Researching news agency production and content

The ubiquity of news agency content in the world’s media diet has never been matched with an abundance of research about that content and how it came to be. Indeed, analysis of the content produced by news agencies and their structures and production processes is rare. This gap is particularly acute in the Global South, where national news agencies are a staple of media; similarly, the classic “big four” agencies dominate existing research. This chapter examines the challenges of researching news agencies and their content, and surveys prominent discoveries of researchers who have attempted to do so. The unique challenge stems from the embedded nature of news agency words, sounds, and images within the “retail” (as Boyd-Barrett called it) content audiences see. While an attentive journalist will know what portion of their story originates with an agency, it is difficult for readers or researchers to know this. We assess the task of obtaining agency content to study it, and review traditional and computational approaches to analyzing the output of news agencies and its circulation. Some analysis has depended upon collaborations with news agencies including ethnographic or interview-based studies of production – an increasingly rare form of coproduction with industry; this is potentially due to their dispersed operations and apprehension about critique. Researchers have studied content with a variety of objectives. A frequent theme has been understanding agencies as agents of globalization or imperialism, potentially injecting foreignness into an unsuspecting nation’s discourse. Others have focused on their agenda setting role as shapers of a national, regional, or global conversation. And some research has simply set out to document the extent of their ubiquity when media give no clear indication of where and how they’ve relied on news agency content. We conclude with recommendations for future research.