الملخص الإنجليزي
Sources of information are one of the main variables affecting the media industry, through the content of newspapers and other media channels in the Sultanate of Oman. Focusing on newspapers, the content provided by international news agencies seems quite dominating especially in the Third World countries, where they depend heavily on these agencies as a source of information. This practice results a certain effect on the content of the newspapers, the kind of stories covered by the newspapers, and their credibility from the readers' perspective, The importance of this study stems from the fact that it is the first of its kind, as far as the researcher's knowledge, which analyze the news' sources of information in the Arabic daily newspapers in the Sultanate of Oman, represented by Oman Daily and Al Watan as the first two Arabic newspapers in the Sultanate. The study aspires to uncover, describe and analyze how Omani newspaper use news sources, and interpret this usage taking in consideration number of key factors like the ownership of these newspapers, the human resources and other financial factors may have an effect on the content. The study used content analysis form as a tool to collect data. The study came up with a number of findings, most importantly: The high proportion of the two newspapers (Oman & Al Watan) usage of external sources and the unidentified sources compared to their dependency on their own reporters. Through the analysis, both newspapers showed higher dependency on international news agencies compared to Oman News Agency (ONA). The study also revealed a pattern of reliability on the newspaper's reporters to cover local and national news, while depending on external resources to cover regional and international news. The findings of the study showed that the two newspapers rely mainly on their reporters and correspondents, to cover local news and events. In the case of covering regional and international news and event, the study shows that international news agencies takes the lion share as an external source of information and news, followed by what is so called "Agencies" as a source and ONA (respectively). The regional news agencies from the gulf region and other Asian agencies were less present as sources of news in the two analyzed newspapers.
