Sources that Trigger the News : Multiplexity of Social Ties in News Discovery

The study explores how the content of the social ties between journalists and their sources, and the multiplexity of the ties in particular, is reflected in the news discovery practices in the political beat. Some of the news ideas come from publicly available channels while others derive from journalists’ unique networks of social contacts (often to some degree informal). The sources connected to journalists via single vs. multiplex social ties achieve a discursive power (Jungerr et al. 2019) in different ways. The study is based on reconstructed news discovery situations (n = 162) from two different political journalism environments: Lithuania and Sweden, and combines quantitative and qualitative questions. First, it measures the prevalence of the multiplex social ties between journalists and the sources. Second, it analyzes how the multiplexity of these ties is reflected in the process of the news discovery and, third, the outcome—the news content. The results show that the prevalence of multiplex social ties, and the social network behind them, is reflected in what news journalists can access and select as newsworthy. Process-wise, multiplex social ties work as a shortcut but require a balance between maintaining the access to the network and distance to the source.