NIEMAN LAB – 24/07/2019
JOSHUA BENTON
People — and by people I mean non-journalists here, normals — have some pretty wild misconceptions about how reporters and editors do their work. To take one example: Only 58 percent think that, when reporters use anonymous sources, they actually know who the source is; most of the rest think the journalists themselves have no idea who they’re talking to. Around a quarter of Americans surveyed aren’t aware of the difference between a reporter and a columnist, or between a news story and a press release.