There is only one news agency (which has the State as its major shareholder), and its presence as a news source for the media is enormous. Lusa has newsrooms in Lisbon and Oporto, apart from regional delegations in all the districts. Besides the provision of news and photos, in the past two years the agency started providing its clients with sounds and videos as well, thus increasing its presence in all the media.
It is not uncommon for journalists, following orders from above, to hide the fact that this or that piece of news has Lusa as its source, either not quoting the source or rewriting the original material in order to make it look ‘original’. This trend increased in the on-line sections of media companies, where most of the newsrooms are composed of very few, and very young professionals, which causes most of the journalistic work to be no more than “desk work”. And because the speed of publication is the first rule in many information sites, the presence of the agency in the area of breaking news is huge, turning it into “the biggest agenda-setter in the country”, to quote the deputy editors we interviewed.
Two other trends are widespread: the high dependence on institutional, official sources, and the increasing ability of Public Relations (PR) organizations to place their material in the pages of the news. A recent study on the origin of the political news in the four main Portuguese dailies (Ribeiro 2009) showed that about 60 % of news items had been originated by PR material, or by communication agencies, rather than by the initiative of the media themselves. As one leading PR manager recently said, “For better and for worse, news sources are installed in the newsrooms” (as cited inSouza 2008).
