Gatekeeping in Transition 9780415731614, 9781315849652

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GATEKEEPING IN TRANSITION

Much of what journalism scholars thought they knew about gatekeeping—about how it is that news turns out the way it does—has been called into question by the recent seismic economic and technological shifts in journalism. These shifts come with new kinds of gatekeepers, new routines of news production, new types of news organizations, new means for shaping the news, and new channels of news distribution. Given these changing realities, some might ask: does gatekeeping still matter? In this internationally-minded anthology of new gatekeeping research, contributors attempt to answer that question. Gatekeeping in Transition examines the role of gatekeeping in the twenty-first century from organizational, institutional, and social perspectives across digital and traditional media, and argues for its place in contemporary scholarship about news and journalism. Tim P. V   os is chair and associate professor of Journalism Studies and coordinator of global research initiatives at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He is co-author, with Pamela J. Shoemaker, of Gatekeeping Theory (2009). François Heinderyckx is full professor at Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Brussels) and Chang-Jiang Scholar Professor at Communication University of China, Beijing (2013–2018). He was President of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) between 2005 and 2012. He was also the 2013–2014 President of the International Communication Association (ICA).

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GATEKEEPING IN TRANSITION

Edited by Tim P. Vos and François Heinderyckx

First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gatekeeping in transition / edited by Timothy Vos and François Heinderyckx.   pages cm   Includes bibliographical references and index.  1. Journalism—Philosophy.  2. Journalism—Technological innovations. 3.  Online journalism.  4.  Citizen journalism.  I. Vos, Tim P., editor.  II.  Heinderyckx, François, editor.   PN4731.G36 2015  070.4—dc23  2014044549 ISBN: 978-0-415-73161-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-84965-2 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Apex CoVantage, LLC

To Pamela J. Shoemaker, an exceptional scholar, educator, and human being

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SECTION TITLES

Part I—Thinking and Rethinking Gatekeeping Part II—Individual Level: The New Gatekeepers Part III—News Routines: New and Old Part IV—News Organization—or Lack Thereof Part V—Social Institutions: Gatekeeping the Gatekeepers Part VI—Social Systems Near and Far Part VII—Conclusion

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CONTENTS

Forewordxiii PART I

Thinking and Rethinking Gatekeeping 

1

1. Revisiting Gatekeeping Theory During a Time of  Transition Tim P. Vos

3

2. How Gatekeeping Still Matters: Understanding Media Effects in an Era of Curated Flows  Kjerstin Thorson and Chris Wells

25

PART II

Individual Level: The New Gatekeepers 

45

3. Journalists’ Truth Justification in a Transnational News Environment  Lea Hellmueller

47

4. Futures of Journalists: Low-Paid Piecework or Global Brands?  Angela Phillips

65

x Contents

PART III

News Routines: New and Old 

83

  5. On a Role: Online Newspapers, Participatory Journalism, and the U.S. Presidential Elections  Jane B. Singer

85

  6. The Journalist as a Jack of All Trades: Safeguarding the Gates in a Digitized News Ecology   Karin Raeymaeckers, Annelore Deprez, Sara De Vuyst, and Rebeca De Dobbelaer

104

PART IV

News Organization—or Lack Thereof

121

  7. The Tyranny of Immediacy: Gatekeeping Practices in French and Spanish Online Newsrooms Florence Le Cam and David Domingo

123

  8. Ecologies and Fields: Changes Across Time in Organizational Forms and Boundaries Wilson Lowrey

141

PART V

Social Institutions: Gatekeeping the Gatekeepers 

161

  9. Keeping Watch on the Gates: Media Criticism as Advocatory Pressure163 Matt Carlson 10. Whose Hand on the Gate? Rupert Murdoch’s Australian and News Coverage of Climate Change  Rodney Tiffen

180

PART VI

Social Systems Near and Far 

201

11. Visual Gatekeeping in the Era of Networked Images: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of the Syrian Conflict  Mervi Pantti

203

Contents  xi

12. How Community Orientation Resists Global News Routines in South Africa and Norway  John A. Hatcher

224

PART VII

Conclusion251 13. Gatekeeping Theory Redux François Heinderyckx

253

Contributors269 Index273

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FOREWORD

This volume lays out a sample of the recent scholarship being produced about journalistic gatekeeping. Gatekeeping Theory was published in 2009 and barely a year had passed before it was apparent that a follow-up would be necessary. This volume is in no way a replacement for that 2009 book. Gatekeeping Theory puts forward the theoretical case for gatekeeping as a meaningful way to think about how news turns out the way it does. Gatekeeping in Transition is a natural continuation of that book—it explores the new empirical realities that are changing what we thought we knew about gatekeeping. It points the way to a research program that takes the dynamics of news construction seriously. The book is structured around the five levels of analysis spelled out in greater detail in Gatekeeping Theory. For readers interested in the theoretical and definitional contours of the five levels, Gatekeeping Theory is the more suitable volume. If readers are looking for new studies that deal with the complexities of the changes facing journalism and how those complexities can be usefully understood through the lenses of the five levels of analysis, the chapters that follow should prove helpful. The book demonstrates the international utility of gatekeeping theory. It includes authors from North America, Europe, and Australia and addresses journalism in Africa and elsewhere. The changes facing journalism are not confined by national boundaries. Gatekeeping has become a global and transnational undertaking; it is only fitting that gatekeeping scholarship be just as global and transnational. The studies and essays that constitute Gatekeeping in Transition are original to this volume. We are grateful to the authors for their commitment to this book. Like most edited books, the original timeline proved to be optimistic, and the

xiv Foreword

project took longer to bring to the finish line than any of us had hoped. The fortunate consequence of those delays was that we were able to cite and highlight an enormous amount of high-quality gatekeeping scholarship that appeared in 2014. In fact, we were tempted to wait a little longer to cover additional new developments and the new research that examines those developments. But alas, the reality of the title of the book hit home. Gatekeeping is in transition. It does not stand still for us to investigate it and write about it. And that is why it is such a fascinating area of study. A number of individuals worked on this project whose names do not otherwise appear in the volume. These are early-career researchers who aided in the many phases of the project. Special thanks to Marina Hendricks,Tatsiana Karaliova,Yulia Medvedeva, Edson Tandoc, J. David Wolfgang, and Yan Wu. All gladly pitched in. Tim P.Vos, Columbia, MO, U.S., November 3, 2014 François Heinderyckx, Brussels, Belgium, November 3, 2014

PART I

Thinking and Rethinking Gatekeeping

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1 REVISITING GATEKEEPING THEORY DURING A TIME OF TRANSITION Tim P. Vos

Gatekeeping did not come with a birth certificate, but the case can be made that the basic theory of gatekeeping is at least 65 years old. Although journalists used the concept of gatekeeping—if not the precise terminology—more than a century ago, the seminal piece by David Manning White (1950) generally gets the credit for launching the scholarly gatekeeping tradition. In many places in the world, 65 is considered the age of retirement. So, is it time to send a reliable but tired old theory “out to pasture”? There is no shame in retirement. Gatekeeping can be remembered for its importance in those early attempts to give early journalism and mass communication scholarship a more systematic and scientific basis. It can be remembered for how it challenged received notions of journalistic objectivity. It can be remembered for inspiring many young scholars to engage in empirical scholarship. On the other hand, 65 is remarkably young compared to many concepts used by those in the academy. John Stuart Mill’s (1977 [1859]) treatment of liberty, while dealing with a far more universal concept than gatekeeping, is far older than gatekeeping and likewise initiated a flurry of theorizing by scholars. Socrates’ notion of virtue has endured for more than two millennia and has inspired scholarly reflection over many centuries since its articulation (Brickhouse & Smith, 2010). While certain ideas about liberty and virtue have fallen out of favor, the basic notions continue to be useful theoretical constructs. So it is, this book argues, with the concept of gatekeeping. Some of the earliest conceptions of gatekeeping have indeed fallen out of favor and did so a long time ago.White’s (1950) consideration of the gatekeeper emphasized the individualized, rationalized selections by a single journalist (Reese & Ballinger, 2001). Almost immediately, critics (e.g., Donohew, 1967; Gieber, 1956; Pool & Shulman, 1959) began to show the ways in which institutionalized factors

4  Tim P. Vos

structured the decision making of journalists. The classic newsroom studies of Gaye Tuchman (1978) and Herbert Gans (1979) demonstrated the role of socialization and journalistic routines in constructing the news. Tuchman, Gans, and others also quickly dispelled the notion that gatekeeping was simply a matter of selection (Shoemaker, 1991). White (1950) selected news stories from the wire service, but most gatekeeping does not start with a raw product called “news.” The process often starts with tips, hunches, and bits of information. Gatekeeping is how these different elements get turned into news and how that news is framed, emphasized, placed, and promoted (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). The conceptualizations of gatekeeping as individual judgment and news selection are incomplete at best and misguided at worst. Scholarship that looks to pick a fight with David Manning White (1950) is beating either a straw man or a dead horse. Gatekeeping as a theoretical construct, however, remains an important and vital lens through which to explore the question How does news turn out the way it does? That question can be posed of a particular news story from a particular publication, or it can be posed of a whole class of stories across a whole news ecosystem. The question How did the Wall Street Journal come to frame the U.S. President’s state of the union address the way that it did? can be asked. And the question How is it that the U.S. news media failed to produce critical coverage of a presidential administration’s case for war? can also be asked. This second question is obviously much more complex, since it points to a whole array of gates—implicating an entire ecosystem of news organizations and distribution networks—and to what ultimately makes it to the public. But this highlights another important feature of gatekeeping theory—namely, the channels through which information and news flow. Although gatekeeping scholarship has long theorized how information flows to and through news organizations, there has been a recent effort to theorize how information flows through and from news organizations to the eventual readers and viewers of news (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Audiences get news by subscribing to a publication or tuning into a broadcast, but audiences increasingly see news that has been emailed, “liked,” and “tweeted” that comes through some aggregators and search engines. How to theorize and empirically examine the structured or patterned characteristics of news delivery channels is still evolving. Chapter 2 offers an approach to move gatekeeping theory in this direction. Gatekeeping scholarship has a longer record for answering the question How does news turn out the way it does? Pam Shoemaker and her colleagues (Shoemaker, 1991; Shoemaker, Eichholz, Kim, & Wrigley, 2001; Shoemaker & Reese, 2013; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009) take an array of factors into account and theorize how various forms of pressure shape news into the form it ultimately takes. They have divided these into five levels of influence: the individual, media routines, organizational, social institutional, and social system levels. Each of these levels represents a conceptual set of factors that can exert positive and negative forces as information moves back and forth through the news construction process.

Revisiting Gatekeeping Theory  5

At the individual level, gatekeeping scholarship has included examinations of the demographic profiles, role conceptions, and cognitive characteristics of gatekeepers. At the routine level, research has examined factors such as time constraints, reporting and verification procedures, conceptualizations of audience feedback, and relationship to sources. At the organizational level, scholarship has explored the ownership structure, organizational culture, and organizational decision-making processes of news-related organizations. At the social institutional level, research has sought to understand the social and institutional pressures on news making that come from governments, sources, advertisers, markets, audiences, public relations practitioners, interest groups, and other media. At the social system level, scholarship has delved into the role of social structure and the role of cultural values, attitudes, and ideas in shaping news. All of this is done with an eye for explaining how news turns out the way it does. These five levels of influence are retained in the structure of this volume to think about the ways in which gatekeeping can be fruitfully reexamined. By addressing these five levels of influence, the gatekeeping tradition has steadfastly rejected the short-circuit fallacy that reduces explanations of news to one or two macrolevel factors. Scholarship on the political economy of news production, for example, has held heuristic value, pointing to the role of profit considerations in news construction. However, gatekeeping theory, in keeping with the field theory of Kurt Lewin (1951), has posited that a field of interrelated factors must be empirically examined to arrive at adequate explanations for how news turns out the way it does. Thus, profit considerations must be examined—for example, within the context of news-making routines, where journalistic autonomy is often practiced in news construction. The value and practice of autonomous news judgment is a powerful force for keeping profit-maximizing logic in check (Demers, 1995). The gatekeeping tradition has typically been dissatisfied with explanations that leave the nitty-gritty of news production in a black box. Gatekeeping researchers have often arrived at their conclusions based on sustained observation and intimate knowledge of complex, real-world conditions. It is this tradition of theorizing news construction through close contact with the real, empirical world that provides the impetus for this book. It is because the real world of news production and distribution is changing so quickly that scholars are confronted with the changing dynamics of gatekeeping. If news making is in a period of transition, then gatekeeping is in transition. Our theorizing must transition as well.

