section_path: Social organization of news production/News organizations
section_name: News organizations
paragraph_text: News organizations
  
  Viewed from a sociological perspective, news for mass consumption is produced in hierarchical organizations. Reporters, working near the bottom of the structure, are given significant autonomy in researching and preparing reports, subject to assignments and occasional intervention from higher decision-makers. Owners at the top of the news hierarchy influence the content of news indirectly but substantially. The professional norms of journalism discourage overt censorship; however, news organizations have covert but firm norms about how to cover certain topics. These policies are conveyed to journalists through socialization on the job; without any written policy, they simply learn how things are done. Journalists comply with these rules for various reasons, including job security. Journalists are also systematically influenced by their education, including journalism school.
  
  News production is routinized in several ways. News stories use familiar formats and subgenres which vary by topic. "Rituals of objectivity", such as pairing a quotation from one group with a quotation from a competing group, dictate the construction of most news narratives. Many news items revolve around periodic press conferences or other scheduled events. Further routine is established by assigning each journalist to a beat: a domain of human affairs, usually involving government or commerce, in which certain types of events routinely occur.
  
  A common scholarly frame for understanding news production is to examine the role of information gatekeepers: to ask why and how certain narratives make their way from news producers to news consumers. Obvious gatekeepers include journalists, news agency staff, and wire editors of newspapers. Ideology, personal preferences, source of news, and length of a story are among the many considerations which influence gatekeepers. Although social media have changed the structure of news dissemination, gatekeeper effects may continue due to the role of a few central nodes in the social network.
  
  New factors have emerged in internet-era newsrooms. One issue is "click-thinking", the editorial selection of news stories—and of journalists—who can generate the most website hits and thus advertising revenue. Unlike a newspaper, a news website has detailed data collection about which stories are popular and who is reading them. The drive for speedy online postings, some journalists have acknowledged, has altered norms of fact-checking so that verification takes place after publication.
  
  Journalists' sometimes unattributed echoing of other news sources can also increase the homogeneity of news feeds. The digital age can accelerate the problem of circular reporting: propagation of the same error through increasingly reliable sources. In 2009, a number of journalists were embarrassed after all reproducing a fictional quotation, originating from Wikipedia.
  
  News organizations have historically been male-dominated, though women have acted as journalists since at least the 1880s. The number of female journalists has increased over time, but organizational hierarchies remain controlled mostly by men. Studies of British news organizations estimate that more than 80% of decision-makers are men. Similar studies have found ' old boys' networks ' in control of news organizations in the United States and the Netherlands. Further, newsrooms tend to divide journalists by gender, assigning men to "hard" topics like military, crime, and economics, and women to "soft", "humanised" topics.