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The Use and Verification of Online Sources in the News Production Process

This chapter has two aims. It discusses how and which online sources journalists use today and how journalists can actually verify information online. We also discuss how the use of online sources affects the prevalence of balanced and objective reporting in mediated discourses. The chapter includes a short case study concentrating on how journalists in the Netherlands select and verify sources online, and suggests that there is little indication that online sources have fundamentally changed issues such as elite bias in news journalism. There is also no indication that the value journalists place on “traditional” techniques of news production has changed. The chapter shows that there is a clear challenge to how online and social media sources should be verified and that journalists have begun to intuitively develop hybrid forms of verification. The chapter concludes with suggesting several actions for journalists to guide the research production process in an online environment.