Copy-paste of journalistieke verdieping? Een onderzoek naar de manier waarop nieuwsfactoren in universitaire persberichten nieuwsselectie en redactionele bewerkingsprocessen beïnvloeden

Copy paste or in-depth journalism? A study of the relationship between news factors in university press releases and news selection and editorial processing of press releases. The leading question of this study is as follows: In what way do news factors in university press releases influence the way that news sites, press agencies, and national daily newspapers use these press releases in their news production? Firstly, the results show that about 90 percent of all press releases is ignored by the news media. Secondly, selection is influenced by the intensity of the presence of news factors in the press releases. Lastly, our results indicate that news factor intensity correlates negatively with the intensity of journalistic processing of the press releases. This last finding means that press releases with a high level of news factor intensity have a higher chance to end up relatively unchanged in news productions. This means that within the topics covered in the university press releases, journalists invest their scarce time and professionalism into unique topics rather than in issues with a high news value, which may also be covered by several other news media.