Newsgathering and language: Concerns and strategies among European minority language journalists

Minority language media journalists face specific difficulties during the newsgathering process such as the lack of news agencies and scarcity of sources that speak their language. This reality could affect the production and quality of their news stories since often times those journalists, working in their community, must act as if they were foreign correspondents covering newsworthy issues abroad and in a different language. To overcome these problems, they deploy diverse strategies that lead to different journalistic outcomes and news stories as it can be seen in this article. It is based on a fairly representative and stratified survey of journalists from ten European minority languages (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Corsican, Breton, Frisian, Irish, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Sámi).