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16 The production of political coverage: The push and pull of power, routines and constraints
Abstract: This chapter discusses the journalistic practices shaping the reporting of politics. It is argued to conceive of political journalism as a subspace within the journalistic field that interacts intensively with the political field, because this theoretical approach highlights the power relations and world views produced by the insider culture of journalists and political actors. Moreover, the chapter suggests that this insider culture affords political journalists privileged access to information, but may also hamper their autonomy and the transparency of their actions. Further, the chapter argues that the routines and constraints of news production only strengthen this reliance on authoritative sources. Technological change and commercial pressures, however, may represent a challenge to this relationship and the practices which govern it. The chapter closes with a call for studies on political journalism in non-Western contexts, on non-elite, local media and for more comparative research efforts in order to broaden the rather partial and limited picture of political journalism we have so far. Key Words: political journalism, journalistic field, autonomy of journalism, news values, news routines, opinion-leading media

1 Introduction
This chapter discusses the journalistic practices surrounding the reporting of politics. It makes the argument that the practices of political reporting are underpinned by a key paradox: On the one hand, journalists are supposed to be in an adversarial relationship to concentrations of power, acting as advocates of the public (Higgins 2008). They are central to the medias role as a watchdog on government, holding it accountable for its actions through constant scrutiny, and providing citizens with the information that they need to make political decisions. The editorial processes involved in the production of political news have profound consequences for what information is available to audiences: The gatekeeping, news selection and agenda-setting work of journalism determine the universe of available political information, including what news events are covered and which individuals are given a voice, and which remain invisible to the public. On the other hand, political journalists are also frequently understood as being part of an insider political elite, complicit and intricately intertwined with political power

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(e.g., McNair 2011). This privileged insider status, in turn, comes to shape the priorities of news production, alongside more subtle institutional constraints such as production routines and the spatial and temporal organization of news-gathering. The relationship between political actors and journalists has been raised as an issue of concern in relation to debates over the health of democracy and citizenship. This discussion has become particularly heated over the past few decades as scholars and observers have grappled with evidence of declining voter engagement and political participation, and an increase in political disenchantment and cynicism. There is by now a fairly long-standing and well-established set of arguments suggesting, as Fallows (1998) memorably put it, that audiences believe that the news media have become too arrogant, cynical, scandal-minded and destructive (p. 3) in their coverage of politics. This, in turn, is alleged to generate a spiral of cynicism among citizens (Capella and Jamieson 1992). Such arguments are often associated with a media malaise thesis, which suggests that the media are responsible for public disengagement or malaise because of their negative and cynical coverage of politics (see also the chapters by Hopmann and by Maurer). The evidence for this thesis is, however, debatable, as scholars who have studied the phenomenon have been frequently found more robust support for the alternative hypothesis that the consumption of political news may actually be mobilizing, rather than alienating audiences. Along those lines, there is evidence for causal and reciprocal relationships between political interest and attention to political news, and between political interest and exposure to some, but not all, news media (Strmbck and Shehata 2010: 575; see also Newton 2005; Norris 2000). Among the writers who have provided the most careful analyses of the structural causes of public disenchantment with politics and the place of journalism within them are Jay Blumler, Michael Gurevitch and Stephen Coleman, who have examined what they see as a crisis of public communication that is sapping the vitality of democratic political culture (Blumler and Coleman 2010: 140; see also Blumler and Gurevitch 1995). Among other things, the crisis is evidenced in the decline in voting and other forms of political activism, and an increase in voter cynicism. To Blumler and Coleman (2010), there are a series of underlying causes for this crisis, including the increasingly adversarial nature of political reporting, the emphasis on politics as a game, the competitive nature of journalism and politics, the burgeoning of political news and information sources, and the emergence of a post-deferential culture in which politicians are forced to compete for attention with popular culture (see also the chapters by Stanyer, by Aalberg and by Hopmann). These trends, they suggest, have alarming consequences for processes of political representation and citizenship:
Political representation has come to be an act of ventriloquism in which the public is left feeling like inanimate dummies, spoken for and sometimes spoken to, but rarely spoken with.

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The demos have become outsiders, some gaping at the political show through the prism of an increasingly cynical media that appears to be run by a clique of entrenched insiders, others firmly turning their backs on it in varying degrees of distaste (Blumler and Coleman 2010: 142).

