ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at how the smartphone and the practices of news reporting have become entangled, and how its affordances have become embodied in newsgathering behaviour – and how, in some situations, they have altered that behaviour or enabled new journalistic models such as the live blog. Journalists’ sourcing routines are the definitive characteristic of the profession and the bedrock of factuality and objectivity, despite sources bringing their own, often dominant, agenda to the process. Elite sources are still favoured for hard news stories; for human-interest features and sports stories, journalists are more willing to contact online sources. Smartphones have also given rise to a novel form of journalism, the live blog, which involves “a single blog post on a specific topic to which time-stamped content is progressively added for a finite period – anywhere between half an hour and 24 hours”.