ABSTRACT
This chapter explores research on news production with the hierarchy of influences model as the structure guiding the narrative, before discussing three recent key trends in the form of a critique of newsroom-centric research, a review of non-human news production, and a call to investigate new entrants to the journalistic field more closely. Early gatekeeping theory thus assumed that ‘news’ is information journalists simply have to select, which, however, ignores many other crucial factors in news production, among them how journalists and editors are socialized in a newsroom. In the 1990s, Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen Reese organized these forces on newswork into what they called a hierarchy of influences, which has become a key model for understanding news production. At the centre of the model in its most recent form lies the individual level, which explores how journalists’ professional identity and ideology, as well as individual attributes like gender or age, affect news production.