Clearly, then, in their views and those of other observers, the production of political news and the relationships between political actors, journalists and citizens which inform it has profound consequences for democracy. Related arguments focus on examining the conditions for news production, making the case that there is a crisis in political journalism arising from organizational constraints which limit the ability of reporters to fulfill their role in democracy. This crisis leads towards a more conformist, less critical reporting environment which is increasingly likely to prove supportive of incumbent governments (e.g., Barnett and Gaber 2001: 2) (see also the chapter by Stanyer). The chapter will explore some of these constraints in more detail as central to understanding the production of political news. Sociologically, political news production is a broad church, encompassing many kinds of professional practice, as well as complex internal and external relations. The category of the political journalist could be understood to entail anything from parliamentary correspondents to celebrity news anchors, local council reporters, political bloggers, and news agency stringers. These professional roles cover over a variety of specific work practices, positions in the newsroom hierarchy, and specialized skills. Here, although the chapter briefly considers a broader array of professional practices, the main focus is primarily on the production of political content at the national level in large part because this is by far the area treated in most detail by scholarly research. Nonetheless, there is evidence to suggest the salient impact of an increasing global public sphere (e.g., Volkmer 1999) on news production practices, including the emergence of 24-hour news broadcasters with a global reach (Cushion and Lewis 2010), alongside the continuing importance of international news agencies and foreign correspondents (Hannerz 2004; Paterson 2011) and local news (Franklin 2006). These developments, while only mentioned in passing here, are part of the broader landscape which informs the production of political news. The chapter opens by considering the distinctive characteristics of political reporting as a professional field, and considers the journalistic practices of political reporting, and the institutional constraints which shape them, including temporal and spatial constraints of news production. The chapter finally considers how new media technologies, including the rise of social media, are creating new challenges and opportunities for journalists. While many of these trends shape journalism as a whole, they have had a particularly significant impact on the professional practices of political journalism and raise fundamental questions about both its form and viability.

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2 Political reporting as a professional field

Political reporters are in constant contact with powerful political actors. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu introduced the idea of viewing social practices through the lens of distinctive and increasingly specialized and autonomous fields. In drawing on such terminology, Bourdieu called attention to the analytical usefulness of examining spheres of action with their own internal hierarchies, power relations, forms of tacit assumptions, and internally relevant markers of achievement and distinction; or what he referred to as forms of capital (e.g., Bourdieu 1984; Bourdieu 2005; Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992; see also Benson and Neveu 2005). Though fields have increasing degrees of autonomy, they also interact in significant and determining ways with other fields. The journalistic field is widely seen as part of the field of power; that is, it tends to engage with first and foremost those agents who possess high volumes of capital (Benson and Neveu 2005: 5). In this context, interactions between the journalistic and political field are particularly relevant, and Bourdieu has written about this relationship suggesting, in language echoing that of scholars of mediatization, that the journalistic field is both increasingly influencing, and influenced by, the political field (Bourdieu 2005: 41). To Champagne (2005) the journalistic field is caught between the fields of politics and the market, weakening the autonomy of its enterprise. Marchetti (2005) traced the increasingly specialized subspaces within the journalistic field as a whole, demonstrating that we need a more differentiated analysis of these subspaces because of the radically diverse backgrounds, experiences and practices of actors within them. Further, such an analysis also needs to consider the interactions of the logics of each subfield with external logics, such as the logics of particular media outlets or types of media, the journalistic field as a whole as well as that of broader mediatized social spaces (including that of politics) (Marchetti 2005: 79) (see also the chapters by Pfetsch and Esser and by van Alest). The notion of field theory, as advanced by Bourdieu and his followers, is an indispensable resource for understanding the sociological world inhabited by political journalists or what other authors in the book refer to as political communication cultures (see for example the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). It is particularly useful in highlighting the push and pull of autonomy and interrelations with other fields but also picks up on structural causes for the close relationship between political and journalistic actors, and signals the need for a differentiated analysis of journalistic subfields. As research on political correspondents over the past four decades has demonstrated, they constitute an elite political grouping; better educated and compensated, and more senior than the broader journalistic field (e.g., Tunstall 1970; Hess 1986; Wahl-Jorgensen 2009). Moreover, research has highlighted, in line with the observations of Bourdieu and his followers, that not only do political journalists constitute an elite within

