Media scholars describe country-specific media systems that condition the norms and values underlying news production (Hallin & Mancini, 2004, 2011). However, in the international press corps, representatives of various media systems come into contact as they participate jointly in press conferences. This raises the question of whether journalists in the international press corps develop common norms, or persist in country-specific practices. News production consists of stages, each of which may reflect a different framing of news content (Eriksson & Östman, 2013). One way to investigate the question is through the analysis of the type and percentage of adversarial questioning practices adopted by journalists of different profiles within the international press corps. Adversarial questioning has been shown to be an effective descriptor of the interactive component of news production in both the U.S. (e.g., Clayman et al., 2010) and G8/G20 contexts (Comstock, forthcoming). This study proposes that in the international press corps, the stages of news production may be differentiated by the degree to which practices common across media systems, namely interactional practices, are embedded, reflecting greater cohesiveness with the international collective at the initial stage of gathering information. Domestic norms then diverge in relation to the framing of content in the finished news product. Questions posed to Presidents Putin and Medvedev in G8/G20 press conferences 2000-2015 are assessed for two indicators: (a) initiative, and (b) adversarial content, and compared to the final news product of Russian and U.S. journalists. Results are discussed in terms of the journalists’ gender, country of employment, and publication represented, differentiating between publicly and privately-owned enterprises. The degree to which differences in media systems are apparent in the press conference stage versus the final news product are discussed.