Gatekeeping

Abstract

Billions of events occur in the world each day, but only a few of them become news. The process through which this occurs is referred to as gatekeeping. Gatekeeping theory is the nexus between two inarguable facts: events occur everywhere all of the time and the news media cannot cover all of them. And so, when an event occurs, someone has to decide whether and how to pass the information to another person, such as a friend, an official, or even a journalist. Many decisions are made between the occurrence of an event and its transmission as news: decision points are referred to as gates and decision makers as gatekeepers. The decision-making process is the core of gatekeeping. It is possible for anyone to be a gatekeeper—anyone who has information about the event and decides to pass it to another person or organization. In processing information and conveying it to someone else, gatekeepers consciously or unconsciously change the information. Some is withheld and the rest is not unchanged, as if it were merely squeezed from a gatekeeping sponge. Traditionally, the role of the gatekeeper was seen as that of a journalist or news editor. Today we see that interpersonal chains of social media organizations and their participants, for instance, connect with media chains in an entirely new way—moving information from one to another, overlapping the news media, and integrating into a new journalism in which reporters and officials have less control over the flow of information than they did in the 20th century. Individuals in the former mass audience have substantial influence as gatekeepers. Everyone constantly evaluates the importance of events. We are participant observers in our own lives, continually making decisions about bits of information. Whereas once we were able to tell only our social circles about news that was relevant to us, those who have the technology and skills to use social media are gatekeepers for people in larger and larger circles. This can result in sharing more information than was consciously or unconsciously intended. Multiple audiences now exist, some more influential than others, with gatekeepers of all sorts monitoring social media content to learn which units of information may be important to large numbers of people. For the first time since the invention of the printing press, individuals in multiple audiences control the flow of information within and across social systems. No longer can a small number of officials and journalists control decisions about which information is acceptable and which is inappropriate. The 21st century marked the start of an age of new combinations between the news media and social media, journalists and individuals. The linear, top-down path of the 20th-century gatekeeping process has been changed irrevocably.