Making Investigative News: Social Network, Collaboration, and Journalistic Autonomy

• In Event: Citizens as Collaborators: Extending the Voices of Journalism

Abstract

This study aims to examine Chinese investigative reporters’ social network and cross-institutional collaboration, and to relate them to journalistic autonomy and deviance. We found that investigative reporters in China form a close-knit community. On average, reporters claimed to know about more than thirty colleagues from various media institutions. The top three popular forms of collaboration are to share informants, to share background information on a news topic, and to offer materialistic help. Meanwhile, reporters seem to hold pretty positive thoughts toward such favor exchange behavior, believing that collaboration could bring truth to the public and could facilitate reporters’ investigation. Reporters’ social network size and closeness showed strong predictive power in predicting collaboration frequency but not so much in predicting one’s attitude toward collaboration. And finally, we found that journalists with a close and larger social network tend to be more independent in the process of their news production, but only with limited effects.

Authors

• Fei Chris Shen, City U of Hong Kong

• Zhian Zhang, Sun Yat Sen University