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the broader journalistic profession; they are also closely linked with the politicians that they report on and are supposed to scrutinize through their reporting. Political journalists and politicians interact in the same narrow professional and social circles (see Marchetti 2005). What King and Schudson (1995) wrote about Washington politics is probably true of the ways in which politicians and journalists interact in legislatures around the world: The inhabitants of the world of Washington politics, naturally enough, talk more to one another than to other people, but there is the danger that this practice can become self-enclosed (p. 150). The terminology that has arisen around this phenomenon reflects the insularity of such environments: In the US, observers refer to goings on Inside the Beltway (around Washington DC), whereas the phrase, The Westminster bubble is used in the UK (e.g., Wring 2005) to describe the self-contained universe of journalists and political actors who interact in the hallowed corridors of Parliament (see also the chapter by van Aelst). King and Schudson (1995) examined the prevailing journalistic narrative which described former US President Ronald Reagan as a highly popular political leader, on account of his unsurpassed communication skills, captured in the widely circulating moniker, The Great Communicator. King and Schudson challenged this account on the basis of opinion poll data, arguing that compared to his elected predecessors, Reagan had the lowest average approval rating for the first two years of his administration precisely the years his legend as the Great Communicator grew (King and Schudson 1995: 134). They documented that political journalism has tended to be a largely oral culture, relying far more on face-to-face conversations than on evidence from documents and public opinion polls, leaving both journalists and politicians vulnerable to drawing conclusions that may resonate within their insider universe, but have little relevance to the prevailing public mood. In line with this observation, evidence suggests that, like other journalistic subcultures, political reporting has historically conducted its business at some remove from its audiences and publics, making assumptions about its views and desires which are based on common-sense understandings circulating within the newsroom, rather than systematic data (Herbst 1998; Lewis, Inthorn, and WahlJorgensen 2005). This, however, may be changing at a time where new technologies are enabling increasing audience quantification (e.g., Anderson 2011) and hence a far more acute and constantly updated awareness of audience behavior and preferences. Nonetheless, these long-standing trends point to an entrenched certain insularity in the culture of political journalists something which scholars have analysed in terms of practices of pack journalism and journalistic coorientation (see also the chapter by Stanyer). In the UK, the so-called lobby journalists have traditionally constituted a particularly elite group among political journalists a small group of reporters (less than 200) from national and international news organizations who enjoy privileged access to the heart of British political power. The lobby was instituted in

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1884, and the term refers to a physical location, as the status of being a lobby reporter provides access to the entrance to the House of Commons (Tunstall 1970: 3), where journalists can engage in informal interactions with politicians and their aides. But it also brings with it a broader set of privileges. Lobby correspondents have historically been granted access to documents prior to their broader dissemination, and have also been given twice-daily briefings by the Prime Ministers staff (e.g., Barnett and Gaber 2001; Tunstall 1970). Though there is evidence that the power of the lobby is declining in the age of digital information and the rise of 24hour news (e.g., Barnett and Gaber 2001; Gaber 2011), the broader sociological reality of a privileged insider group of political journalists remains salient. As a lobby correspondent for the US news agency, Dow Jones, described his experience in looking from the outside in:
Id say that working in the lobby has been the most peculiar experience Ive had in journalism so far () to a large extent the lobby and the structure of the lobby reflect in a sense the structure and the atmosphere of Parliament itself. Its an extremely clubby institution () to a large extent it serves the status quo in whatever form you want to interpret that. () the lobby itself has its own hierarchy where the political editors of certain British newspapers are at the top of that hierarchy (Barnett and Gaber 2001: 40).

This journalists observation neatly encapsulates the distinctive power relations and hierarchies within this (very privileged) subspace of opinion-leading media within the journalistic field. These, in turn, are predicated on particular forms of cultural capital, and the fact that, like other fields, actors operating within it have a clear interest preserving the status quo (see also the chapters by Stanyer and by Salgado). At the same time, it also highlights how intricately intertwined the subspace of lobby reporters is with the political subspace of Parliament. These distinctive features are deliberately built into the processes of lobby journalism. The 1956 version of the Lobby rules, a document written to introduce new reporters into the venerable institution, opened with the following admonition:
The technique of Lobby journalism can be fully acquired only by experience. It is a technique which brings the journalist into close daily touch with Ministers and Members of Parliament of all parties, and imposes upon him a very high standard of responsibility and discretion in making use of the special facilities given him for writing about political affairs (Tunstall 1970: 124).

