THE SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF U.S. JOURNALISTS AND THEIR "BEST WORK''

Research on the sociology of news has tended to de-emphasize the impact that the social characteristics of journalists may have on news content. This study suggests that more attention should be paid to the link between these individual-level characteristics of news workers and the content that they produce. The study is a secondary analysis of short narratives from 327 reporters who worked with a high degree of newsroom autonomy. They were asked to give a recent example of their "best work''. The topics of the stories that they cited varied systematically according to some of the reporters' social characteristics. This finding suggests that certain individual-level factors may have a stronger link to the production of news than is generally believed.