated before using the source.