Indeed, scholars and observers who have written on national political reporting frequently refer to the insular world formed by the close relationship between journalists and politicians. As Stephen Hess put it, The echo chamber of this world gives a special resonance, like the corridors in a hospital or penal institution (Hess 1981: 118). Hesss description calls to mind Michel Foucaults work on the clinics and prisons (e.g., 1991, 1994), which demonstrates that such institutions generate their own distinctive disciplining logics which might, however, expand their influence to the population in general, as in the development of the medical

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gaze or the broader self-policing discipline arising from the invention of the prison. This suggests, in turn, that we should understand not just the disciplining consequences of the political echo chamber but also its broader consequences for society as a whole. There are clearly pragmatic reasons for the close relationship between politicians and journalists, as their informal, everyday face-to-face contacts facilitate the production of political news and, along those lines, for the dissemination of politicians messages. As such, the relationship is symbiotic; one which is based on a mutually beneficial arrangement. One of the key distinctive features of the relationship between political journalists and their political sources is the convention of allowing sources to speak off the record, attributed only as sources close the White House or a Number 10 source, to mention just a few examples of the nomenclature used to conceal the identity of sources. To the British political journalist and observer Michael Cockerell and his colleagues, in speaking about the role of the Lobby, these non-attribution rules has turned the Lobby into the Prime Ministers most useful tool for the political management of the news (Cockerell, Hennessy, and Walker 1984: 33). It would, however, be misleading to suggest that these rules merely serve the interests of political actors. In fact, political journalists also view them as a key tool of their trade, because it allows them to publish information of a potentially sensitive nature which may otherwise remain out of the public domain. As such, both political journalists and their sources have a significant investment in maintaining the attribution rules, despite the fact that they go against increasingly voluble calls for transparency. This investment in the attribution rules was poignantly demonstrated in a study of the institutional setup of the politician/journalist relationship in the immediate aftermath of the establishment of the Scottish Parliament (Schlesinger, Miller, and Dinan 2001). In their study, based on ethnographic work and interviews with politicians and journalists engaged in the process of establishing the rules of conduct in the newly devolved Scottish Parliament, Philip Schlesinger and his colleagues found that there was great reluctance to move away from off-the-record briefings in favor of greater transparency. Journalists complained that doing so would compromise their relationships with sources and hence their access to information. As one political reporter told the authors, in justifying pressure from journalists to maintain the practice of off-the-record briefings:
Openness and transparency is judged on the degree of information about what reaches the public sphere () and if that takes some element of off the record and senior sources or whatever, then that is a service to the end of openness and transparency. Transparency of the actual process of government rather than the transparency of the process by which you get it (Schlesinger, Miller, and Dinan 2001: 101).

Such an understanding of transparency is clearly self-serving and fails to address the criticisms occasioned by the appearance of a secretive and intransparent rela-

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tionship between journalists and politicians. Nonetheless, this understanding also represents a time-honored view that the ends of transparency justify murkier means. Attribution rules are just one area, albeit a particularly poignant one, which reveals the precarious nature of political journalists information-gathering practices, and the ways in which it is heavily predicated on forms of secrecy which cement the insider status of political journalists, while raising questions about their autonomy (see also Tunstall 1970: 17). Certainly, the close relationship between political and journalistic elites has significant consequences for transparency and editorial independence. Outside of the well-trodden Anglo-American contexts, there are significant variations in the specific terms and nature of this relationship. Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini (2004) have suggested that media systems can be distinguished according to a series of features, including the extent to which journalists are instrumentalized. They define instrumentalization as control of the media by outside actors parties, politicians, social groups or movements, or economic actors seeking political influence who use them to intervene in the world of politics (p. 36). Hallin and Mancini (2004) argued that instrumentalization, alongside the pressures of commercialization, tends to be a threat to journalistic professionalism. Their analysis suggests that what they refer to as Mediterranean or Polarized Pluralist media systems characterizing countries including France, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain are marked by weaker professionalization and varying degrees of instrumentalization (Hallin and Mancini 2004: 67). Other scholars working in non-Western context have examined sustained and institutionalized practices of patronage, including bribes and the selective awarding of official advertising contracts (Hasty 2005; Macias Gonzalez 2012; Wahl-Jorgensen and Cole 2008). These practices share a relatively formalized and often widely known process for cementing journalistpolitician relations which translates into, for the journalists, favorable access to information and, for the politicians, favorable coverage, but at the same time threatens the autonomy of political journalists. Ethnographic and interview-based studies of the production of political content have tended to echo the idea that while the structurally, socially and physically close relationship between journalists and politicians generates opportunities for the dissemination of information, they may also compromise the independence of journalists and hence their ability to act as watchdogs on concentrations of power. Barnett and Gabers (2001) interview-based book on Westminster political correspondents chart four particular sources of pressure on political journalists which are, they suggest, having an adverse impact on the quality of journalistic work. First of all, they suggest that there has been a shift in the working relationship between political journalists and their sources as a result of the professionalization of political communication (e.g., Negrine et al. 2007) which has meant that spin doctors are now increasingly responsible for the communication of political