Rethinking Gatekeeping It is important to acknowledge that what we thought we knew about gatekeeping might need reevaluation. Take, for example, the recent fate of gatekeepers of all sorts. Legacy institutions or industries that have relied on gatekeepers to mediate between sources of information and the ultimate recipients of that

6  Tim P. Vos

information have mostly found themselves on hard times.The idea that big record labels exerted no small measure of control over what music we heard now seems quaint—or perhaps disturbing—but nonetheless outdated. Given the obvious and rapid changes in society, it’s unsurprising that some observers have announced the death of the gatekeeper. Even before journalists and other observers concluded that legacy media were in significant trouble, some scholars took stock of the emergence of online media and warned about the fate of gatekeeping practices and roles. Williams and Deli Carpini (2000) pointed to the role of online media in breaking open the story of U.S. President Clinton’s affair with a White House intern and concluded that gatekeeping was collapsing: The new media environment, by providing virtually unlimited sources of political information (although these sources do not provide anything like an unlimited number of perspectives), undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: if there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers. (Williams & Deli Carpini, 2000, pp. 61–62) The “multiplicity of gates” (p. 66), in other words, means that information will make it into the public sphere, regardless of actions taken by the legacy media. Editors and news directors might still be minding gates for their organizations, but so many gates now exist that one or two—or even a hundred—closed gates will not prevent information from being published. There will always be an open gate somewhere. A related argument is that the vast capacity of the internet means that news organizations are not limited by traditional news holes. More information can be published, so gatekeepers need to hold less information back (Pavlik, 2001). Both arguments—that gates are so numerous as to be meaningless and that space is so bountiful that selectivity is less of an issue—point to a key premise of the old gatekeeping model: scarcity. Shoemaker and Vos (2009) had defined gatekeeping as crafting news by choosing from a near-limitless amount of information. But the abundance of information has now been met by an abundance of space and an abundance of outlets. Others have conceptualized the breakdown of the gatekeeper role as the leveling of the hierarchy between news organizations and audiences. Audience-generated content, crowd sourcing, and other means of audience involvement “herald the slow death of top-down models of journalistic news coverage and information dissemination, and even the gatekeeping model itself ” (Bruns, 2011, p. 118). Bruns (2005) saw the rise of collaborative media organizations and news aggregators as subverting the old “regime of control” (p. 11). He clearly saw the coming tide of audiences as co-producers of media content and aptly noted the implications for old gatekeeping models. Because of the open information environment created

Revisiting Gatekeeping Theory  7

by the internet, audiences often have access to the same information as journalists, allowing audiences to better see how legacy media have tried to control information (Bruns, 2005). That exposure puts the legitimacy of legacy media on shaky ground. These two basic critiques of the gatekeeping model—that space and outlets are no longer scarce and that news production is no longer unidirectional—point to new dynamics for journalistic gatekeeping. This becomes even more obvious in the age of social media. Social media empower the audience to distribute and frame the news and add to the ubiquity of information (Coddington & Holton, 2014). But before we proceed with the project to reimagine gatekeeping as a concept in the digital era, we would do well to consider why gatekeeping might still be a useful concept for thinking about the construction of news and public affairs discourse.

Diverse Media, Diverse News? Gatekeeping is typically explained in terms of human decision making. So, given the range and variety of journalists and news organizations engaged in decision making, how is it that these journalists and news organizations, when confronted by a complex phenomenon, are capable of producing such a narrow range of news messages? This has been an important question within the gatekeeping literature (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Gatekeeping scholarship has provided a theoretical approach and an empirical research tradition for answering that question. It has pointed to a range of factors—from routines of information gathering and assessment, to organizational characteristics of news media, to pressures from various extra-media institutions, to dominant social and cultural values, attitudes, and ideas—that limit the range of information available to the public. The range of ideas and the corpus of factual information that media contribute to the public sphere play no small role in the vibrancy of democratic self-governance (Christians, Glasser, McQuail, Nordenstreng, & White, 2009), so this is a consequential question to contemplate. If the flow of information has changed such that there are more outlets for information and the hierarchy of information is flattened, then the presumption of the question—that the information environment is capable of exhibiting a narrow range of news messages—should be less valid. But take the example of the financial and banking crisis that emerged around 2008. Scholars (e.g., Manning, 2013; Starkman, 2014; Usher, 2013) have observed that journalists and others failed to warn citizens of the impending crisis and initially failed to give the issue the prominence it deserved. This would have been easier to explain if it had happened a decade or two earlier, when the legacy media dominated the news landscape. The legacy media represented a relatively narrow social institution, peopled by older, upper-middle-class white men (Weaver, Beam, Brownlee, Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007;Weaver & Wilhoit, 1996) who were driven by a shared set

8  Tim P. Vos

of profit motives (Bagdikian, 2004; McManus, 1994). But the financial crisis happened during a time of diverse digital media and at a time in which sources and experts had their own digital platforms outside the mainstream press (Starkman, 2014) and comments sections and discussion boards within the mainstream press (Baden & Springer, 2014). Facebook and Twitter were relatively new but were clearly finding widespread use, especially Facebook, when the crisis emerged. In other words, the mainstream press was not the regime of control it had once been, and the flow of information would not ostensibly be strictly in one direction. Nevertheless, the messages available to the public were surprisingly uniform (Starkman, 2014).The elite press and business press missed the story until it was too late (Manning, 2013; Usher, 2013). User-generated content on mainstream news sites was apparently not a source for heterogeneous views either. A study of reader comments in German newspapers, for example, showed that comments deviated little from the viewpoints already expressed in the press (Baden & Springer, 2014). Dissident voices were complaining to authorities about fraud and poorly designed financial instruments and trying to warn of the coming economic catastrophe, but by most accounts those voices and warnings did not break through to an audience of any consequence (Manning, 2013; Starkman, 2014). The truth did not go viral. The truth remained locked behind the gates. One can obviously read too much into a single case, but this particular case is one of significant global importance. Other, arguably less consequential cases, such as the Drudge Report’s breaking open of the Clinton sex scandal, have been occasions to revisit what we thought we knew about gatekeeping. Perhaps this case should give us pause as well. For example, it can help us think more clearly about the kinds of gates that make up the gatekeeping process. While the gatekeeping model has long recognized that gates exist at many points in the construction and communication of news (Shoemaker, 1991), it is good to be reminded that input and output gates can face different kinds or degrees of force (Bro & Wallberg, 2015). We might hypothesize that information that enters gatekeeping channels easily can exit easily. When this is the case, the same information will be widely distributed, and the same information can also be easily framed and reframed in line with goals of market and political differentiation. However, other information can be complex and actively hidden by interested actors, as it was in the case of the financial crisis (Starkman, 2014), creating significant force against the gate that would allow the information into a news organization or other outlet to begin with. Getting the story about the looming financial crisis right would have been reasonably difficult. The greater pressure, we might hypothesize, would force similarity in messages about the looming crisis. Once the actual story had wide circulation, the incentives to differentiate coverage based on political or market considerations would conceivably emerge. Indeed, some research suggests that once the actual crisis had emerged, diverse views on the causes and consequences of the crisis found expression (Báez & Castañeda, 2014).

Revisiting Gatekeeping Theory  9

The assumption has been that diverse media and diverse alternative channels produce diverse news. While that is no doubt the case in many instances, it is not the case in all instances. Until it is, we would do well to build on the gatekeeping tradition to understand phenomena such as the lack of diversity in early coverage of the financial crisis. Again, the dynamics of gatekeeping are in transition, but the model remains a useful analytical tool.

Gatekeeping as a Role It is not always clear what the logic is of the argument that gatekeeping is less consequential in an era with multiple gates and enormous digital capacity. Yes, it is reasonable that information that fails to pass a set of news media gates should be, in an era of abundant digital outlets, more likely than in the past to find open gates elsewhere. But does this really change how actual gatekeepers think about their gatekeeping? If an editor knows that information about a politician’s policy position is already available on the politician’s website—and thus ostensibly available in the public sphere—does that make the editor any less likely to present that information via his or her news outlet? Likely no. Gatekeeping is not simply something that journalists and others do—it is often seen as a public and moral responsibility. Journalists generally hold that news plays a valuable role in democracy by performing a number of essential tasks, such as reporting up-to-the-minute news, providing a forum where ideas of public significance can be discussed, and checking abuses of political and economic power (Weaver et al., 2007; Weaver & Willnat, 2012). The fact that others share in this responsibility does not detract from an obligation to do so according to the journalist’s conscience (Baker, 2002; Christians et al., 2009; Gans, 2003). Editors, news directors, and other decision-makers craft some information as news and hold back or discard other bits of information for a variety of reasons. One reason might be limited space, but reasons can also relate to the political, geographical, and moral vision of the gatekeepers. Gatekeeping theorists do not need to accept such moral reasoning as a complete account of why some information is published or broadcast and other information is not to nevertheless recognize that the gatekeeping outcomes of any particular gatekeeper with a following are worth exploring.This is why researchers (e.g., Douai & Wu, 2014) have been interested in the gatekeeping practices of the Wall Street Journal, the leading daily business newspaper in the U.S., during the time surrounding the financial crisis. Researchers do not abandon such inquiry if they believe that the same information will make it to the public one way or another. In fact, given the Journal’s role as an inter-media agenda setter, there is much about the news ecology that can be gained from such an examination. Simply put, the observation that gates are abundant says little about how specific kinds of information make it into the public sphere. Mainstream media, online-only digital media, the underground press, immigrant journalism, and theatrical documentaries—to list but a handful of examples—each provide distinctly

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different channels and present information often in distinct ways to distinct audiences. For example, the patterned consumption of news raises important questions about the political knowledge of the electorate and how the knowledge is tied to repertoires of news consumption (Garrett, 2009). Again, it is worth knowing what kinds of information make it through what kinds of channels if we are to understand the broader news ecology and its significance for the public information environment.

Patterns of News Consumption The argument that traditional media gates are less important or less interesting in an age of digital media puts a lot of stock in the assumption that news of consequence will find its way to the public, regardless of what traditional media hold back. There are certainly many cases of events gaining public attention through social media, only then to be picked up by the mainstream and other media channels. In fact, there is ample evidence that mainstream journalists track trending topics on social media as a way to develop news stories (Soo Jung & Hadley, 2014; Tandoc, 2014). There is also ample evidence that journalists interact with audiences via Twitter and other social media in a shared form of news selection and framing (Xu & Feng, 2014). But it would overstate the evidence to say that this is always, or even usually, the case. As empowering as it would be to believe that the circulation of news had been democratized through digital media, we would do well to investigate the variety of channels or patterns for how news makes its way to the public. When researchers have investigated the consumption of news, they have failed to find highly individualized consumption, which would presumably be consistent with the democratization hypothesis.While audiences may have autonomy in news selection (Napoli, 2003), it turns out that audiences fall into a fairly limited range of repertoires for news and other media consumption (Taneja, Webster, Malthouse, & Ksiazek, 2012). So, many, many media gates exist, but audiences attend to a relatively small percentage of those gates. And while some may consume niche media (Anderson, 2008), the relatively few who do consume niche media also consume large amounts of media in general (Elberse, 2008). As Kjerstin Thorson and Chris Wells note in the next chapter, the news ecology is still dominated by the usual suspects. The national quality press; the major metropolitan press; satellite, network, and cable television; and local broadcast radio and television are still selecting, prioritizing, and shaping information and casting it as news for substantially sizeable audiences. The readers and viewers of news might get their news from relatively new places, but industry research (Edmonds, 2013) shows that audiences still spend an overwhelming amount of time reading news from legacy media products. This observation is not an argument that legacy media can or will maintain their dominance—only that they remain relevant to the overall news ecology.

