For a long time,
gate keeping has provided a
dominant paradigm for journalistic news gathering and news publishing in the mass media, both for journalists’ own
conceptualization of their work and for academic studies of this mediation process. In media such as print, radio, and TV, with their inherent structures of available column space, air time, or transmission frequencies, it is necessary to have established mechanisms which keep watch over these gates and select events to be reported according to specific criteria of newsworthiness. Gate keeping is the process by which selections are made in media work, especially decisions whether or not to admit a particular news story to pass through the “gates” of a news medium into the news channels. Lately, however, the effectiveness of gate keeping has been questioned from a number of perspectives: on the one hand, increasingly ‘the practice of journalism is being contaminated from outside. The “fourth estate” is in danger of being overwhelmed by the “fifth estate”, the growing number of “PR merchants and spin doctors” influencing the news agenda’ (Turner et al. 2000: 29, following Franklin) and undermining the reliability of the gate keeping process itself. This is also related to the fact that ever since the emergence of 24-hour broadcast news services and even more so since the advent of online news the reporting speed required of news services has also increased steadily, which has made gatekeepers even more likely to rely on prepared material from this ‘fifth estate’ rather than spending time and money on their own, independent research.
Further, the addition of the World Wide Web to the media mix has meant that news consumers are now
far less reliant on what passes through the gates of the mainstream news organizations, but can bypass these altogether and turn directly to first-hand information providers. Technological advances are opening up opportunities for individuals to express themselves to a wider audience. The consumer is turning producer as the affordability and ease of operation of digital recorders, still cameras and DVCs make confident non-journalists to record and transmit coverage of news events.
This disintermediation has meant, therefore, that online the gates are now located with the information providers (ultimately, with anyone who publishes a Website with potentially newsworthy information) as well as with the end user.
Thus, for the online context gate keeping may no longer be the most appropriate news gathering paradigm; instead, it is replaced with an alternative approach to gate keeping altogether that is gate watching. This practice of monitoring the content of external sites and alerting the community to new developments can usefully be described as ‘gate watching’ I: users-as-journalists watch the gates of other publications to see what material passes through them – but they have no ability to prevent that material from being published, or to keep other users from reporting material which they themselves might have considered less than newsworthy.Gatewatching is a significant modification to the power structures of journalism; the focus has shifted away from a strict selection of ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ (leaving anything else unpublished), to the alerting of readers to the most relevant of information from all the content which is currently available. Gate watchers fundamentally publicize news (by pointing to sources) rather than publish it (by compiling an apparently complete report from the available sources). While maintaining the benefits of gate keeping (specifically, the ability to provide readers with an overview of current key news), this addresses several problems inherent in the
gatekeeper approach:
• Stories have the potential to be more deeply informative, since readers are able to explore the source materials directly, and in full;
• The speed of news reporting increases since new stories can be posted as soon as source information is found anywhere on the Net, without a need to wait for journalists to file their stories or gatekeepers to complete their evaluation; the news gathering process becomes more transparent, and readers are not prevented from checking a report’s sources for themselves, but instead encouraged to do so; the news gatherer’s personal bias may still affect their own report, but since readers are more likely to consult original sources this bias will have a reduced effect; Gate watchers do not require significant journalistic skills, but instead need to have more general online research skills.
This is linked to the new media-driven shift from news as information to news as myth. Some downsides or challenges are clearly visible:
• Gate watching relies almost entirely on the availability of existing news sources
• It evaluates and publicizes news, but does not create news reports itself.
• Misinformation and bias in the original sources will therefore be passed through to the reader.
• Gate watching also requires more work of the reader, who (in line with general trends for online audiences) really must be an active user rather than a passive recipient of news, and takes on some of the role of the traditional gatekeeper-journalist themselves: by passing through the gates pointed out by the gate watcher, the user in their search for information and their evaluation of what they find becomes their own gatekeeper. But people in developing countries are not much aware and are passive users.
• Finally, gate watching also continues to rely on the gate watchers’ intuition of what news topics might interest their users. News as myth is myth, after all – but at the very least the plurality of gate watcher sites enables a plurality of divergent myths. ‘People are increasingly able to seek out stories and storytellers who challenge and reject views of the state scribes [i.e., of the major political and economic interests].
• People tell each other news as myth. News as myth is myth, after all – They must have the ability to find others who share and confirm their views of the world.
• People must have the research skills and their ability to make the most of electronic networks and cheap digital equipment for news production and distribution.
