Information Gathering for Online News Publications: A Multidimensional Issue for Media Professionals and Educators

The purpose of this study is to reveal some current issues concerning the gap between the education and practice of Romanian online news reporting, especially regarding the activity of information gathering, critical event reporting and fulfilling the role of exposing reality in an objective manner. Several observations from previous studies showed a discrepancy between the educational standards of journalism schools in the matter of news documentation and the reality on the ground. We tried to see what skills the faculties of future journalists must train in order to ensure a return of the media to a more critical attitude, necessary for a democratic society, starting from the qualitative analysis of several local and national media platforms in Romania. Our main interest was the degree to which reporters that publish news on online media platforms use filed documentation, interviews and other news gathering techniques in their activity, compared to simply publish institutional PR briefings or third-part articles. The conclusions of our research are that the vast majority of news is based solely on curated information and lacks not only a critical approach, but also the personal input of reporters.