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messages. The exercise of tight control by increasing savvy media advisers means, according to Barnett and Gaber (2001: 45), that it is becoming exceedingly difficult for political journalists to retain a critical distance (see also the chapter by Kiousis and Strmbck). Secondly, they suggest that media ownership has an impact on media coverage, as powerful media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch take an active role in shaping political coverage and seeking to influence policymaking processes (Barnett and Gaber 2001: 56). Third and fourth, they trace an increasingly competitive, financially challenging and diversified media environment and changes in the working conditions of journalists, including the emergence of new technologies, the increasing requirement for multiskilling and shifting and increasingly casualized employment conditions in the media industry (Barnett and Gaber 2001: 78). The latter trends have only accelerated in recent years and are, as this chapter later discusses in more detail, reshaping the journalism profession as a whole (e.g., Mitchelstein and Boczkowski 2009). Another increasingly salient issue which has elevated the centrality of transparency in discussions over government communications is the rise of public relations as an industry which seeks to influence policy-making and media coverage behind the scenes (e.g., Davis 2002; Davies 2009; Franklin 2004; Schlesinger, Miller, and Dinan 2001). The growth and burgeoning sophistication of the PR industry, combined with the decline in the financial and human resources of media organizations, has meant that the vested (and usually corporate) interests represented by lobbyists are now increasingly seen as the invisible center of the political communications process. As Davis (2002) has documented, the public relations industry is becoming more adept than ever at drawing on or even creating experts, institutions and statistics supporting their interested efforts at manufacturing real news (p. 172173) (see the chapter by Kiousis and Strmbck).

3 Newsroom procedures, routines and constraints

The documentation of institutional constraints and their impact on the production of political content has been a long-standing theme in scholarship on political journalism. Jeremy Tunstalls 1970 book, The Westminster Lobby Correspondents, examined the working conditions of British parliamentary correspondents, suggesting that their work is constrained by commercial pressures, news values and a lack of transparency and cooperation with journalists representing other specialisms. Michael Traceys (1978) book, The Production of Political Television, based in large part on ethnographic work and interviews with producers of political programmers on UK terrestrial television, and informed by a political economy approach, concluded that political television cannot straightforwardly be seen to play a fourth estate role: [Rather] than serving the electorate or the people as an information-starved collective entity, and therefore acting out a role in a system

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of political communication, such television serves particular institutional and political interests (Tracey 1978: 248). More specifically, Traceys study demonstrated that any individual ideologies of political journalists played a limited role in shaping content given the fact that political journalists, as consummate professionals, were strictly bound and inhibited by institutional ground rules, by the concern of the organizational hierarchy with that adherence and by the routinized mechanics of programme making (Tracey 1978: 250). Yet these very same rules designed to ensure impartiality and editorial independence meant that journalists were forced to rely primarily on sources within the government party, and these sources, in turn, were able to impose their own interpretation on news events (Tracey 1978: 250). As Brian McNair (2011) notes, the ways in which the doctrine of impartiality is typically practiced works to contain political debate within a more or less tightly drawn consensus, which admits only an established political class and often marginalises or excludes others (5758) (see also the chapters by Jandura and Friedrich and by Hopmann). This pattern has been discussed in a different context in McNairs chapter in this volume, where a more detailed discussion suggested that political news tends to privilege authoritative sources. Indeed, broader studies of sourcing patterns reveal that the most powerful and, in particular, political elites are privileged in reporting, and that this means that their frames and interpretations will overwhelmingly be the dominant ones. For example, in their classic study of the public debate over mugging in the UK, Stuart Hall and his colleagues (1978) demonstrated that government sources were able to serve as the primary definers who settled the interpretative framework for stories which all other sources as well as journalists secondary definers were forced to follow. In the context of political coverage, resource-rich sources are able to determine what counts as rationality in any given case, whereas resource-poorer groups are forced to rely on spectacular strategies and tactics (e.g., Davis 2002; DeLuca and Peeples 2001) (see also the chapters by Stanyer and by Hertog and Zuercher). One of the recurring questions preoccupying those studying political reporting has been its ability to influence policy-making and its contribution to agendasetting (see also the chapter by van Aelst), or to determining what issues the public thinks are important (see also the chapter by Arendt and Matthes). A closely related area of research is that of news values research, which has focused on the criteria by which journalists and their news organizations decide which news events to cover, and which to ignore. This area of research was pioneered by Johan Galtung and Mari Ruge, who took up the apparently simple question of how events become news (Galtung and Ruge 1965: 65). They outlined a set of news values informing journalists selection of stories and angles. Among these, they highlighted reference to elite people (such as politicians), and suggested that events which are culturally meaningful, already in the news, and unfold within the publi-