Revisiting Gatekeeping Theory  11

Going, Going, but Not Gone While legacy news media might seem passé or like old news, the story of their demise is missing a couple of important details—the plot’s climax and denouement. Y   es, some news organizations have folded, others have pared back, and many are barely recognizable as their former selves (McChesney & Nichols, 2010). Angela Phillips documents some of these changes in legacy media newsrooms in Chapter 4. But, at this point, the plot is one of growing tension. Where the narrative arc in this story ends is still only a guess, however educated that guess might be. Except in rare cases, legacy media outlets have not gone away. Granted, these legacy news media are in a period of transition—the audiences are not what they used to be, the reporting staffs are mostly smaller, and profit margins have been reduced compared to the past (Anderson, Bell, & Shirky, 2012; McChesney & Nichols, 2010; Ryfe, 2012)—but transition is not termination.The fact is that legacy media still act as gatekeepers and embrace their gatekeeping roles. They are still worth investigating through the lens of gatekeeping theories. The transition that this book explores is not from legacy media to some kind of future world where legacy media no longer exists. Such a transition may indeed happen at some point in the future, but that is not the present reality. Legacy media are adjusting to the new digital environment and embracing the digital tools that allow journalists to do their jobs in new ways. T   hat transition has involved qualitative differences in gatekeeping routines and behaviors, but it is still gatekeeping. Take, for example, the observation noted previously that the transition to digital platforms and the transition to social media as tools for audience engagement have come with a flattening of news hierarchies, where audiences and journalists are now co-producers of news. This observation is sometimes accompanied by claims that this represents a fundamental change to gatekeeping theory (Bro & Wallberg, 2015). However, gatekeeping scholarship has long theorized places of audience input into the construction of news (Adams, 1980; Allen, 2005; Jacobs, 1996; Kim, 2002; Sumpter, 2000).The literature has suggested that the more audiences are engaged and the more journalists are open to this engagement, the more news should be aligned to audience interests and priorities (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). That the audience is more active or more present in the construction of news in the age of digital media is not so much a change to gatekeeping theory as it is support of the theory. What we know from the recent scholarship is that audiences, more so than in the past, figure into the calculus of how news turns out the way it does. The challenge moving forward is to understand how this new level of audience presence shapes or interacts with other factors from the five levels of influence. For example, do journalists’ roles also begin to change, whereby journalists’ views of autonomy and audience mobilization evolve? Do news values, as an abstraction of audience wishes, evolve, thereby altering journalistic routines? Do news organizations’ orientations to advertisers lose ground to orientations to citizen audiences?

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These potential changes in the interconnected journalistic field are what we mean when we say that gatekeeping is in transition. Truth be told, news media have always been in transition. That transition was often invisible or imperceptible. The difference now is that the transition is so visible and so stark that theorizing has been energized.

Gatekeeping in Transition Up to this point, this chapter has made the case for the continued relevance and viability of gatekeeping theory. It has also made the case that while legacy media are in a period of transition, they remain relevant to the current news ecology. On one hand, this observation about the legacy media seems like a contrarian argument in the wake of various public pronouncements, often by journalists themselves (Ruppert, 2012), about the impending death of legacy journalism. Hyperbole is not in short supply. On the other hand, the hyperbole, if that is indeed what it is, captures something of the real, felt experience of those who have a strong connection to journalism. Journalism, as we have known it, does not occupy the same position in the news ecology that it once did. Non-legacy media—news startups, social media platforms, and search engines—seem to be displacing, at least in the public imagination, the older purveyors of news. Perhaps most important to the relevance of gatekeeping scholarship is that these non-legacy media are also gatekeepers. Search engines such as Yahoo! and Google dominate online searching, including searching for news. Research by Bui (2010) shows that search engines do not simply reproduce the news priorities and emphases of dominant legacy outlets (but neither do they provide much of a platform for alternative media). In other words, search engines are news gatekeepers in their own right. Facebook is perhaps the most obvious example of a social media gatekeeper and a disrupter of legacy media’s place in the news ecology. The Pew Research Center found in late 2014 that 30% of U.S. adults got news via Facebook (Anderson & Caumont, 2014). Facebook, of course, is also a platform for sharing news stories with persons in one’s social network. It is also a platform for users to post their own text and video of news events. That makes every Facebook user a potential gatekeeper (Singer, 2014). But, just as importantly, it makes Facebook one big, influential gatekeeper, since the site crafts and recrafts algorithms to structure the flow of news (Somaiya, 2014). This puts news organizations in a position of gaming the algorithm to maximize traffic for their news stories (Somaiya, 2014). News organizations, responding to similar incentives, have taken to writing headlines in such a way as to maximize traffic from search engines (Tandoc, 2014). Facebook is different from legacy media gatekeepers in that it is arguably less hierarchical. Not everyone sees the same news feed on Facebook because the algorithm that is used takes the individual user’s profile and habits into account (Somaiya, 2014). However, given that these algorithms are proprietary, it is unknown to what extent Facebook and other sites

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are making specific content decisions. For example, Facebook encountered public criticism when it was learned that the site’s feeds were manipulated as part of an experiment (Gillespie, 2014). A handful of large companies—social media sites and search engines—control their algorithms and thus, to some extent, control the news that gets circulated. As suggested earlier in the chapter, the importance of the digital media environment, in which social networks, aggregators, and search engines play an increasingly important role, is that it alters how news is received by the end user. Thus, the networked nature of information becomes an important consideration in theorizing gatekeeping. Barzilai-Nahon (2008) has put forward a theory of network gatekeeping. Network gatekeeping takes in a range of information control, including “selection, addition, withholding, display, channeling, shaping, manipulation, repetition, timing, localization, integration, disregard, and deletion of information” (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008, p. 1496). This approach is not only more extensive in identifying gatekeeping actions than previous approaches, but it also takes into consideration the networked nature of news construction and movement. Scholars have begun to use this approach to study gatekeeping in a social media environment. For example, Coddington and Holton (2014) conclude that “evolving practices serve to both subvert and reinforce the traditional gatekeeping role, but they do so by making it more relational, reflexive, permissive, and expansive” (p. 254). However, research by Bui (2010) fails to support parts of the network gatekeeping model, pointing instead to the appropriateness of a traditional gatekeeping approach. How we think about the structural characteristics of the news ecology is perhaps the most urgent area of gatekeeping research. In Chapter 2, Kjerstin Thorson and Chris Wells reexamine flows of news and information and theorize a curation of flows. They identify the characteristics of the different pathways by which news makes it to the reader, listener, and viewer. Thus, they move the consideration of gatekeeping past the simple publication of news to the more complex reception of news. The ensuing chapters examine influences on the construction of news, using the framework of the five levels of influence. The goal is to highlight the diverse approaches, styles, and topics that merit examination through the lens of gatekeeping theory. There is no one best way to conduct gatekeeping research, and these chapters highlight how different methods and traditions of inquiry can inform our understanding of how news turns out the way it does.

Individual Level David Manning White’s (1950) lone gatekeeper caught the imagination of early journalism researchers. The idea of such a colorful figure making such idiosyncratic decisions seemed to comport with those researchers’ own newsroom experiences (Reese & Ballinger, 2001). Although gatekeeping scholarship has largely given up making the case for the individual gatekeeper as a lone decider of news,

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scholars are nevertheless still interested in the individuals who make news decisions, particularly in the new digital environment. Hence, we read about the gatewatchers, gatecrashers, gatejumpers, gateprogrammers, gatepokers, and gatemockers who have seemingly replaced the gatekeepers of the past (Bruns, 2005; Painter & Hodges, 2010;Yu, 2011). T   hese terms also hint at the complexity of the interconnected journalistic field. In Chapter 3, Lea Hellmueller puts forward a new way to think about the individual level of analysis. In keeping with the logic of Lewin’s (1951) and Bourdieu’s (1998) field theories, Hellmueller’s study of correspondents in Washington, DC, demonstrates that levels of influence cannot be theorized in isolation from each other. In a globalized world, geographical space and national boundaries are less important than other kinds of networks in forming how journalists think about journalistic roles and practices. Much of the gatekeeping research has shown how journalists rarely make highly individualized decisions. They are socialized within news organizations and follow, more or less, the procedures and directives of editors, news directors, or others in charge of newsrooms (Schudson, 2003). When individual journalists resist overt direction, according to research by Ryfe (2009), it is largely because they choose instead to abide by trusted media routines. Witschge and Nygren (2009) show that the economic upheavals facing journalism have come with even less autonomy and less agency for journalists. But individual agency should not be ignored. In the face of economic upheaval, some veteran journalists—and even early-career journalists—have taken the opportunity to pursue journalism on their own terms, vowing to practice a kind of journalism they could not in legacy newsrooms (Briggs, 2012). Indeed, entrepreneurial news startups might even attract individuals who would not otherwise be journalists for legacy news organizations. Entrepreneurial journalists, especially those working on their own, would be free to pursue news stories and make decisions without controls from editors and controversy-adverse lawyers. Independent journalism bloggers also operate with few such constraints (Haas, 2005). But, so far, the search for bastions of agency is proving elusive. Lowrey and Latta (2008) find that bloggers, for all their seeming independence, are also subject to routines of news construction: “Bloggers adopt routines to deal with their unique set of constraints, burdens, and pressures” (p. 195). As economic, technological, and institutional changes reshape the context in which journalism is practiced and envisioned, the work and roles of individual journalists are changing. In Chapter 4, Angela Phillips shows the extreme differences in the prospects of journalists in the digital transition. Some journalists’ expertise and following make them global brands, which in turn affords them more discretion in their work. Meanwhile, many journalists seem less like autonomous professionals than low-paid piece workers. Research by Bakker (2014) backs up Phillips’ conclusions, pointing to a set of roles that involve less old-fashioned reporting and more work as managers, repackagers, and curators of information and news.

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Routines Level News organizations have developed routines to regulate the seemingly unpredictable and fast-moving world of newsworthy events. These routines, by nature, provide constancy and efficiency. But new technological and economic realities have presented new opportunities and new incentives to find new efficiencies. Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than in the moves toward automation of work. Research by van Dalen (2012) has documented the use of algorithms to produce news headlines and basic news stories. The move has disrupted routines, pushing journalists to embrace greater creativity and complexity in their journalism and to rely less on factual, inverted pyramid styles. So-called robot journalism is perhaps the most extreme example, but the arrival of digital journalism in all its forms is pushing journalism in the same direction of reconsidering routines of news construction. In Chapter 5, Jane B. Singer examines how the online versions of major U.S. newspapers have changed their routines in the coverage of political campaigns. As newspapers have faced budget and staff cuts and as digital media tools have allowed candidates to reach voters in new ways, the routines of campaign coverage have shifted toward fact checking, analysis, and interpretation. Given the changes in the news ecology, news organizations are focusing on a narrower range of duties than in the past, breaking news via social media and offering news interpretation in the columns of the newspaper. Journalistic routines have historically arisen to accomplish a lot of work within the limits of the publication or broadcast cycle (Bourdieu, 1998). The shift of journalism online has meant that publication cycles are changing, and journalists find themselves under constant pressure to get the news published online. Reich and Godler (2014) have analyzed how time constraints shape the news and have concluded that “time matters” (p. 613). They find that when time is in short supply, “newswork [contains] systematically less diversity and cross-checking, greater involvement of public relations, fewer senior sources and ordinary citizens, and fewer leaks” (Reich & Godler, 2014, p. 607). Others have arrived at similar conclusions—time constraints force journalists into routines that are meant to save time but nevertheless leave their mark on the news (Deuze, 2011; Lewis,Williams, & Franklin, 2008). Journalists’ news construction routines have also traditionally revolved around relationships with sources and audiences. The arrival of digital tools has altered both of these relationships. In Chapter 6, Karin Raeymaeckers, Annelore Deprez, Sara De Vuyst, and Rebeca De Dobbelaer examine how Belgian journalists are using digital tools to tap into their audiences as sources of information and thereby tap into different kinds of sources. Journalists do not just rely on elite sources; they use social media to incorporate the perspectives and voices of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and ordinary citizens. The conclusion shows a more extensive approach to audience and sourcing than Hermans, Schaap, and Bardoel

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(2014) found in their study of Dutch journalists. Hermans et al. (2014) conclude that while a new digital initiative did use more citizen voices as sources, those voices largely came in the form of man-on-the-street interviews rather than in using citizens’ relevant knowledge or experience. Carpenter (2008) compared the sourcing routines of online newspaper journalists and online citizen journalists and found that citizen journalists relied less on official sources and more on their own opinions. Taken altogether, the studies might suggest that economic constraints and economic incentives have a bearing on how sources are used and how routines get altered.

