AMATEUR SOURCES BREAKING THE NEWS, METASOURCES AUTHORIZING THE NEWS OF GADDAFI’S DEATH

Abstract

This article takes its point of departure in the thesis that today’s global, digitalized and convergent media environment has promoted new patterns of information gathering and dissemination within journalism, and war journalism in particular, which involve changing forms and various degrees of interplay between elite and non-elite sources as well as media professionals and amateur sources. On account of their proximity to unfolding events, amateur sources often break the news by means of raw and fragmented bits of visual and verbal information. Elite sources rarely possess the same exclusive access to information from war zones, but are instead brought in to comment on, validate and grant legitimacy to amateur sources as a form of explicit source criticism that we would like to term metasourcing. This new pattern of information gathering and sourcing within war reporting manifests itself most clearly in cases of major international news events, which render visible the multitude of sources and the speed of information production and distribution. A recent example is the capture and subsequent death of Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011. Based on quantitative and qualitative analyses of the sources included by selected newspapers to report on this event, the current article investigates the following research questions: Which types of sources are brought into play in the news coverage of Gaddafi’s death, and which forms of interplay between sources in today’s globalized and convergent media landscape are indicated by this case?

Keywords:

• amateur images
• amateur sources
• breaking news
• death of Gaddafi
• elite sources
• global media
• metasourcing
• war journalism

Notes

1. This article is the product of close collaboration between the two authors, and we are equally responsible for the content. Our names are listed alphabetically.

2. In total 147 visuals illustrate the 124 articles in the sample. Thirty-one visuals are video clips (six) or stills from video clips (25) produced by amateurs.

3. All Danish text is translated to English by the authors of this article.