There is no centralised national news agency in the UK. The Press Association (renamed PA Media in 2019) is over 150 years old and is owned mostly by a consortium of national and regional newspaper publishers. Other national and international news agencies are also frequently used, including Reuters, Associated Press, Agence France Press, and Australian Associate Press. Some news outlets make extensive use of agency copy in their online output, particularly MailOnline.
Journalists tend to have a significant degree of freedom to pursue sources and stories (though newsroom roles differ and local newspaper journalists are more likely to be reliant on external sources of information due to pressures on time and resources, with agency copy and public relations (PR) material; see, e.g., Indicator C4 – Journalism professionalism). Face-to-face and telephone interviewing is still regarded as the main method of interacting with sources and obtaining information (Spilsbury, 2018: 34). Investigative journalism and the use of foreign reporting continue to be central to UK news organisations, though economic pressures have reduced the capacity of newspapers to engage in both (e.g., Indicator C9 – Watchdog function and financial resources).
The problem of “churnalism” – the recycling of PR material as news – has been well documented in the UK print media and has been detected in both national and local news content (see Indicator F5 – Company rules against internal influence on newsroom/editorial staff). Syndication of content (that has not been produced by a news agency) is rare, although anecdotal evidence is beginning to emerge of replicated stories within the local newspaper portfolios of some regional publishers responsible for large numbers of titles. The recent Local Democracy Reporter Scheme – a partnership between the BBC and local newspapers – results in a central repository of stories to be accessed by members of the scheme, though this is produced by a network of reporters embedded in local newspapers, rather than a centralised agency or syndication network (Tobitt, 2019).
Studies of news media content at the time of elections has often found that institutional and elite political sources dominate news coverage (Moore & Ramsay, 2015), though broadcasters routinely use members of the public as proxy sources for public opinion in political stories (Cushion, 2018). News media typically do not omit sources on political grounds; the practice is prohibited to a degree on television due to impartiality rules (though the qualifier of “due” impartiality means that all views need not be included in news reporting; for more details on internal pluralism in newsrooms, see Indicator E10 – Rules and practices on internal pluralism).