Organizational Level As the Carpenter (2008) study shows, different organizational environments result in different routines and different news styles.This highlights a key issue related to gatekeeping dynamics—a host of new kinds of news organizations have entered the news ecology. Legacy media have been joined by online-only news organizations, entrepreneurial startups, and news aggregators. Bloggers, documentary filmmakers, and freelancers have set up shop on their own. Founders of some organizations have sought to develop new business models—finding support through new means of digital delivery, through focusing on new market niches, and through new approaches to advertising, such as native ads that are meant to look like editorial content (Cook & Sirkkunen, 2013; Kaye & Quinn, 2010; Nel, 2010). Meanwhile, others have established nonprofit news sites, seeking support through foundations or philanthropic gifts, through audience-based microfunding, and through performance of anxillary services (Kaye & Quinn, 2010; Nevill, 2014). A combination of new technologies, bad economic conditions, and a more crowded marketplace has undercut the health of legacy news organizations and forced these organizations to adapt to the new realities. As Florence Le Cam and David Domingo demonstrate in Chapter 7, the emerging organizational context of online news production finds individual journalists under increasing pressure to do more with less. While journalists would like to devote their time to investigation and news gathering, business pressures push them to constantly update the news site and interact with the audience via social media and comments sections.The new digital reality is leading the newsrooms they studied to adjust their internal organization to accomplish the always-urgent work of the moment. It is little wonder that research (e.g., Skovsgaard, 2014) shows that journalists feel that time constraints enforced by their news organizations have robbed them of their professional autonomy. For some journalists, the demise of their work environments has presented them with the opportunity to try something new. As noted previously, they have started their own blogs and news sites, developed news-related apps, or taken up documentary filmmaking. As empowering as the leap has been for many

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journalists, it has also come at a price. The absence of insulation from external and profit pressures that organizations provides exposes independent journalists or new, small news outlets to a set of problems they heretofore had left to others. News organizations are supposed to accomplish a purpose, fostering a division of duties that allows for the construction of news. So, what have these organizational changes wrought? In Chapter 8, Wilson Lowrey addresses the erosion of news organizations’ boundaries and how organizations deal with a constantly changing environment in the age of digital media. The chapter also explores how new news entities take on formal organizational characteristics over time. Focusing particularly on news blogs, Lowrey concludes that organizational-level gatekeeping remains relevant, even for new news organizations. As gatekeeping research moves forward, more attention will undoubtedly turn to the kinds of news these new outlets and alternative business models produce. A study by Jian and Usher (2014) examined the kinds of news stories that audience micropayments fund. They found that funders “favor stories that would provide them with practical guidance for daily living (e.g., public health or city infrastructure), as opposed to stories from which they gain a general awareness of the world (e.g., government and politics)” ( Jian & Usher, 2014, pp. 164–165). Research will also likely turn to whether or not these new news organizations will make peace with journalism’s received routines. The aforementioned study by Carpenter (2008) shows that citizen journalists have moved away from objectivity-related routines. Attention has already turned to how these organizational developments might affect journalism’s role in democratic self-governance (Franklin, 2012). In other words, scholarship is beginning to examine the consequences of organizational change for the kinds of news we read and see.

Social Institution Level In an earlier age, when social institutions had little choice but to reach the public through mainstream media, those institutions invested significant efforts into trying to influence how news media would tell the stories important to those institutions.While new communication channels now exist, governments, sources, advertisers, public relations practitioners, and interest groups seem no less intent on pressuring or helping the news media to tell stories those institutions can live with. In fact, the development of new digital tools seems to have aided in the development of new forms of press criticism. In Chapter 9, Matt Carlson tackles the burgeoning field of press critics and how these critics seek to shape the structure of the journalistic field. Critics not only push back on specific news stories, but they also push to discredit those journalistic conventions that will shape subsequent reporting. Carlson examines press critics’ discourse about an abortion doctor on trial for the murder of a woman and several newborns. The chapter theorizes how advocatory gatekeeping pressure is brought to bear on journalists’ gatekeeping decisions. Simply put, partisans use the journalistic principle

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of neutral reportage to move topics into a realm of legitimate controversy. This advocatory gatekeeping pressure is no doubt exerted across a range of topics. For example, studies have found similar pressures applied to journalists who cover climate change (Antilla, 2005; Boykoff & Boykoff, 2007; Hiles & Hinnant, 2014). In a similar vein, in Chapter 10 Rodney Tiffen documents how Rupert Murdoch’s Australian has covered climate change. Tiffen theorizes the proprietor—in this case, Murdoch—as a social institutional gatekeeping force, bending newspaper coverage toward a more skeptical position on anthropogenic climate change. The chapter concludes that news coverage in the newspaper cannot be understood apart from a gatekeeping framework, underscoring the significance of a proprietorial influence in explaining gatekeeping decisions. As already noted, audiences play an increasingly important role in news construction with the arrival of the digital age. In an earlier era, journalists and news organizations had developed routines to account for the audience. For example, news values such as proximity, timeliness, and conflict emerged as a means of knowing what it was that audiences wanted from newspapers and broadcasters (Gans, 1979). Journalists rarely heard audience voices but settled instead for abstractions and typifications (Tuchman, 1978). That has changed with the arrival of audiences’ abilities to comment on news stories in comments sections attached to news stories and through social media (Hille & Bakker, 2014). Researchers are only beginning to examine how these interactions with audiences might shape how news turns out the way it does. But some indications are that social media editors frame news stories in ways that are different from traditional frames, downplaying conflict and economic frames that are dominant in traditional media (Wasike, 2013). It is difficult to sort out which changes in journalism are due to digital disruption and which are due to other factors. Most of the changes involve a combination of factors. Take, for example, the enormous growth in government surveillance and the consequences for journalism. Much of that growth in government supervision and spying comes because digitalization and the ubiquity of digital channels of communication make surveillance easier. The impact of surveillance influences nearly all aspects of life, not just journalism. However, journalism has keenly felt the impact (Boghosian, 2013). Journalists report that they find it harder to engage in investigative journalism—i.e., precisely the kind of journalism they believe to be most valuable in democratic societies (Schuman, 2013). Scholars have only begun to study how journalists and sources behave and what kind of journalism is produced when journalists and sources alike believe that governments are monitoring gatekeeping channels.

Social System Level The social structures and social values, attitudes, and ideas that generally come with social systems understandably influence how everyone in a news ecosystem

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thinks and acts. So, it is important that research examines the similarities and differences in news content across countries or other kinds of social systems. In Chapter 11, Mervi Pantti performs a cross-national analysis of the visual reportage of the Syrian crisis. Pantti examines images of the crisis in seven newspapers in seven countries to theorize social system–level gatekeeping forces. The chapter argues that the visual gatekeeping of traditional news organizations results from the challenges professional journalists faced in covering the crisis and from the stark international divisions about how to respond to the mounting crisis. Given the global interconnection that the internet and digitization have provided, it is plausible that news organizations and news audiences are less bound by the countries in which they live. So, it seems likely that globalization has made individual social systems less relevant in understanding news production. Transnational news organizations now operate outside the confines of the traditional nation-state (Reese, 2008). Globalization has seemingly been felt at an institutional level as news organizations across countries adopt a common structure and focus (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Reese, 2008). In Chapter 12, however, John A. Hatcher sets out to explore if an institutionalized, globalized journalism has really made its way to community-level journalism. The chapter shows how the news routines of community journalism in Norway and South Africa diverge from each other and from dominant models. Hatcher demonstrates how community-oriented journalists practice distinctly different gatekeeping routines based on culturally specific community expectations. All of this is not to say that globalization has not affected journalism. Large mainstream news organizations likely have always had a more global orientation than community news organizations, given their investment in foreign correspondents and their interactions with the foreign press corps (Hannerz, 2004). News organizations around the world now also face more common problems, such as global climate change and global recessions (Berglez, 2008). Journalists are indeed being drawn together across national boundaries. A study by Brüggemann (2013) shows how transnational journalism emerges as news organizations co-orient to each other, even across national borders. The study finds that journalism is a transnational “community of practice” (Brüggemann, 2013, p. 414). Transnational journalism, whatever its drawbacks might be, might also be the most advantageous way to still perform the kind of investigative journalism that is under threat from government surveillance and government crackdowns on journalists.

Still Relevant The media and social landscapes that gave rise to gatekeeping scholarship have changed remarkably in the last 65 years. Nevertheless, the theoretical concept of gatekeeping remains a relevant framework for exploring how news turns out the way it does. It is also emerging as a relevant means for exploring how and what news makes its way to audiences. In the chapters that follow, each author will

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make his or her own case, implicitly or explicitly, for the relevance of the gatekeeping concept.They will highlight how gatekeeping has changed, how it might even be the same, and where gatekeeping research might fruitfully head. Finally, in Chapter 13, François Heinderyckx considers what has been gained from the metaphors of gates and gatekeeping and what has potentially been overlooked. While making an impassioned plea for the importance of the gatekeeping function, he also playfully suggests an alternative metaphor to think about the construction of news and how and what news makes its way to the public. Gatekeeping is not yet ready for retirement. It cannot be. It still has much important work to do. Pamela Shoemaker and Vos (2009) have argued that gatekeeping scholarship is both an important theoretical tradition and a kind of practical research. We face a period in which journalism is being transformed. This transformation is inevitable. However, the contours of that transformation are not beyond human control. As journalists, entrepreneurs, and others experiment with new kinds of news organizations and new routines for doing journalism, gatekeeping scholars need to follow closely to document how these transformative developments shape the kind of news that makes it to the public. And now that new channels of press criticism have opened up, gatekeeping scholars would do well to use those channels to confront and congratulate the journalists and others for the kind of news that they produce. If, for example, they are producing news that contributes to democratic self-governance, they deserve to be congratulated and supported. If they produce news that makes democratic self-governance more difficult, they should be called out. This would be a kind of practical research that makes for better journalism and a better world. In the end, gatekeeping will be as relevant as gatekeeping researchers make it.

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McChesney, R. W., & Nichols, J. (2010). Death and life of American journalism:The media revolution that will begin the world again. Philadelphia, PA: Nation Books. McManus, J. H. (1994). Market-driven journalism: Let the citizen beware? Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Mill, J. S. (1977). On liberty. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing. Napoli, P. M. (2003). Audience economics: Media institutions and the audience marketplace. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Nel, F. (2010).Where else is the money? A study of innovation in online business models at newspapers in Britain’s 66 cities. Journalism Practice, 4(3), 360–372. Nevill, G. (2014). Funding news freedom: How reporting is paying its way. Index on Censorship, 43(3), 63–66. doi: 10.1177/0306422014548376 Painter, C., & Hodges, L. (2010). Mocking the news: How The Daily Show with Jon Stewart holds traditional broadcast news accountable. Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 25(4), 257–274. Pavlik, J. V. (2001). Journalism and new media. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Pool, I.D.S., & Shulman, I. (1959). Newsmen’s fantasies, audiences, and newswriting. Public Opinion Quarterly, 23, 145–158. Reese, S. D. (2008). Theorizing a globalized journalism. In M. Löffelholz & D. H. Weaver (Eds.), Global journalism research: Theories, methods, findings, future (pp. 240–252). Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Reese, S. D., & Ballinger, J. (2001). The roots of a sociology of news: Remembering Mr. Gates and social control in the newsroom. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 78(4), 641–658. Reich, Z., & Godler, Y   . (2014). A time of uncertainty. Journalism Studies, 15(5), 607–618. doi: 10.1080/1461670X.2014.882484 Ruppert, M. (2012). Is traditional media dying? The numbers indicate just that. Retrieved from http://wakeup-world.com/2012/04/06/is-traditional-media-dying-the-numbersindicate-just-that/ Ryfe, D. (2012). Can journalism survive? An inside look at American newsrooms. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Ryfe, D. M. (2009). Broader and deeper: A study of newsroom culture in a time of change. Journalism, 10(2), 197–216. Schudson, M. (2003). The sociology of news. New York, NY: Norton. Schuman, J. (2013). The shadows of the spooks. The News Media and the Law, 37(4), 9–12. Shoemaker, P. J. (1991). Gatekeeping. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Shoemaker, P. J., Eichholz, M., Kim, E., & Wrigley, B. (2001). Individual and routine forces in gatekeeping. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 78(2), 233–246. Shoemaker, P. J., & Reese, S. D. (2013). Mediating the message in the 21st century:  A media sociology perspective (Third ed.). New York, NY: Routledge. Shoemaker, P. J., & Vos, T. P. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. New York, NY: Routledge. Singer, J. B. (2014). User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space. New Media & Society, 16(1), 55–73. Skovsgaard, M. (2014). Watchdogs on a leash? The impact of organisational constraints on journalists’ perceived professional autonomy and their relationship with superiors. Journalism, 15(3), 344–363. doi: 10.1177/1464884913483494 Somaiya, R. (2014, October 26). How Facebook is changing the way its users consume journalism. New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2014/10/27/business/ media/how-facebook-is-changing-the-way-its-users-consume-journalism.html?_r=3

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Soo Jung, M., & Hadley, P. (2014). Routinizing a new technology in the newsroom:Twitter as a news source in mainstream media. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(2), 289–305. doi: 10.1080/08838151.2014.906435 Starkman, D. (2014). The watchdog that didn’t bark: The financial crisis and the disappearance of investigative reporting. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Sumpter, R. S. (2000). Daily newspaper editors’ audience construction routines: A case study. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3), 334–346. Tandoc, E. C. (2014). Journalism is twerking? How web analytics is changing the process of gatekeeping. New Media & Society, 16(4), 559–575. Taneja, H., Webster, J. G., Malthouse, E. C., & Ksiazek, T. B. (2012). Media consumption across platforms: Identifying user-defined repertoires. New Media & Society, 14(6), 951–968. doi: 10.1177/1461444811436146 Tuchman, G. (1978). Making news: A study in the construction of reality. New York, NY: Free Press. Usher, N. (2013). Ignored, uninterested, and the blame game: How The New York Times, Marketplace, and TheStreet distanced themselves from preventing the 2007–2009 financial crisis. Journalism, 14(2), 190–207. doi: 10.1177/1464884912455904 Van Dalen, A. (2012). The algorithms behind the headlines. Journalism Practice, 6(5–6), 648–658. doi: 10.1080/17512786.2012.667268 Wasike, B. S. (2013). Framing news in 140 characters: How social media editors frame the news and interact with audiences via Twitter. Global Media Journal: Canadian Edition, 6(1), 5–23. Weaver, D. H., Beam, R. A., Brownlee, B. J.,Voakes, P. S., & Wilhoit, G. C. (2007). The American journalist in the 21st century: U.S. news people at the dawn of a new millennium. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Weaver, D. H., & Wilhoit, G. C. (1996). The American journalist in the 1990s: U.S. news people at the end of an era. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Weaver, D. H., & Willnat, L. (Eds.). (2012). The global journalist in the 21st century. New York, NY: Routledge. White, D. M. (1950). The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27(4), 383–390. Williams, B. A., & Deli Carpini, M. X. (2000). Unchained reaction: The collapse of media gatekeeping and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal. Journalism, 1(1), 61–85. Witschge,T., & Nygren, G. (2009). Journalism: A profession under pressure? Journal of Media Business Studies, 6(1), 37–59. Xu,W. W., & Feng, M. (2014).Talking to the broadcasters on Twitter: Networked gatekeeping in Twitter conversations with journalists. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 58(3), 420–437. doi: 10.1080/08838151.2014.935853 Yu, H. (2011). Beyond gatekeeping: J-blogging in China. Journalism, 12(4), 379–393.

