ABSTRACT
At the beginning of their classic study of news production, Making the News (1979), Peter Golding and Philip Elliott quote an exchange from Neil Simon’s comedy, The Odd Couple (1966), involving the journalist Felix and two women:
Cecily: What eld of endeavour are you engaged in? Felix: I write the news for CBS. Cecily: Oh! Fascinating! Gwendolyn: Where do you get your ideas from? Felix: (He looks at her as though she’s a Martian) From the news. Gwendolyn: Oh, yes, of course. Silly me…
(in Golding and Elliott, 1979: 5)
Golding and Elliott (1979) use this dialogue to highlight the widespread belief among journalists that their work is simply to report what is already there. For journalists, news is not made, but found. The production of news
is a self-evident practice: everyone knows what news is, although journalists, through years of practice, may have developed a particularly good ‘nose for news.’
