Winston Churchill said the UK and US are ‘divided by a common language’, but does this hold true of the US-UK journalism market? This chapter examines the journalistic practice of operating as an international journalist and the different news values and newsgathering between the US and the UK. It also makes a comparison of traditional journalism and Journalism 2.0 to gain insights into current practice. It will also look at both reporting about the UK for a predominantly American audience and reporting as a foreign correspondent back to the UK.The dominant cultural hegemony in international journalism has been the Anglo-American model, formed by the Big Four news agencies, The Associated Press, Reuters, UPI and AFP, and their largest market, the US. Chalaby argues that the Anglo-American model is borne out of discursive practices such as interviewing, newsgathering and fact checking (1996). The historical development of the Anglo-American model of journalism assumes that practice and practitioners on both sides of the Atlantic are a homogenous group, socially, culturally and professionally. Working practices such as writing, newsgathering, news values, accuracy, fact checking, the significance of official sources and the weighting of official quotes and information vary significantly on both sides of the Atlantic. How much do differences in reporting practices vary in reporting standards between the UK and US? Our case study draws on experience of international journalism to look at what drives some stories to resonate across the Atlantic.In observing the globalisation of news Boyd-Barrett (1998) pointed out that the number of players in global journalism had diversified over the previous 90 years as traditional news outlets such as TV, radio and newspapers thrived, though the locations or interests represented had not diversified. He also noted that the global news agencies had gained greater autonomy in that period and that this is a desirable condition for the agencies. Although the growth of the Internet since 1998 has tested the dominance of the Anglo-American model of journalism, it still prevails and the major global news agencies formulate operations around the US and the UK with common western political and economic values. The fragmented, fractured and individualistic nature of the Internet means that a serious challenge might be down in terms of TV output, which is expensive to make and distribute. This distribution is also topdown and arranged and organised by a small number of gatekeepers with common socio-economic beliefs and world views. Golding and Elliot point out that TV news provides an ideological distinctive world view that reinforces skepticism of ‘divergent, dissident or deviant beliefs’ (1979: 210). Multimedia forms of distribution are predicted to replace TV in the long run (Paterson in Boyd-Barrett, 1998), and although the Internet has so far failed to achieve this with TV news, it has made significant inroads into text-based journalism.
McConville et al. (Sat,) studied this question.