2 HOW GATEKEEPING STILL MATTERS Understanding Media Effects in an Era of Curated Flows Kjerstin Thorson and Chris Wells

Rapid changes in communication media have scholars of many fields reconsidering their theories and methods. In this chapter, we focus on the implications of the digital media revolution and broader shifts in the social environment for research concerned with the ways that the public receives news and information. We outline a conceptual framework designed to help scholars make sense of the multiple, intersecting flows of content—online and off—that shape exposure to news and political content for any given individual.We term this framework curated flows and outline the contingencies of media exposure that are created through the overlapping curating activities of journalists, strategic communicators, individuals, social networks, and online display algorithms in the contemporary media environment. By placing these flows alongside one another, our framework presupposes no hierarchy of curators; instead, we highlight the work needed to understand which sorts of content flow are most influential, for which people, under which conditions. Our second purpose is to outline the connections between our proposed framework and research on news gatekeeping processes. We view the increased contingency and idiosyncrasy of individual media use repertoires not only as a challenge to the study of media effects—it is growing quite difficult to answer the question “exposure to what?”—but also as a rich opportunity for scholars to explore how the curation practices of journalists intersect with behaviors of multiple other curating actors.

New Media, New Metaphors Gatekeeping is a conceptual toolkit that has contributed greatly to our understanding of a problem at the heart of communication:What determines the information that enters the public arena? Or, to phrase the question as it is commonly

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asked in our area of specialization, political communication:What affects the news content that citizens encounter? In our own research, we have been asking how our approaches to this question must change in response to massive changes in communication media and broader social processes. And we believe that, as in other areas of scholarship, the next phase of research in the gatekeeping tradition must contend with fundamental changes in the structure of communication. First among these is the spectacular increase in varieties of content and content creators in today’s communication environment. This shift means that content produced by legacy news organizations is increasingly in competition with multiple other sources of information—and other framings of the same information—for the attention of publics.What journalistic organizations do not consider news may no longer wall off audiences from content in which they may be interested. This fact was demonstrated in dramatic fashion several times throughout the last decade, as politicians learned that it was no longer only the press they had to manage but any and all communications around their campaigns. Such lessons were illustrated by “viral” videos of candidate gaffes and the increased possibility that citizen-created content could—at least in some instances—drive press coverage, rather than the reverse (Lessig, 2005; Pilkington, 2008; Sayre, Bode, Shah, Wilcox, & Shah, 2010). We are witnessing the changing outlines of what we once considered a definable communication space, and substantial attention has been paid to considering what such changes mean for the concept of gatekeeping (e.g., Barnhurst, 2011; Barzilai-Nahon, 2009; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009; Singer, 2014).Yet, dramatic as they are, the disruptive entrance of bloggers to political journalism is only part of the story of the diversification of the media landscape. The arena of communication as a whole is being reshaped by patterns of production and distribution that go well beyond the infusion of new voices. Thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and dozens of other social media platforms, today’s citizens can be directly “in touch” not only with mass media actors but also politicians, parties, companies, musicians, celebrities, organizations, and, of course, friends and family. Individuals can not only choose among these actors as sources of information but can also themselves produce content—communicating among a circle of family and friends but also occasionally even rising to prominence within the broader media ecology. All of these actors have the capacity to create and share messages that—at least sometimes—have civic or political relevance. In stark contrast to the logics by which the institutions of journalism produce news, however, we know very little about the patterns underlying content flow among this great variety of communicators. At the same time, the news consumption behaviors of individuals have changed. Conventional forms of news surveillance—reading the morning paper, watching the evening news—are becoming less common; among some audiences, they have been replaced by a news omnivorousness, exemplified by gathering public affairs content from an ever-expanding array of content providers and delivery platforms and at all times of the day (Massanari & Howard, 2011). Among others, channel

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fragmentation has enabled the nearly complete avoidance of news content (Prior, 2007) or (at the most) occasional, incidental encounters (Yadamsuren & Erdelez, 2010), which raises new questions about the role of personal agency and circumstances in determining a person’s information diet. All of these conditions point to the increased complexity of communication flow and reception that ultimately create myriad contingencies in any particular individual’s information experience. We conceptualize these contingencies as the array of intertwining factors that determine what a person is exposed to and use them as the jumping-off point for asking how we can productively theorize such contingencies today. In this essay, we lay out our perspective on how changes in the communication environment are affecting the way scholars, both theoretically and methodologically, approach the problem of understanding what kinds of content audiences receive and why it matters. Our view is historically informed—a choice we feel is necessary to gaining a footing on quickly shifting terrain. We thus begin by considering the social context in which the gatekeeping perspective evolved and how it has grown and evolved alongside the related—but quite distinct—body of theory harkening back to the “two-step flow” (Lazarsfeld, Berelson, & Gaudet, 1944). Following the trail of social and technological change to our own time brings into sharp relief both the continuing value of and need for adaptation within contemporary gatekeeping scholarship. We build on the core concerns and insights of gatekeeping theory to offer a framework designed to accommodate a media environment characterized by a diverse array of communicators creating and sharing information and their various effects on audiences. Our approach, which we term curated flows, is meant to acknowledge: (1) that contemporary networked publics are subject to a multiplicity of information curators, increasingly on an individual, rather than mass, basis; and (2) that processes of curation may be better conceptualized as drawing information in rather than keeping it out. We develop our notion with a discussion of recent insights offered by scholars of communication in the digital media environment. Finally, we conclude by considering some of the larger implications of the collision of gatekeeping with our notion of curated flows and what productive research questions may be raised by their intersection.

Twin Transformations in Media and Society In the seminal era of mass communication research, scholars developed two paradigms conceptualizing the transmission of information from media to mass publics, each built on a particular metaphor of how information moves through society. One of these was gatekeeping, a term coined by Lewin (1947) and elaborated by White (1950), among others. Gatekeeping placed the power over communication flows squarely with information professionals: For studies of mass communication, this meant most of all reporters, editors, and other members of the press. It was

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these information workers, organizations, and routines that controlled the information “gates” of the metaphor, holding back all but the information they selected for the newspaper or newscast. The other paradigm-forming research explored how mass media messages reached and affected audiences. Lazarsfeld and colleagues (Katz & Lazarsfeld, 1955; Lazarsfeld et al., 1944) built on a metaphor of flow, proposing the acclaimed “two-step flow” model and the less well-known “multi-step flow” update (Menzel & Katz, 1955). In contrast to the gatekeeping model, the two-step flow model emphasized the informational importance of citizens in social contact. Rather than simply being automatons tuned in to the latest programming, members of society actively speak to one another and ask one another questions in an effort to make sense of—interpret—mass communications. From nearly the beginning of our intellectual history, therefore, two powerful metaphors—“gates” and “flows”—have been operant. Though not often in direct competition, early on the two metaphors gave way to differences of emphasis that continue to the present day. Gatekeeping’s concern was with the control of information (e.g., Barzilai-Nahon, 2009; Coddington & Holton, 2014).That, after all, is the meaning of a gate: to control what passes through a wall. In the context of political communication, this perspective implies that elite actors in media, government, and other sectors operate fundamentally differently from other publics. After all, they are the ones with privileged access to the content beyond the gate. High-profile examples of gate control, such as the famous case of journalists choosing to keep Franklin Roosevelt’s illness largely out of the news, characterize the essence of this view (Pressman, 2013). By contrast, the two-step flow gave citizens a prominent role in conveying information and interpreting it.The notion of a “flow” implies a liquid that is not easily contained and is instead directed to its goal by various channels. The flow metaphor emphasized that in different contexts, different individuals—and not just social elites, though there was a tendency in that direction—might prove to be opinion leaders, interpreters, and shapers of political information. Because of its finding of the qualified effects of mass media on the public, this body of theory quickly became the poster child for the “minimal effects” perspective, which cautioned against overstating the influence of media in mass society (though a close read reveals that Lazarsfeld and his colleagues saw the two-step flow as much as an extension of mass media’s reach as a limitation of them [Lazarsfeld et al., 1944]). Beyond simple differences of perspective or intellectual preference, it should be noted that specific historical and social circumstances of the 20th century shaped the origins of the two metaphors of mass communication and their fortunes in the late 20th century. As we turn to reconsidering the metaphors we use to evaluate our own communication environment, this perspective is crucial. Bennett and Iyengar (2008) argued that Lazarsfeld and his coinvestigators (1944) and Lewin (1947) were analyzing a society in which place-based, hierarchical social structures were powerful influences on individual experience.Two features of this

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social structure stand out. First, the embeddedness of personal identity in local groups undergirded by regular interpersonal interaction made personal influence a worthy counterweight to the nascent mass medium of television. This was a particular social moment in which the “minimal effects” of mass media could still be observed (Bennett & Iyengar, 2008; see also Castells, 1996). Second, a hallmark of high modernity was the coherent differentiation of tasks between social actors, as Lewin’s (1947) original conceptualization makes clear. Within the household, he readily ascribes very specific and different roles to the wife and her husband: Whereas the wife has primary control over grocery-purchasing decisions, it is the husband who chooses what to plant in the garden; other household members are apparently assumed to have minimal influence over the operation of those gates. This view of the discretely allocated household tasks, anachronistic (for many members of our society) today, has parallels with larger social routines. This was the era of the organization man, the height of Weberian bureaucratic efficiency, of the bureaucratic corporation, specialization, and professionalization. The structure of media and information distribution was part and parcel of this social pattern: limited channels of communication, highly hierarchical and professionalized organizations, and clear differentiation—both within organizations and in terms of public norms—between the roles of officials, news professionals, and citizens. This was a social moment in which officials spoke, news organizations reported, and citizens dutifully listened (Baym, 2010). One can see how these social conditions lent themselves to productive analysis in both the two-step flow and gatekeeping paradigms. But changes in the latter part of the century shifted the weight of evidence toward gatekeeping’s emphasis on control. In particular, as television became ubiquitous and social structures simultaneously began fracturing into what would later be termed the “network society” (Castells, 1996), the great direct media effects paradigms of agenda setting, priming, framing, and cultivation were born. Shifts away from group-based social arrangements undermined the social structural basis of the two-step flow by detaching many citizens from the rich social networks in which they once filtered information (Bennett & Manheim, 2006). But as the minimal effects paradigm weakened, gatekeeping scholarship flourished; it was bolstered by findings of substantial effects stemming from direct exposure to news content—thus implicating as crucially important the choices made by those who kept the gates: There was great desire to trace communication patterns from opinion makers through news processes to mass publics (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). We trace this social and intellectual history to offer perspective to the fact that we are today experiencing another period of marked change in our social and communication circumstances. Our contention is that the circumstances that favored the gatekeeping metaphor as the dominant way to understand the transmission of information within mass publics of the late 20th century are breaking down. The social–structural changes of the late 20th century have continued,