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cation cycle of a news medium are more likely to attract coverage. Subsequent scholarly analyses have built on these findings. Among them, Schulzs (1982) work proposed six dimensions of news selections, including status (elite nation, elite institution, elite person), valence (aggression, controversy, values, success); relevance (consequence, concern); identification (proximity, ethnocentrism, personalization, emotions); consonance (theme, stereotype, predictability); and dynamics (timeliness, uncertainty, unexpectedness) (summarized in ONeill and Harcup 2009: 165). Political news especially at the national level fits particularly well with such criteria, as a high-status form of news often predicated on controversy and conflict, featuring a high degree of relevance and identification as well as predictability. There is some agreement that news values form part of a tacit knowledge which is passed down to new generations of journalists through a process of training and socialization (Harrison 2006: 153; Harcup and ONeill 2001); an unspoken set of rules which are learned on the job and become central to journalists ways of life. Nonetheless, Peter Golding and Philip Elliott (1999), in their ground-breaking study, Making the News, originally published in 1979, took a critical view of the news values literature. To them, the approach is guilty of embracing the mythology of journalism, celebrating the novelty, excitement and creativity of covering unknown and breaking news stories: [N]ews production is rarely the active application of decisions of rejection or promotion to highly varied and extensive material. On the contrary, it is for the most part the passive exercise of routine and highly regulated procedures in the task of selecting from already limited supplies of information (p. 118). They argued that decisions about news selection derive from assumptions on the basis of three principal concerns. While the first of these relates to the importance of the story to the audience, the second and third factors purely pertain to the ways in which the story fits the practical concerns of the news organization: First, accessibility is understood in terms of two factors, prominence and ease of capture. Prominence refers to the extent to which the event is known to the organization while ease of capture reflects how available to journalists is the event, is it physically accessible, manageable technically, in a form amenable to journalism, is it ready-prepared for easy coverage, will it require great resources to obtain. Secondly, fit reflects whether the item is consonant with the pragmatics of production routines, is it commensurate with technical and organizational possibilities, is it homologous with the exigencies and constraints in programme making and the limitations of the medium? Does it make sense in terms of what is already known about the subject? (Golding and Elliott 1999: 119). Editorial decisions do not merely reflect the significance of the event, but are also based on a consideration of limited resources, in the context of a highly routinized news production process (e.g., Kepplinger and Ehmig 2006). In political reporting, the routinization of news production maps neatly onto the highly pre-

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dictable and routinized schedule of political events, where much of what happens on a typical day is pre-scheduled, from briefings and press conference to major announcements and speeches, thus allowing for the careful editorial advance planning which is part and parcel of the temporal structure of news production (Golding and Elliott 1999). Indeed, much journalistic work focuses on careful temporal planning designed to limit the uncertainty of producing news. It could be argued that journalism is often marked by a stop-watch culture where what is valued is not so much creativity, but efficiency and the ability to produce news on a tight schedule (Schlesinger 1987). Ekstrm (2002) commented that journalistic knowledge production is steered by the demands of predictability and control over the ingredients of a programme that has a predetermined format, that will be ready at a given point in time and that recurs with a certain regularity (often daily) (p. 269). This is no less true of political journalism, where the pressures of deadlines only strengthened in recent years by the emergence of constantly updated online news and the rise of 24-hour news enforce the long-documented immediacyorientation of journalism and militate against contextual stories in an area of disposable news (Lewis 2010) where the need for speed (Juntunen 2010) dictates the terms of political news production. Changing temporal patterns of news production, in turn, have been alleged to profoundly affect the foreign policy-making process through the so-called CNN effect, as governments are increasingly pushed for immediate and forceful reactions to unfolding news events (e.g., Livingstone 1997) (see also the chapter by Robinson). Ultimately the most significant consequence of the spatial and temporal organization of news production is that it reinforces practices underwritten by the insider culture of political reporting. First of all, deadline pressures mean that journalists rely heavily on a limited number of easy-to-reach authoritative sources. In the case of political reporting, this means relying on known political actors and media professionals, rather than seeking out those who operate outside the corridors of power. Secondly, the spatial organization of news gathering into a process of beat reporting concentrates resources in specific locations that are likely to generate news stories and sources who are at the center of these stories such as the seat of government (e.g., Kavanagh 2011; see also Hess 1981). At the same time, this organizational model is also likely to leave alternative or oppositional viewpoints unexplored and outside of reach. Gaye Tuchman (1978: 2125) thus developed the metaphor of the news net to describe how the system of beat reporting catches the big fish or the sources who have privileged access due to location and status but lets the tales of less privileged people and groups slip through the holes. Adding to the tight temporal constraints on journalism, other institutional factors also shape political news production. In particular, critics have been alert to the consequences of commercial pressures, which are shaping the nature of news

