Gatekeeping (communication) - Gatekeeping in The 21st Century

Gatekeeping in The 21st Century

More than fifty years after White’s Mr. Gates study, in 2001, Shoemaker, Eichholz, Kim, and Wrigley studied the forces in news gatekeeping in relation to coverage of Congressional bills. More specifically, they were interested in two hypotheses: 1) the routine gatekeeping force of assessing a bill’s newsworthiness will be related to how prominently a bill is covered. And 2) the individual journalist forces (education, political ideology, work experience, ethnicity, gender, voting behavior) will be related to how prominently a bill is covered. They also predicted that the newsworthiness of a bill would be more important than journalists’ personal characteristics. Surveying both journalists (for their personal characteristics) and editors (for evaluating newsworthiness, Shoemaker and her colleagues found that only newsworthiness had a significant effect on the amount of coverage given to a bill, thus their first hypothesis was supported as well as the idea that newsworthiness would be more important than personal characteristics.

While Shoemaker et al.’s study focused on traditional news rooms, Singer has been interested in how gatekeeping translates to how traditional newspapers use online tools. In both the 2000 and 2004 Presidential elections, she studied how the Internet was changing the process for newspapers, contending that, “the power of gatekeepers seems to diminish in a modern information society. The Internet defies the whole notion of a ‘gate’ and challenges the idea that journalists (or anyone else) can or should limit what passes through it” (p. 265). In the study of the 2004 coverage, Singer posed the following research questions: 1) What did editors of Web sites affiliated with major newspapers see as their goals and their most noteworthy achievements in covering the 2004 political campaign and election? 2) To what extent did these editors relinquish their gatekeeping role by providing opportunities for users to provide or personalize content? And more broadly, 3) In what ways have the views of editors of Web sites affiliated with major newspapers changed since 2000?

Singer found that the content which appears in online editions of newspapers mostly comes from content that appears in the print versions. However, editors were also very proud of the interactive tools on their websites that could not be in the paper. The goal of most editors was after all to inform the public. Further, journalists were beginning to take a step back from their traditional gatekeeping role such that many websites had sections in which journalists provided baseline information and users could manipulate according to their needs and interests like interactive maps, Electoral College scenarios, and ballot building tools based on zip codes. In 2000, editors were likely to boast about how quickly they could publish returns on election night. In 2004, this was no longer the case, as it was standard practice by then. Further, their stated goal for the 2008 election cycle was to let the audience guide the coverage.