Journal of Applied Communications Volume 93 Issue 3 Nos. 3 & 4 Article 3 Impact of Reporter Work Role Identity on News Story Source Selection: Implications for Coverage of Agricultural Crises Judith McIntosh White Tracy Rutherford Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/jac This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Recommended Citation White, Judith McIntosh and Rutherford, Tracy (2009) "Impact of Reporter Work Role Identity on News Story Source Selection: Implications for Coverage of Agricultural Crises," Journal of Applied Communications: Vol. 93: Iss. 3. https://doi.org/10.4148/1051-0834.1197 This Research is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Applied Communications by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Impact of Reporter Work Role Identity on News Story Source Selection: Implications for Coverage of Agricultural Crises Abstract This study examined coverage of the December 2003 bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) event to discover impact of reporters’ work role identities on news story source choices and to explore implications of results for agricultural crisis coverage. Content analysis was performed on 62 stories from U.S. newspapers in the Lexis Nexis database, selected through keyword search December 23, 2003 through October 31, 2004. These stories were divided into two equal groups based on reporters’ work-role identity (dichotomized between science-specialty beat reporters and non-specialty reporters) and analyzed by length, number of sources, and source variety.