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production across the board (commercialization). First of all, as discussed above, the downturn in the fortunes of the newspaper industry has resulted in a significant decline in the financial and human resources of many long-standing news organizations at all levels. Secondly, the commercial pressures on news are also alleged to shape the nature of political news, resulting in dumbing down, tabloidization and an increasing focus on scandal and sleaze in political reporting as well as in broader journalistic fields (see also the chapters by Schulz, by Stanyer and by Hopmann). Among the main proponents of these arguments is Bob Franklin (e.g., 1997, 2004, 2005), who has criticized the McDonaldization of journalism, or what he sees as the increasing dominance of entertaining, pleasing and easily digestible form of soft news which is, however, insufficiently substantial to provide citizens with the information that they need in a democratic society. In the political arena, such criticisms have often been associated with observations around an alleged personalization of politics, or the increasing focus on the personal lives of political figures, to the detriment of an emphasis on issues of policy and substance (e.g., Kleis Nielsen 2012; Langer 2012) (see also the chapters by Aalberg and by Hopmann). This alleged tendency has not necessarily been conclusively demonstrated in empirical research, but the heated academic debates over its existence dramatize a set of broader anxieties over the tension between style and substance in political coverage, and also over the shift towards a more entertainment-orientated political culture documented elsewhere in this book. Other observers, however, suggest that perceived shifts in the focus of political reporting towards softer, more emotionalized and entertaining styles, formats and content may be engaging audiences. For example, the rise of political entertainment formats, or what is often described as the new political journalism challenges the conventional seriousness of political reporting and also appear to be energizing new audiences, particularly among younger demographics (see also the chapters by Moy, Johnson, and Barthel and by Holbert, Hill, and Lee). Further, the medias focus on political scandal has also, according to some observers, been seen as both an inevitable consequence of a changing media environment and as potential benefit for democracy in its heightened scrutiny of the actions of political leaders (Thompson 1995, 2000, 2005). As Thompson (2005) described the process: Political leaders today are more visible to more people and more closely scrutinized than they ever were in the past, and at the same time, they are more exposed to the risk that their actions and utterances () may be disclosed in ways that conflict with the images they wish to project (p. 42). To Thompson (1995, 2005), the development that he characterizes as the transformation of visibility generates new risks but also new opportunities for politicians and audiences. On the one hand, it makes politicians more vulnerable to the exposure of any skeletons in their closets. On the other hand, it provides them with a far ranger set of opportunities for communicating with their publics (see also the chapter by Shaefer, Shenhav, and Balmas). Nonetheless, in an age of

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mediatization these forms of communication take place according to a media logic, which means that political leaders are compelled to tell their story by drawing on media-friendly strategies, which involve, among other things, simplification, stereotypization, polarization and personalization of the message, and an emphasis on horserace elements of the political game (e.g., Altheide and Snow 1979; (Strmbck 2008; see also the chapters by Schulz and by van Aelst). Certainly there may also be evidence to support the idea that political reporting is increasingly focused on the process of politics rather than on substance or policy (Louw 2010), due in large part to processes of mediatization described in this chapter and elsewhere (see also the chapter by Aalberg). Political reporters are both subjects to these changes and complicit with them; as this chapter has demonstrated, they are deeply embedded in their corner of the journalistic field but also interact in complex and mutually determining ways with the political field.

4 Looking to the future: Emerging trends in the reporting of politics

Overall, these developments suggest that political journalism remains a dynamic and contested area, and one that is currently undergoing profound transformations in terms of both practices and formats. In particular, technological change is having a profound impact on the working routines of political journalists, who now have an unprecedented array of information sources at their disposal, but also face new challenges and pressures. For example, as Ivor Gaber (2011) documented, the working days of journalists covering elections has changed profoundly alongside the rise of the digital campaign. This term covers over journalists increasing use of new media technologies, particularly social media such as Twitter, to keep abreast of campaign developments. Along those lines, Gaber (2011) distinguished between the conventional or analogue mode of campaign reporting and the emerging digital campaign practices (see also the chapter by Strmbck and Kiousis). The traditional analogue campaign day consisted of a series of face-to-face encounters between journalists and politicians on the campaign trail involving pseudo-events (Boorstin 1961) such as the morning news conference, the rally, and politicians carefully stage-managed walkabouts and encounters with citizens in shops, factories, restaurants and streets. By contrast, todays political reporter is much more likely to follow the campaign in a second-hand fashion; following live television and radio coverage, Twitter feeds, and online news updates, and continually posting their own updates, but spending less time on the ground in campaigns. This has a number of potential implications for the nature of campaign reporting and its role in democracy. Most importantly, perhaps, has been the decline of the press conference, a traditional campaign fixture. As political blogger Mark Pack put it:

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This election continued, and accelerated, the death of the morning press conference cycle. They were never perfect means of politicians and journalists interacting, but they did give journalists the chance to pin politicians down when there was bad news in the air. Without the fixed rendezvous in the diary, it is easier for politicians to dodge journalists and in the end that's bad for politics as it relies on robust, but fair coverage with journalists asking questions directly of the main players (Pack, cited in Gaber 2011).

In other words, the traditional watchdog role of political journalism may be increasingly difficult to fulfill under conditions where journalists opportunities for face-to-face interactions with, and questioning of, politicians are circumscribed by technological change and changing news cycles. The emergence of the digital campaign is, of course, part of a larger trend whereby new media technologies are shifting the nature of political news production away from the insular relationships between journalists and politicians encapsulated by the Inside the Beltway and Westminster Bubble cultures. Along those lines, many scholars and other observers have placed great store in the emergence of citizen journalism and the increasing proliferation of user-generated content, which has promised profound transformations by empowering The People Formerly Known as the Audience. If, as Ian Hargreaves (1999) suggested, in a democracy, everyone is a journalist, (p. 4) the ease of producing journalistic content has brought this utopian aspiration closer to reality by democratizing the production of news content, turning consumers into prosumers (Bruns 2008). Certainly, the ease of producing, publishing and sharing information through venues like blogs and social media has meant that it has become easier than ever for ordinary people to voice their concerns and tell their stories (Stanyer 2009), and for audiences to access a broader and more global set of voices and viewpoints (McNair 2009). Among other things, social media such as Twitter and Facebook have been seen to play a key enabling role in the Arab Spring revolutions of 2011 (e.g., Cottle 2011). Nonetheless, as discussions over developments ranging from Wikileaks to user-generated content have demonstrated (e.g., Wahl-Jorgensen 2012), journalists continue to proclaim the importance of their professional status and skill, and this is also true in the realm of political journalism where reporters, editors and pundits have rushed to the defense of their profession (e.g., Cassidy 2012). These defensive moves reveal much about the journalism professions need to justify its existence at a time profound challenges which appear to shake the profession at its core and undermine its legitimacy. At the same time, they also point to the fact that political journalists do possess specialist knowledge and skills which they bring to bear on a rapidly changing communication environment.

5 Conclusion
This chapter has explored key dynamics around the production of political content. It has argued for the analytical usefulness of an understanding of political

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journalism as a subspace within the journalistic field, and one which interacts in significant ways with the political field. By looking at the production of political content through such a lens, we can better understand the power relations and world views produced by the insider culture of journalists and political actors, and its consequences for democracy. Concretely, the chapter has suggested that this insider culture affords political journalist privileged access to information, but also may hamper their autonomy and the transparency of their actions, and compel journalists to take for granted the interpretations and world views of political actors. Further, the chapter has suggested that the routines and constraints of news production only strengthen this reliance on the views and interpretations of authoritative sources. Nonetheless, technological change may represent a challenge to this insular relationship and the practices which govern it. Here, it is worth noting that much of the research on the production of political content is focused on the work of political journalists working at elite, urban and national news organizations in Western liberal democracies, particularly the US and the UK. This bias is not unique to work on political journalism, but rather reflects a broader tendency in journalism scholarship whereby the field of study has been inescapably entwined with the power relations shaping the practice that is studied (Wahl-Jorgensen 2009). This is an important scholarly blind spot for several reasons. First of all, it is a significant omission because local media are far more numerous than national ones, widely read and trusted in their communities, and employ the vast majority of the journalistic workforce (Franklin 2006). More urgently, the pressures that are affecting the elite news organizations that remain the focus of the vast majority of scholarly work are felt far more fiercely, and with devastating consequences, in local and regional media. As local reporters struggle to cover local politics with increasingly scarce resources, the quality of political information available at the local level is suffering immeasurably (Franklin 2006). Similarly, the focus on the Anglo-American context severely restricts our understanding of the diversity of journalism cultures, and the recent turn to cross-country comparative research is therefore essential to a better appreciation of the complexities of the field (see also the chapter by Pfetsch and Esser). The very partial and limited picture offered in this chapter can only scratch at the surface of the complexity of relations between journalists and political actors; a relationship which may shape democracy more than any other.

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