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with probably substantial—though not yet understood—consequences for citizen reception of news. Individuals in many post-industrial societies continue to move away from identity-anchoring institutions and instead create affiliations on individually networked bases (Giddens, 1991; Inglehart, 1997; Rainie & Wellman, 2012). An important result is “individuation,” as citizens’ faith in major institutions declines and they turn to other, often highly personalized, activities and identities for satisfying self-conceptions and ideas about how they relate to the world (Castells, 2000). In the political sphere, an illustrative manifestation of this trend has been the rise of “lifestyle” politics in which individuals engage in personally meaningful lifestyles and practices (e.g., vegetarianism, consumer activism) in lieu of the institutional affiliations (with parties or civic groups) that shaped their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences of civic life (Bennett, 1998). Sociologically, this does not mean that people no longer associate but that the nature of that association is taking new forms. As Rainie and Wellman (2012) depict it, the new form of personal association is no longer the group form but the networked form: “Networked individuals” maintain highly personal—and personalizable—networks based more on lifestyle, personal interest, and cultural affinity than geography; these networks are enhanced by the communication technologies we describe in the following. All of this may seem far afield from our core question of how we study the factors leading to citizen news exposure, but in fact social changes and changes in media in this era are deeply intertwined (Turner, 2006; Wells, 2014). Social media are an obvious correlate to the networked society. What better way to transcend one’s particular geographic positioning and maintain friend and communication networks with distant others than with communication technologies built on flexible, personalizable networked bases? How better to accommodate the shift from individual experiences and identities rooted in group structures to those arranged along lines of interest, passion, and concern? The primacy of the traditional journalistic organizations in determining what citizens read, watch, and hear has become an open empirical question. The communication environment is becoming much larger, with orders of magnitude more information available to citizens today than in the last century. Today, the gatekeeping literature describes the news-making processes as content production and distribution among one particular set of actors and institutions, but we must understand these activities as becoming increasingly intertwined with content-shaping processes undertaken by a broadening array of other actors. In these circumstances, we are left with something of a conceptual hole which, in the following, we suggest may be at least partially filled by infusing our conceptual framework with a refreshed notion of content “flows.” What we wish to note is that the change in quantity and new entrants into the public conversation may not even be the most significant change occurring; indeed, as Jones (2009) notes, the great majority of news content continues to originate from a single, highly

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journalistic source: newspapers. Therefore, the question is not whether conventional gatekeeping continues to play a role—it clearly does. But the gatekeeping processes we associate with journalists and news organizations have been joined by others: Beyond news communicators, the underlying dynamics of how citizens receive and interpret information are changing as a result of the networking of civic communication ( Jenkins, 2006; Williams & Carpini, 2011).

A New Framework: The Curation of Flows In what follows, we propose a framework to help us make sense of new contingencies in content exposure that are produced by the changes to social structure and communication media just described.The curated flows framework considers the roles of journalistic actors in content production and dissemination (gatekeeping) alongside four additional sets of curating actors: individual media consumers themselves; social others embedded in online and offline networks; strategic communicators; and algorithms designed to shape the discovery and presentation of content in many digital contexts. In presenting this framework, we emphasize the metaphor of curation and bring it together with the more familiar metaphor of flows. Curators are active selectors and shapers of content working under conditions of content abundance. Curators do not only receive messages or filter them out. They may search out content and engage in reframing and remixing ( Jenkins, Ford, & Green, 2013). Multiple, intertwined content flows make up an individual’s communication experience. Exposure to any given message (or, in aggregate terms, the types and frequencies of exposure) therefore depends on a person’s position within the multiplicity of intertwined message flows. Active curation practices are now undertaken by a wider array of actors than in previous eras. In political communication, we have paid the most attention to the curation practices of journalistic organizations (gatekeeping); today, similar work in content creation, framing, and shaping is also done by presidential campaigns, interest groups, bloggers, Facebook users, and the human actors responsible for designing content display algorithms. And whereas communication research tends to be siloed into separate research programs—gatekeeping, media effects, uses and gratifications, and so on—for the networked individual, information reception, dissemination, and interpretation are not so cleanly delineated. Further, as we discuss in the following, the logics of curation that shape the choices made by other sets of actors are much less well understood than those of journalists, leaving a broad theoretical gap in our understanding of the way message flows are shaped.

Journalistic Curation Even as news organizations face economic pressures and cultural challenges brought about by the rapidly changing communication environment, there is little

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question that the role of the press remains central in the political communication information ecology ( Jones, 2009). This includes the content flowing through social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter: Data from late 2013 show that of the top ten “most liked” publishers on Facebook, seven are mainstream news organizations (Thompson, 2013). News organizations also dominate the lists of most mentioned usernames and most linked-to websites on Twitter. The role that journalists play in making decisions about which news to report, and how to report it, thus continues to be crucial. And, of course, it is this form of curation that we know most about: Scholars of the sociology of news production and gatekeeping have built a major body of knowledge about how journalists and their organizations go about their work (e.g., Gans, 1979; Shoemaker, 1991). This literature is premised on the idea of exploring a key question for journalism: What ends up in the newspaper or on the news broadcast? The sociology of news and gatekeeping thus has an enormous amount to tell us about the logics applied when journalists select the information they will publish—their values and biases (Gans, 1979), their striving for balance and objectivity, and their susceptibility to political forces (Bennett, 1990; Bennett, Lawrence, & Livingston, 2007). However, this literature has only begun to consider gatekeeping processes as they are carried out in the new media environment (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Today, news organizations must compete with one another not only for scoops but for speed within the uninterrupted news cycle. They are also responding to intense competition from an array of other media outlets appealing to audiences’ attention. And they must now provide content and delivery methods that fit within an ecosystem in which much of their content is not delivered directly but via a third party—principally one of the other variety of curations to be described in the following. Research has so far paid little attention to how journalistic curations intersect with the curating logics of other actors—a question that occupies us in the latter parts of this chapter (however, see Singer, 2014; Thorson, 2008).

Social Curation The second form of curation we consider is that performed by the social network or networks of which an individual is a member. Attention to these socially curated flows is not new to communication scholarship. The classic two-step flow model drew our attention to the role that social groups have to play in disseminating and mediating the understandings of exposure to mass media content (Lazarsfeld et al., 1944). Today, the rise of social media platforms has brought questions about social networks and the spread of content back to the forefront. In 2010, 48% of American internet users reported sharing news and information with their friends and followers online, and 28% of American internet users reported getting news content from their friends via social networking sites (Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel, & Olmstead, 2010). The affordances of social network sites (SNSs)

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combined with the sharing tools popular on many content-producing websites make it not only possible but easy for individuals to spread content through their online social networks. The curated flows model raises the possibility that two-step flow dynamics may be amplified for individuals connected by social media. That said, we do not claim a priori that social media, lifestyle network–enabled two-step flows are identical to those of the previous era. The broad social changes outlined previously suggest that individuals have an increasing level of choice in the social networks with which they affiliate (a form of personal curation, as described in the following), and such networks may be chosen based on shared interests and common causes (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). As such, these self-selected networks may encourage flows of homogeneous information, or they may produce increased information diversity, depending on the makeup of the network; the literature is still at a fairly early stage of disentangling these competing possibilities (Bakshy, 2012; de Zúñiga, Jung, & Valenzuela, 2012; Goel, Mason, & Watts, 2010; Huckfeldt & Sprague, 1987; Messing & Westwood, 2014). But the larger point is to recognize that when a person glances at their news feed, the “news” coming over it is not only filtered by journalists: Within the networked environment, the peers with whom that person has online connections now sit next to journalists, with equal capacity to present the consumer with information for consideration. Before that encounter, the peer engages in a process of viewing, filtering, and sharing information that we do not yet well know.

Personal Curation There is a growing consensus that the multi-channel, multi-device media environment is bringing with it an increase in the capacity for individuals to curate their own information environments. As such, personal choice is an increasingly powerful factor in information exposure (Donsbach & Mothes, 2012; Sunstein, 2001). We refer to this process as personal curation because, like the other forms of curation, this one involves the selection and filtering of some information packages and not others. In personal curation, it just happens to be the end user who is doing the curation for himself or herself. Also like the other forms, it is not an entirely new observation that individuals choose what to watch, hear, or read. Decades of research on uses and gratifications of media and on individual differences in media selection habits have shown the importance of considering the roles of choice and motivation (e.g., Blumler & Katz, 1974). What has changed in the recent era is the array of options available to the media consumer (Prior, 2007). Choice in the broadcast era was much more limited, both in terms of the array of channels and media available but also in terms of the devices through which to consume media, the capacity to interact with media and to share it with others, and even to choose the time at which content would be consumed. In the contemporary media ecology, personal curation

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thus becomes an important source of contingency when it comes to exposure to political messages. Even though some research suggests that many consumers do continue to maintain habitual repertoires of media consumption (e.g., LaRose, 2010; Yuan, 2011), the possibilities for idiosyncrasy of those repertoires is substantially greater. Given this, we are likely to see an increasing correspondence between individuals’ personal interests and concerns and the media they experience. But personal choices will always take place alongside other flows of content, and the ways in which these will intersect are many and important. For example, Pew reports that in 2010 in the U.S., 23% of social networking site users who got news online also followed a journalist on Facebook or Twitter (Purcell et al., 2010). In our framework, we see each of those individuals as opting in to a journalistic communication flow. Online, the impact of personal curation choices can often be invisible. Tracking of data about where an individual goes and the content they select can drive what will be displayed to them in the future on sites ranging from Facebook to Google (Pariser, 2011)—an entanglement of personal curation and algorithmic curation, as outlined in the following.

Strategic Curation For some scholars, a central story emerging from the digital media era has been the growing capacity for strategic actors—politicians, corporations, governments, interest groups—to address publics directly, in many cases bypassing the curation choices of the news gatekeepers (e.g., Howard, 2006). Political campaigns and corporations alike are embracing new capacities for databasing and datamining and are combining them with digital communication tools to reach targets directly. Bennett and Manheim (2006) argued that we are entering a new era of “one-step flow” in which communicators directly target messages tailored at nearly the individual level (Edsall, 2012). Social networking companies such as Facebook and Twitter and content hubs like Flickr and YouTube actively work with political campaigns and companies to help them reach constituents directly: Their advertising-driven business model demands the satisfaction of communicators wishing to reach publics. Political candidates can communicate directly with their “fans” on Facebook and their “followers” on Twitter, as well as via websites and email. In terms of the curated flows model, such inputs create new overlaps between strategic curation and social curation processes within social networking sites. The integration of vast troves of data about individual preferences and behaviors with the infrastructure to contact citizens directly makes it ever easier to deliver different messages to different people. There are obvious incentives for strategic communicators to do this. First, bypassing journalistic curators serves to clarify the message being conveyed to intended recipients and greatly narrows the range of interpretations that can be

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derived from it. Further, microtargeting of small, homogeneous publics or even individuals means that appeals can be made that are only appealing to specific groups—or are even offensive to others—often without the repercussions of public messages digested by the press. In contemporary digital spaces of mixed flows, we also are now seeing political actors redistributing stories and analyses from the news media. This is a perfect inversion of the old gatekeeping relationship: Rather than journalists selecting which of the political actors’ communications to include in stories, it is now political actors, speaking directly to publics, employing journalistic output—highly selectively, of course—to buttress their own arguments and legitimacy.

Algorithmic Curation A final type of curation frequently overlaps with the other four, at least in many online contexts. Algorithmic curation is the process of information filtering and selection driven by computer algorithms and other, often hidden, modes of determining what kind of content is displayed to a user of a device or platform (Braun & Gillespie, 2011).The term “algorithmic” represents the appearance of this curation from the perspective of the media consumer but, of course, these curations are not simply conducted by computers. They are set in motion by technical actors employed by the corporations that control many of the “digital intermediaries” that connect citizens to each other and to civic content in our current era. Like social curation, automated curation is only beginning to receive attention in popular media and from scholars, with corresponding anxiety about what it may entail for patterns of information distribution (Gillespie, 2010, 2011; Pariser, 2011). Pariser (2011) in particular has warned of a “filter bubble” in which the algorithms in place in major information-sharing sites such as Facebook “learn” what you like and shape incoming information according to what the algorithm thinks you will want. In Pariser’s terms, this could mean that one stops seeing the posts of family members with different political views because Facebook has noticed that one does not “like” them as often. In a way, this is an extension of the old concern that our information experiences will be walled off from one another (e.g., Sunstein, 2001), but in the case of algorithmic curation, it may not be the end user doing so intentionally, or even noticing it. However, some companies and other organizations are taking steps to encourage more heterogeneous and unexpected information encounters (Freelon, Kriplean, Morgan, Bennett, & Borning, 2012; Garrett & Resnick, 2011), and more attention to this issue is clearly warranted.

