Social Networks and News Production: A Study of Taiwan Correspondents in Mainland China

News production is news people's reconstruction of reality through social interaction in ideological and cultural contexts. The relationships between journalists and sources are important for news production, as interactions between journalists and their sources determine how social reality is defined and how social meaning is constructed. Previous studies on journalist-source relationship usually adopt two approaches. In traditional journalist-source relationship research, researchers regard news sources as aggregate of independent individuals. They believe that social attributes of news sources influence journalists' construction of social reality. However, they do not pay much attention to the relational linkages among social actors. When a relationalism model is adopted, researchers focus on dyad relationships between journalists and sources, where a person is able to retain his individuality, but less attention is paid to the triad structure. Here, the third party can provide both opportunity and constraint to the previous two actors and their relationships. This study views interactional relationships among journalists and sources as interdependent networks, and argues that the interactional relationships and structure of journalist-source network influence the media construction of social reality. Journalists construct social reality for the audience, and international news is the symbolic reality about the world constructed by foreign correspondents. In the context of international relations, foreign correspondents present the social reality of other countries by constructing a network of sources (news access) and maintaining this network (news interaction). One such example is Taiwan correspondents based in mainland Chinese bureaus. They are outsiders who are yet nearest to the mainland Chinese system and have the best understanding of Chinese language and culture. The subjects of this study are these Taiwan correspondents. This study discusses how interactional relationships between Taiwan correspondents and sources influence the media representation of social reality. This study tries to include all Taiwan correspondents in mainland China as research sample. It adopts multiple methods including participant observation, survey, in-depth interview and content analysis. The research procedure involves several steps: First, I conducted participant observation on three Taiwan correspondents from different types of media organizations in six time slots, and online ethnography of all Taiwan correspondents during the last three years. Second, I carried out a survey and an in-depth interview of all Taiwan correspondents in mainland to study their news access and relevant interactions. The response rates are 71.6% and 83.6% respectively. Third, I randomly drew 1,000 news articles reported by the Taiwan newspaper reporters, and conducted a content analysis to study the influences of journalistic practices on the news content. The result shows that the network formation of Taiwan correspondents in mainland China is influenced by several factors at the individual level, news routine level, extra-media level and ideological level. They construct social networks with high demographic homophily and a certain degree of value heterophily. The result also shows that the Taiwan correspondents maintain instrumental, expressive or composited interactions with various social actors. Their interactions with core sources are close, strong in trust and varied over time. The result also shows that news access and news interactions between the Taiwan correspondents and their sources influence the salience and core issue of cross-strait news, influence the media representation of multi-dimensional social reality in various geographic regions of mainland China, but have little influence on the news stand of presentation. This study finds that the Taiwan correspondents in mainland China represent and reconstruct the relations of social actors in their news content. As journalistic experience accumulate, the Taiwan correspondents tend to internalize their social relations with core sources in order to get a better understanding of social relations among other sources, cross-strait relations and mainland Chinese social reality. The main contribution is the introduction of social network analysis into news production research by examing the essence of media representation. The analytical perspective is shifted from individuals with certain attributes to linkages among relational social actors. The attempt to link macro social structure and micro individual interactions explains how interactional relationships between journalists and sources shape the world presented by the media. Journalists continue to construct social networks, optimize the network structure, and mobilizing sources embedded in the networks. They represent and explain the social relations involved and observed, which constitutes the world they present to the audience. This study also has practical implications for journalists in reporting foreign news and domestic news. The strategies of news access discussed in this study can help journalists get appropriate news sources and find the brokers who are crucial for their news work. The modes of news interactions discussed in this study facilitate journalists to obtain information, points of view, better understanding of the society as well as prediction of news events in the future.