CNN Newsource and What It Makes Available

Presenter Full Name: Joel Moroney, master’s student

College of Communication and Information: Journalism and Media

​

Full author list: Dr. Mark Harmon and Joel Moroney

46^th Annual CCI Research Symposium

STUDENT RESEARCH STARS

CNN Newsource and What It Makes Available� 

Mark D. Harmon, Professor

&

Joel Moroney, graduate student

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Geography of TV as reflected in download feed

• This content analysis is an exploration of the material made available by one news sharing affiliate service, CNN Newsource. This research explores if those video news items carry forward some of the same flaws noted by Rosenblum, Adams, UNESCO, and many others.
• Those flaws include a parochialism evident in domination either about or of specific interest to Western (US/European) audiences—only showing up in Third World to cover disasters and coups.

​

How CNN Newsource describes itself

• With 36 domestic and international editorial operations and more than 1,000 local news partners in our network, CNN Newsource is the industry’s most powerful newsgathering resource and North America’s most widely-distributed syndicated news service.
• CNN Newsource provides you with 24-hour digital distribution and eleven live digital satellite channels to create a compelling local newscast. Your CNN Newsource regional newsgathering partners work in the trenches with you -- to support you as news develops, collaborate on key stories and gather news that matters to your audiences (CNN Newsource Overview).

​

Hypotheses and Research Questions

These past observations and findings suggest the following hypotheses and research questions:

H1. Domestic U. S. items will outnumber intl. items regarding material available via Newsource.

H2. Intl. items, as compared to domestic U.S. items, will have a higher % of disaster/accident stories.

H3. Among international items, those from European nations (plus Canada) will outnumber those from Latin American, African, and Asia nations.

RQ1. What news topics are covered by items made available in this affiliate feed?

RQ2. What story forms are most frequently made available by this affiliate feed?

Sample

Newsource

Page

​

Notice the

Left Column

Navigation

& Internal

Tallying

​

One can

Click on

each story

for more

Information

Including

Supers and

Scripts.

The blue minimization

button was useful

for coding breakdowns

of two categories:

​

• Europe/Middle

East/Africa

divided into

Europe

Middle East

Africa

​

• Accident Disaster

divided into

Intl. Accident Disaster

& US Accident Disaster

Methodology

• Researchers opted for a constructed-week approach in which coding would occur on one day and then not again for six days (because stories can linger on the feed for up to four to five days). The staggering over 14 coding days thus created two constructed Monday through Sunday weeks, and also assured that individual items were not coded twice in the content

analysis. The days of coding, all starting at 1:05 p.m. (both for consistency and to avoid hourly updates as coding was in progress) were:

• Saturday, Sept. 23; Friday, Sept. 29; Thursday, Oct. 5; Wednesday, Oct. 11, Tuesday, Oct. 17,
• Monday, Oct. 23; Sunday, Oct. 29; Saturday, Nov. 4; Friday, Nov. 10,  both coders (intercoder reliability check day); Thursday, Nov. 16; Wednesday, Nov. 22; Tuesday, Nov. 28; Monday, Dec. 4; and Sunday, Dec. 10.

​

Methodology

• An intercoder reliability day took place on November 10, during which both coders coded the same information and reviewed results for accuracy. The reliability was calculated in the standard manner, the number of times a set of ratings are the same, divided by the total number of units of observation that are rated, multiplied by 100.
• Reliability was 100 percent for relaying CNN-coded data. For our data set our manual coding was used to separate CNN’s International category “Europe/Middle East/Africa” and to separate the Disaster category into national and international stories. Coding reliability was calculated at 195 out of 204 instances, for an intercoder reliability of 95.59%.

Findings

• H1 was supported. Domestic U.S. items significantly outnumbered international news items available via Newsource, at a rate of typically four or five to one.
• H2 was not supported. International stories were statistically about as likely to focus on disasters as U.S. stories, roughly two percent or story counts for each.
• Hypothesis 3 was not supported. Among international items, those from European nations (plus Canada) did not outnumber those from Latin American, African, and Asia/Pacific nations. But Africa at 37 stories was barely more than 1% of international items.

Findings

• RQ 1. U. S. Politics and Crime & Justice were the largest topic category by far, combining for almost half (48.71%) the topic-coded stories fed.
• Judged by percent of the US regional population, the US Northeast was overcovered and the Pacific Coast undercovered.
• RQ 2. Package stories were the most common story form, followed by Cut Sound, File, and Raw.
• Huge jump in Mideast stories following outbreak of Israel/Hamas War, ranging from five to twelve in the first three codings, then jumping to 208 in the next feed after the Oct. 7 attack.

Findings & Discussion

• In each of the 14 coding days, wars were the CNN-coded #1 Top Story on all but one occasion, first with the Ukraine War, but then displaced by the Israel Hamas War.  Once the U.S. House Speaker Crisis took the top spot, and U.S. politics items made up many of the other top five with the global climate crisis sometimes getting a reference. 
• Rosenblum book title needs a bit of an update.  A better title for today’s international geography of news might be When We’re Finished Telling You about U.S. Politics and Crime, We’ll Give You Lots of Wars. 
• This research looked at the stories made available to affiliates of CNN Newsource, it does not reflect stories actually selected and aired, or the geography of visual news on domestic and international news sites.  Those would make for good follow-up studies on what appears to be the changing geography of the tools and videos available to newsrooms.