Research Questions Inspired by the Curated Flows Framework This rough outline of a possible universe of curating actors inspires a set of research questions that cut across multiple subfields within communication research. A first

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set of questions derives from our sense that what were once reasonable assumptions in the last century must be empirically reexamined in this one; that is, where the significance of journalistic gatekeeping to a person’s information experience could once be assumed, this may be less and less the case. The degree to which a particular person’s experiences are shaped by what we would call journalistic curation becomes an empirical question. Thus, we must increasingly ask: Which curation processes are most important in the lives of citizens? In a diverse, fragmenting society characterized by unequal attention and interest, we must also remain aware that such answers may vary widely among groups and individuals. Thus: How do curation profiles differ among individuals? Addressing this question requires not only fine-grained data about individual media repertoires but also quite quickly opens up questions about how curated flows intersect. For example, we are engaged in a research project in which we use an application to collect information from the Facebook news feeds of participants who opt to take part in the study and survey the same participants about their general media consumption/creation habits and outcomes like political knowledge, participation, and so on. These data will allow us to create curation exposure profiles and connect them to democratic outcomes: For example, we can compare the political knowledge of participants whose news feeds contain a higher proportion of strategic political communication (because, say, they have opted in to receive messages from their favorite political figure or a series of interest groups) with those who receive most of their civic communication directly from journalistic sources. We will even be able to distinguish those for whom exposure to civic information is primarily incidental—that is, those for whom social curation processes dominate what they learn about the world. A second set of questions concerns the logics of curation as undertaken by actors other than journalists. Here, scholars will have much to gain from the body of gatekeeping literature. We have assembled categories of curating actors based on our synthesis of existing work, and we believe that creating such categories has been done on reasonable grounds—for example, journalistic institutions have been shown to operate under relatively similar sets of norms and routines, producing similar definitions of newsworthiness and value (Gans, 1979); there are good reasons for algorithms to be designed to select information concordant with users’ existing beliefs. Research on selective exposure strongly suggests that individuals prefer information agreeable to their existing views (e.g., Garrett, Carnahan, & Lynch, 2011). However, the very act of classifying curating actors pushes us to ask: What is the degree of variation between curation processes within each category? On what factors do the logics of curation depend? Research in this area has begun to emerge.The institutional and individual processes leading to the curation of news algorithms are under study (Ananny, 2013; Braun & Gillespie, 2011), as are the social logics that affect what kind of civic content is spread on sites like Facebook and Twitter (Rui & Stefanone, 2013; Thorson, 2014).

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A third set of questions is linked more directly with the effects of media exposure. That is: How do the flows through which a message is received shape the effect of that reception? We know, for example, that social endorsements shape the apparent credibility of messages in comparison with computer-generated selections or those of news editors (Sundar & Nass, 2001); just this one example makes it clear that the same message may have different effects based on the particular curation process(es) through which it travels. Extensive work remains to be done, for instance, looking at the assignment of credibility, relevance, and other judgments dependent on the flows through which a message has traveled on its way to the point of reception. The complexities of providing answers within each of these question sets are amplified by the fact that multiple acts of curation are at work simultaneously within any individual’s content network. Some of these intersections are quite obvious and easily observed: The New York Times posts a story to Facebook and my friend shares it on the site; an individual chooses to follow CNN breaking news on Twitter and therefore opts in to receiving content from that source. Others are more subtle. In the U.S., in the past two campaign cycles, for example, candidates drew on voter data files to help online volunteers strategically target the most persuadable among their Facebook friends for sharing certain kinds of news and campaign-created content ( Judd, 2011). Here, we see a message originating with a strategic communicator—possibly a story that began its life in a mainstream news organization—traveling on its way to an individual by way of a social contact and the complex content display algorithm devised by Facebook. Only by typologizing these potential overlaps and intersections (something the curated flows framework allows us to do) can we begin to model the multi-faceted nature of the contemporary political information experience and its possible effects. Again, new methods make it increasingly possible to design research projects directed toward understanding these intersecting flows. We could, for example, trace the flow of a particular news story from a newspaper to its appearance (and perhaps reframing) on an individual’s blog, then follow it as the link is shared again within a network of, for example, climate change activists. We can see how a YouTube video of a news channel was retweeted within a network of protesters in support of the Occupy Movement. Unpacking pathways from the news source to individual reception requires our attention to the ways in which multiple forms of curation intersect: The clip from the news channel might be posted to YouTube by the news organization itself, an act of journalistic curation; tweeted by an individual, an act of individual selection; and then received by another individual in that person’s network (social curation). Many examples of this type of research are beginning to emerge in the literature (e.g., Baym & Shah, 2011; Bennett & Segerberg, 2011; Thorson et al., 2013; Wallsten, 2010).

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The Implications of Curated Flows for Gatekeeping Scholarship We end this chapter with thoughts about the implications of the curated flows framework for gatekeeping scholarship. There is an important history of linkages between gatekeeping and media effects. For those scholars who are interested in how exposure to news content affects public opinion, knowledge among the citizenry, and participatory behavior, an understanding of what that news media content contains has long been of utmost importance. Take, for example, research linking frames that emerge in news stories as a result of journalistic norms and structures—findings from gatekeeping research—with the uptake of frames for understanding political events by audiences of that news content—a question of media effects (Scheufele, 1999). To that end, the findings from gatekeeping research of a certain stability in journalistic norms and routines across organizations and individual journalists have been a boon to media effects research. It is this consistency and our confidence in the relative uniformity of news content across outlets that have allowed us to bracket specific issues of content in survey-based studies of news effects. We often put to one side the question of “exposure to what” in macrolevel studies of the role that news consumption plays in promoting democratic outcomes. Thus, “hard news” use is linked to the emergence of social capital (Shah, Kwak, & Holbert, 2001), and “local news use” promotes political participation (Moy, McCluskey, McCoy, & Spratt, 2004). Even studies that draw on experimental methods to test the effects of specific news texts on psychological outcomes justify their choice of stimuli by reference to our collective knowledge about news production processes. Strategically framed political news, episodic-versus-thematic framing, human interest stories, and economic consequences as genres, for example—all of these become interesting as experimental manipulations because they have been uncovered as common outcomes of existing news production processes (Iyengar, 1987; Semetko & Valkenburg, 2000; Shoemaker & Reese, 1990). In turn, certain frames or types of stories are commonly found in the news because of the particular set of forces that shaped news production in the mass media era. Whether made explicit or not in any given study, research into media effects is always based on theories about how media content is produced (Shoemaker & Reese, 1990). We have learned much from this research and continue to do so. However, the twinned transformations described previously of media technology and the broader social structure are disrupting the extant relationship (and the often unspoken assumptions) between studies of news media production and research on media effects. The proliferating channels through which media content can flow and the expansion of the number of actors who can directly shape media content as it is experienced by others require us to turn our attention again to the question of  “exposure to what,” and to do so perhaps with a new set of lenses. New actors are challenging existing gatekeeping processes, changing not only the quantity of content that is spread among citizens but also often upheaving

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traditional notions of quality. As a result, journalists are being pulled into the modes and logics of other actors with whom they are competing for attention (Anderson, 2013; Bruns, 2005; Singer, 2014; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). To be sure, many of the changing conditions of the current information environment discomfit some of gatekeeping’s fundamental assumptions.These include the massively increasing quantity of information available to citizens; the increasing tenuousness of thinking of journalists’ work as one of informational “control”; the entrance of a wide range of new actors to the communication scene with logics and processes for channeling information that are not yet well understood; and a networked information architecture in which individuals are situated at the center of a variety of “flows” of different sorts. But this in no way suggests a call for gatekeeping’s retirement. On the contrary, contributions of gatekeeping scholarship are essential for moving us forward in understanding how citizens interact with their personalized information environments. First, gatekeeping, in its classic, publisher–editor–journalist sense, is still crucially important to the information environment. A great portion of the news people receive—whether it is on Facebook, Twitter, or another social platform—originated with a newspaper or other news organization ( Jones, 2009). From a normative democratic perspective, the persistence of traditional news processes is essential. However we may debate the “quality” of journalism today, content produced within the institution of journalism remains more likely than other forms of curation to provide individuals with a diverse array of information. We continue to need to understand what factors and considerations go into deciding what information enters that powerful and influential stream—even as those factors and considerations change, as we note in the following. Second, gatekeeping scholarship should help to inform our ongoing analysis of these new and expanding forms of curated content flows. As of yet, we know very little about these processes/patterns—for whom each is most decisive, under what conditions, and so on. Although we have argued that the gatekeeping metaphor is best reserved for its current use—focusing on the actions of news institutions and journalists—the gatekeeping tradition offers a road map for the exploration of similarities and differences of curation processes within emerging categories of curating actors. Shoemaker and Vos (2009) write of findings from gatekeeping research: Routines are crucial in determining which items are moved through the channel and which are rejected, and the distinction between individual influences and communication routine influences on gatekeeping must be made if we are to evaluate the extent of each separately. (p. 51) Such observations should drive our study of curation practices undertaken by other actors. For example, scholars are just beginning to explore the structural and cultural forces that shape the emergence of display algorithms on sites like

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Google News or Facebook. We might ask: To what extent do the preferences of choices of individual engineers as compared with corporate institutional routines and requirements shape whether Google News allows visitors to fully customize the news they see? Finally, in this new media environment, gatekeeping processes are themselves undergoing a change. We believe that drawing on the curated flows typology can help to accelerate our understanding of those changes. Monitoring and awareness of the fortunes of news content as it spreads through the information environment are becoming increasingly important tasks undertaken even within traditional news organizations (Anderson, 2013; Singer, 2014). The role of “the audience” in influencing journalistic gatekeeping is becoming more concrete (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Similarly, many of the new entrants to the public communication space are demanding recognition and authority over news production. As Robinson (2009) demonstrates in an analysis of the interplay between “citizen journalists” and the conventional news media in constructing memories of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf of Mexico in 2005, responses to these demands will engender new forms and practices among journalists.

Conclusions There is great interest in the nature of the media environment we currently inhabit.This interest has yielded claims about the end of the utility of gatekeeping (Barnhurst, 2011); its continued, if evolved, importance (e.g., Shaw, 2012); and the purportedly rising dominance of personal news selection (Sunstein, 2001), strategic microtargeting (Bennett & Manheim, 2006), and automated content filtering (Pariser, 2011). The very range—not to mention mutual incompatibility—of such claims is evidence of a remarkable moment of change. And yet neither the degree of change we are witnessing nor the emergence of various new intellectual toolkits should prevent us from carefully exploring new ways of integrating existing theoretical perspectives into a contemporary understanding of complex media flows. We offer the curated flows framework as one typology to help us pinpoint crucial challenges to our existing assumptions about the intersections among media production, dissemination, and effects.

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Pilkington, E. (2008, April 13). Obama angers midwest voters with guns and religion remark. The Guardian. Retrieved from www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/ barackobama.uselections2008 Pressman, M. (2013). Ambivalent accomplices: How the press handled FDR’s disability and how FDR handled the press. Journal of the Historical Society, 13(3), 325–359. doi: 10.1111/jhis.12023 Prior, M. (2007). Post-broadcast democracy: How media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell, A., Rosenstiel, T., & Olmstead, K. (2010). Understanding the participatory news consumer. Pew Internet and American Life Project. Retrieved from www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Online-News.aspx Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). Networked:The new social operating system. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Robinson, S. (2009). “If you had been with us”: Mainstream press and citizen journalists jockey for authority over the collective memory of Hurricane Katrina. New Media & Society, 11(5), 795–814. Rui, J. R., & Stefanone, M. A. (2013). Strategic image management online: Self-presentation, self-esteem and social network perspectives. Information, Communication & Society, 16(8), 1286–1305. Sayre, B., Bode, L., Shah, D., Wilcox, D., & Shah, C. (2010). Agenda setting in a digital age: Tracking attention to California Proposition 8 in social media, online news and conventional news. Policy & Internet, 2(2), 7–32. Scheufele, D. A. (1999). Framing as a theory of media effects. Journal of Communication, 49(1), 103–122. Semetko, H. A., & Valkenburg, P. M. (2000). Framing European politics: A content analysis of press and television news. Journal of Communication, 50(2), 93–109. Shah, D. V., Kwak, N., & Holbert, R. L. (2001). “Connecting” and “disconnecting” with civic life: Patterns of Internet use and the production of social capital. Political Communication, 18(2), 141–162. Shaw, A. (2012). Centralized and decentralized gatekeeping in an open online collective. Politics & Society, 40(3), 349–388. doi: 10.1177/0032329212449009 Shoemaker, P. J. (1991). Gatekeeping. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Shoemaker, P. J., & Reese, S. D. (1990). Exposure to what? Integrating media content and effects studies. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 67(4), 649–652. Shoemaker, P. J., & Vos, T. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. London, UK: Routledge. Singer, J. B. (2014). User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space. New Media & Society, 16(1), 55–73. Sundar, S. S., & Nass, C. (2001). Conceptualizing sources in online news. Journal of Communication, 51(1), 52–72. Sunstein, C. (2001). Republic.com. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thompson, D. (2013, December 10). I thought I knew how big Upworthy was on Facebook: Then I saw this. The Atlantic. Retrieved from www.theatlantic.com/business/ archive/2013/12/i-thought-i-knew-how-big-upworthy-was-on-facebook-then-isaw-this/282203/ Thorson, E. (2008). Changing patterns of news consumption and participation: News recommendation engines. Information, Communication & Society, 11(4), 473–489.

