City Research Online

Abstract

Creativity and verification are intrinsic to high quality journalism, but their role is often poorly visible in news story creation. Journalists face relentless commercial pressures that threaten to compromise story quality, in a digital era where their ethical obligation not to mislead the public has never been more important. It is therefore crucial to investigate how journalists can be supported to produce stories that are original, impactful, and factually accurate, under tight deadlines. We present findings from 14 semi-structured interviews, where we asked journalists to discuss the creation of a recent news story to understand the process and associated Human Information Behaviour (HIB). Six overarching behaviours were identified: discovering, collecting, organising, interrogating, contextualising, and publishing. Creativity and verification were embedded throughout news story creation and integral to journalists’ HIB, highlighting their ubiquity. They often manifested at a micro level; in small-scale but vital activities that drove and facilitated story creation. Their ubiquitous role highlights the importance of creativity and verification support being woven into functionality that facilitates information acquisition and use in digital information tools for journalists.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2022 The Authors. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of Association for Information Science and Technology. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) Z Bibliography. Library Science. Information Resources > Z665 Library Science. Information Science
Departments:	School of Science & Technology > Computer Science
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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