Nhung Nguyen

Key scholars

• Robert Park (1922)
• Kurt Zadek Lewin (1943)
• David Manning White, a journalism professor at Boston University (1950)
• Pamela Shoemaker, Martin Eichholz, Eunyi Kim, and Brenda Wrigley (2001, 2009, 2011)

Seminal reading(s)

• Park, R. (1922). The immigrant press and its control. Harper & Bros., NY.
• Lewin, Kurt. “Forces behind food habits and methods of change”. Bulletin of the National Research Council. 108: 35–65.
• Lewin, Kurt (1947). “Frontiers in group dynamics”. Human Relations. 1 (2): 143–153. doi:10.1177/001872674700100201.
• White, David Manning (1950). “The “gatekeeper”: A case study in the selection of news”. Journalism Quarterly. 27 (4): 383–391. doi:10.1177/107769905002700403. S2CID 164602148.
• Shoemaker, Pamela J.; Vos, Tim P. (2009). Gatekeeping Theory. New York: Routledge. ISBN 978-0415981392.
• Shoemaker, P. et. all(2001). “Individual and routine forces in gatekeeping”. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 78 (2): 233–246. doi:10.1177/107769900107800202. S2CID 145448374.
• Kwon, K. H., O. Oh, M. Agrawal, and H. R. Rao (2012) “Audience Gatekeeping in the Twitter Service: An Investigation of Tweets about the 2009 Gaza Conflict”, AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (4) 4, pp. 212–229.
• Brun A, (2003). Gatewatching, not gatekeeping: Collaborative online news. Media International Australia Incorporating culture and policy, 107 (1), 31-44.
• Process of Gate Keeping in Media: From Old Trend to New

Key concepts

• “Gatekeeping”- Gatekeeping mechanism
• “Gatekeeper”
• “Gate” – “Gated”
• “Network Gatekeeper”
• “Audience gatekeeping”
• “Gate- watching”

Main premises

• In a nutshell: Gatekeepers are the data decision makers who control information flow to an entire social system – based on personal preference, professional experience, social influences, or biases they allow certain information to pass through to their audiences (Gatekeeping Theory by Shoemaker + Vos)
  • “Gatekeeping is a selection process in which all the information is organized by level of importance and interest.” – [Shabir & Safdar – Article 1 in readings list]
  • “The gatekeeper/s fix on which information is relevant after sorting it out in a hierarchy that determines what they need.” – [Shabir & Safdar – Article 1 in readings list]
• Concept: The Gatekeeper decides what information should move to a group or individual and what information should not. The gatekeeper is using their own influence like social, cultural, ethical and political. (It’s the idea that one’s own political and social influences determine what information the gatekeeper is going to share with the publics). In the terms of news media, this is the job of the editor. They have to decide what information will be published and what will not.
• Example: While a news channel receives numbers of new items in any given day, they cannot choose to show all of the new items to its audience because it could affect the channel’s reputation within its publics and organizational policies. An international new affiliate may receive a story about the recent event that happened at the Chiefs Kansas football game, but may choose not to run this story because it does not have any international relations and does not align with their audiences news needs.
•  
• Things I found interesting:
  •  “Simply put, gatekeeping is the process by which the billions of messages that are available in the world get cut down and transformed into the hundreds of messages that reach a given person on a given day.”  Ten years later Shoemaker admitted a broader concept of gatekeeping: “However, the gatekeeping process is also thought of as consisting more than just selection. … In fact, gatekeeping in mass communication can be seen as the overall process through which social reality transmitted by the news media is constructed, and is not just a series of ‘in’ and ‘out’ decisions” (Shoemaker, Eichholz, Kim, & Wrigley, 2001, p. 233). Thus, theories of communication focused mainly on the process of gatekeeping and identifying the prominent factors that influence it.

Classic gatekeeping

Journalists/editors/newsrooms are the gatekeeper, they judge and reject writing pieces based on 1) not worthy of being reported or 2) there was another story on the same event

• Information moves step by step through channels. The number of channels varies and the amount of time in each channel can vary.
• Information must pass a “gate” to move from one channel to the next, such that…
• Forces govern channels. There may be opposing psychological forces causing conflict which creates resistance to movement through the channel. Further…
• There may be several channels that lead to the same end result.
• Different actors may control the channels and act as gatekeepers at different times

(This results in the 5 categories of newsworthiness including Strong impact; Violence, conflict, disaster, or scandal; familiarity, Proximity, and timeliness and novelty.)

(KU’s TIPCUP: Timeliness, Impact, Proximity, Conflict, Unusualness, and Prominence)

Audience gatekeeping

Shoemaker and Vos (2009) and Kwon agreed on a new “gatekeeper”- the audience- when the audience judge themselves for newsworthiness, comment and share news as re-processing and re-broadcasting.

Gatewatching (open journalism) – Brun

In the online context, gatekeeping may no longer be the most appropriate news-gathering paradigm; instead, it is possible to find new forms of news-gathering which have developed entirely new organisational structures. Replacing what Paul Levinson calls ‘the rusted gatekeeper’ (1999: 199ft) is a new approach which offers an alternative to gatekeeping altogether: gatewatching.

Model of Communications for Gatekeeping

Classic gate-keeping: Information > Classic Gatekeeper > Shares messages > With their audiences (print, broadcast, etc.) > With their intended support of messaging in mind (with third person effects too)

New gatekeeping: Information > new media outlets (editors as a gatewatching identity) > audience gatekeepers > re-producing + re-broadcasting

(Audience of media outlets > Decide what information and messaging should be presented for themselves and to be represented > To the other audiences)

Common methods

• Survey, case study, observation (traditional)
• In-depth interview (traditional)
• Content analysis (traditional-digital)
• Follower/following; sharing, reposting, re-tweeting (digital)

Typical research questions

• Who are the gatekeepers?
• Which criterias for news filting? What influences gatekeepers in news disseminating? (why do they choose what they choose?) 
• Who are news gatekeepers of such new media?
• What influences they have on newsroom operations?
• Through what mechanism does such influence happen? In other words, what message elements would trigger audience gatekeepers’ reactions on social media like sharing or retweeting?

Limitations

• The “gate” can be objective, abuse of power, unstable (change priority). Relating to third person effect theory, gatekeeper may imply censorship on its audience or to be self-censored. The limitation of paper size, TV-audio space can cause media bias and audience bias.
• Gatekeeping theory suggests only one gate, but in this digital media, there are many. It may be difficult to find new gatekeepers of such new media. Gatekeeping is limited in the fact that it is audience specific. 
• Although the editors of media outlets have the power to say what gets disseminated and what doesn’t, at the end of the day, the audiences of the media outlet are the determiners of the information presented to them. 

Developments

• The idea of people/individual journalism
• Media literacy and information literacy for audience and individual journalism

Gate – “entrance to or exit from a network or its sections.”

Gatekeeping – “the process of controlling information as it moves through a gate. Activities include among others, selection, addition, withholding, display, channeling, shaping, manipulation, repetition, timing, localization, integration, disregard, and deletion of information.”

Gated – “the entity subjected to gatekeeping”

Gatekeeping mechanism – “a tool, technology, or methodology used to carry out the process of gatekeeping”

Network gatekeeper – “an entity (people, organizations, or governments) that has the discretion to exercise gatekeeping through a gatekeeping mechanism in networks and can choose the extent to which to exercise it contingent upon the gated standing.”

*This is the series of theories from KU’s Jour801 Course- Communication Theories