The Negotiation of Corporate News : A Study of Source-Media Interaction

Previous research has described the increasing number of corporate media relations experts and the professionalization of their work vis-a-vis media and focussed on providing normative and directive advice on how to interpret and address this development from a critical (concerned/societal) or an instrumental (organizational/professional oriented) perspective. By employing institutional thoughts on translation and editing, we propose a different research perspective on journalist-source interactions. Based on empirical field studies at a business news department at a major Danish broadsheet newspaper and on two separate corporate information departments at two Swedish companies, we argue that the relation between journalists and their sources is as much a relation of mutual dependency and negotiation as it is a relation of conflict, power and diverging interests. We also argue that corporate media work is not only a temporally and spatially dispersed set of dynamic and constantly re-negotiated activities, but also a routinized and highly organized process that is institutionally and organizationally rooted between the different actors. Hence, this paper seeks to contribute to further in-depth understanding of the negotiation of corporate and business news.