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Thorson, K. (2014). Facing an uncertain reception:Young citizens and political interaction on Facebook. Information, Communication & Society, 17(2), 203–216. Thorson, K., Driscoll, K., Ekdale, B., Edgerly, S., Thompson, L. G., Schrock, A., Swartz, L., Vraga, E. K., & Wells, C. (2013).YouTube, Twitter and the Occupy Movement. Information, Communication & Society, 16(3), 421–451. doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2012.756051 Turner, F. (2006). From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Wallsten, K. (2010). “Yes we can”: How online viewership, blog discussion, campaign statements, and mainstream media coverage produced a viral video phenomenon. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 7(2–3), 163–181. Wells, C. (2014). Two eras of civic information and the evolving relationship between civil society organizations and young citizens. New Media & Society, 16(4), 615–636. White, D. M. (1950). The “gate keeper”: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383–391. Williams, B. A., & Carpini, M.X.D. (2011). After broadcast news: Media regimes, democracy, and the new information environment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Yadamsuren, B., & Erdelez, S. (2010). Incidental exposure to online news. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 47(1), 1–8. Yuan, E. (2011). News consumption across multiple media platforms:A repertoire approach. Information, Communication & Society, 14(7), 998–1016.

PART II

Individual Level The New Gatekeepers

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3 JOURNALISTS’ TRUTH JUSTIFICATION IN A TRANSNATIONAL NEWS ENVIRONMENT Lea Hellmueller

The individual level is where most of our thinking on influence over news starts. The individual level “involves studying the characteristics of people—their demographic, their life experiences, their personal values and attitudes, and their work experiences” (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009, p. 31). Journalists’ actions and their work are easily observed and tangible to the public, as in watching political correspondents on TV explaining the implications of new legislation. As scholars move away from the directly observable level by studying other levels of influence, such as the organizational level, our research inquiry becomes more complex. Studying the organizational level requires more analytical thinking because organizational forces, such as technical and financial resources, are less visible in news stories and less directly observable. We first have to build an understanding of what organizational forces entail—and their power to shape the production process of news—to conclude the evidence of such less immediate forces. Powerful as they are, organizational structures are not directly observable and are more difficult to grasp analytically in how they shape news content (Shoemaker & Reese, 2013). It is somewhat paradoxical that on one hand, the individual level is the level where most of our thinking starts, but on the other hand, it is also the least theorized level of influence over news. The paradox results from the many facets the individual level incorporates, instead of linking those facets to other levels to build a theoretical framework of individual-level influences over news. To give an example, as 2013 and 2014 marked the years of immigration reform talks in the U.S., on the individual level, we entertain a variety of research questions to understand the impact individuals have on how immigration is framed in the news.We might ask questions about what influence individual demographics or personal preferences, such as how journalists’ own citizenship matters, have for the tone of the story. If a journalist personally believes in the need for immigration reform, is it ethical

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from a journalistic standpoint to seek out sources such as an immigration reform activist to give him or her the platform to speak to the public and claim his or her statement to be true? We might also ask about how different sound bites or quotes are chosen to combine a variety of standpoints and fulfill a journalistic ideal of being balanced. Both individual characteristics and the professional ideal of journalism are questions that tap into the individual level of analysis. Most research on the individual level within the last 60 years described either personal individual characteristics of journalists (i.e., personal background) or focused on journalists’ professional roles and ethics. That said, much research has described individuallevel variables but has done little to link these to other levels and explain why they matter (or not) for the news. This chapter, however, provides an argument for linking those individual-level questions to other levels to understand how individual-level influences can be explained and conceptualized by higher levels of influence. Taking the previous example, on the next analytical levels—the routine and the organizational— individual questions may extend beyond individual characteristics and professional approaches to journalism and connect these characteristics to how well an individual fits into an organization. For example, we might ask: Is a journalist’s preference for immigration reform influenced by the ideological leaning of a media organization, such as if he or she is employed by a national Spanishlanguage organization that supports advances in immigration? In this case, the individual level—the journalist’s preference—is explained by professional attitudes as an expression of the organization and the social system (foreign, national, or local audiences) in which journalists are embedded. What is most important to understand from the previous example is that individual characteristics are embedded in a social system and an organizational framework and are expressed through journalistic routines (e.g., the sources reporters seek out). Linking those individual characteristics to other levels certainly helps to understand why some individual characteristics in news stories are visible, while others are not. T   hat said, a reporter who works for a Spanish-language network is encouraged by the very nature of the media organization to seek out Latino or Hispanic news sources on the topic. At the same time, the organization enables individual characteristics (e.g., a journalist’s preference for reform) through its structures by giving the reporter the resources he or she needs to seek out the sound bites or quotes for such a story. Hence, we can argue both ways: from the micro- to the macrolevel—that the reporter has to cover those sources because of organizational constraints and the ratings—or from the macro- to the microlevel—that the structure of the organization enables the reporter to seek out Latinos for a story on immigration. Certainly from a U.S. perspective, the granting of individual responsibility has proven to be more appealing to journalists (Shoemaker & Reese, 2013) than more liberal critiques based on claims of owner control and corporate domination, which might hinder room for personal agency. Because of that, individuallevel explanations bear ideological and professional assumptions and have a strong

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normative context. The normative context is essential, since journalism as a profession is legitimized as a semi-autonomous field on normative conventions of truth telling, such as objectivity, autonomy, impartiality, and independence (Deuze, 2005). This in turn leads to another paradox at the individual level that combines personal characteristics and professional variables. Based on such an idea that journalists should be impartial, how might individual preferences of sources go contrary to the journalistic norm of impartiality? For example, what does it mean to be independent if a journalist’s own background is reflected in a story he or she writes? Whereas normative categories and individual characteristics are considered individual-level factors, they may also contradict each other, from a normative standpoint, in how they should influence news content—at least from a U.S. perspective. For example, after a decade as a reporter, A. Kent MacDougall revealed in 1971 that he was a socialist and had written for radical papers while employed by the Wall Street Journal. His story created a long controversy, particularly over the question of objectivity and personal bias (Reese, 1990). On one hand, journalists and scholars alike advocate to eliminate individual characteristics reflected in the news (e.g., political views), as was the case with “the socialist at the Wall Street Journal.” On the other hand, journalists aim for their professional individual characteristics to be visible in news outputs. Hence, taking the U.S. example, the individual level is somehow divided into forces that powerfully shape news (professional roles and norms), and the prevailing belief is that individual factors should remain unseen (political bias). While professional individual factors and personal attitudes are subsumed under the same analytical level in the U.S. tradition, in the European context, this challenge has been acknowledged: Donsbach (1987) distinguished between the subject and the professional sphere. Donsbach (1987) places values and norms—all factors that influence the journalist as an individual (Kunczik & Zipfel, 2001)—in the subject sphere. Associated with the professional sphere are social factors such as ethical principles, professional norms, news selection criteria, research methods, and social orientation. However, what is left is a descriptive model instead of a linkage of those spheres or levels to explain the underlying process leading to news judgment (Donsbach, 2004) and, eventually, news. This chapter aims to shed light on the underlying link between professional variables and social-system variables. The following empirical study links those professional individual-level forces to the structures of social systems. Washington, DC, provides the perfect case for such a study because of the high autonomy reporters enjoy in the nation’s capital compared with journalists in other cities (Willnat & Weaver, 2003). Second, the DC case shows how individual characteristics express themselves through different social systems, as the city attracts one of the largest numbers of foreign correspondents in the world. Comparing U.S. reporters to foreign reporters explains how social-system variables manifest themselves in the actions of DC reporters. Because these correspondents assume autonomy, we can study how individual responsibility (the individual-level

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variable) is negotiated under different cultural structures (the different country those journalists are working for). It is worth taking that step to theorize the individual level of a hierarchical model of gatekeeping in relation to other levels. First, it maps a framework of structural differences: How are U.S. and foreign correspondents distinct in their access to politicians? The chapter details how access structures enable journalistic roles and how routines and the reiteration of journalistic practices reinforce social structures to remain powerful influences over news content—expressed through individual-level professional variables.

Journalists’ Characteristics: 1950 Through to Today Scholarly interest in describing individual characteristics has emerged within the past 60 years of journalism research because of its assumed importance to shape news content. One well-known study on gatekeeping concluded that one third of the time, story decisions were based on Mr. Gates’ prejudices: “I dislike Truman’s economics, daylight saving time and warm beer, but I go ahead using stories on them and other matters if I feel there is nothing more important to give space to” (White, 1950, p. 390). Since the 1970s, journalism studies have focused on describing individual characteristics tied to professional characteristics, such as how journalists conceive of their roles in society (Hanitzsch, 2011) and their values and norms (Weaver, Beam, Brownlee,Voakes, & Wilhoit, 2007), their political affiliations, their education, or their affiliations with interest groups (Shoemaker & Reese, 2013). These studies ask what journalists stand for and, more importantly, how journalists can cope with preconceived sympathies, as they may know some sources from their previous assignments—sources who might be more likely to respond in time for journalists to meet their deadlines. Does a hidden ideological agenda matter for the news these journalists produce? Thus, most individual-level influence factors play out at the sourcing stage when journalists come in contact with opinions or ideas that are similar or different from their own (Reese, 1990). Meanwhile, most studies on individual-level characteristics of journalists have explained professional attitudes as a function of the social and political system (i.e., distinguishing between democratic, developing, transitional, and authoritative political systems). From a theoretical perspective, gatekeeping theory conceptualizes journalists’ roles, ethics, and attitudes as embedded in routines and performed within a social system (mostly defined by national borders) that serve as the foundation from which media content is constructed (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Such theorizing explains the need for journalists to embrace a professional role, which targets mostly national or local audiences. However, with increased globalization, gatekeeping forces change. The forces reflect the emergence of news organizations enlarging their audience by targeting a transnational audience. In fact, the launch of Al Jazeera America in August 2013 is just another example of how global media outlets headquartered in the U.S. have become more global in

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their news-gathering routines (with 70 offices overseas). They have done this by approaching news content as a means for building global understanding while also attracting an American audience. The same holds true for foreign correspondence in the 21st century and for national news outlets targeting a culturally diverse audience within one country. There is no doubt that globalization and increasing immigration have intensified the need for such a network but have also opened up new markets for targeting different ethnic groups within one country. Here again, national borders no longer reflect cultural or ethnic borders. Reese (2001) argued, “More important than national differences may be the emergence of a transnational global professionalism, the shape of which will greatly affect how well the world’s press meets the normative standards we would wish for it” (p. 173). Based on these global developments within the media industry, this chapter theorizes individual-level characteristics in relation to social-system structuring forces in a transnational news environment as a way to approach gatekeeping in transition. While transnational journalism spaces have existed since the evolving practice of foreign correspondence, advances in communication technologies have affected journalists’ interactions and access to sources. To explore gatekeeping in transition, this chapter is designed to theorize the individual level in linkage with the social system—from an individual level of measurement (surveys with journalists and qualitative interviews) and individual and social-system levels of analysis (explaining the outcomes by structuring forces based on journalists’ social-system backgrounds). For this purpose, the news environment in Washington, DC, is analyzed to examine how levels of gatekeeping provide structure to the practices and individual characteristics of DC correspondents. Specific attention is given to how U.S. and foreign correspondents justify truth to understand the unique elements of what constitutes a transnational journalism environment from an individual-level perspective—that is, the journalistic field constitutes journalists’ particular form of belief that guarantees their independence from external forces and their first obligation to truth (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2001).

Research Inquiry on the Field of Transnational Journalism The number of foreign correspondents in Washington, DC, has increased over the years. In 2008, the number was nearly 10 times what it was in 1968 when the U.S. State Department first opened a foreign press center (Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009). In addition, the terrorist attacks of September 2011 have certainly raised international interest in U.S. politics (Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009). For example, Al Jazeera’s English-language service opened a Washington bureau in 2006, and within three years, the organization had already hired 86 staff members accredited to cover the U.S. Congress. The decline in the number of U.S. mainstream media has led to a sharp growth among niche media and a

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significant jump in foreign media represented in Washington. Indeed, DC has emerged as a transnational journalism space; an increasing number of journalists from around the globe compete for political sources in DC and gather news alongside U.S. journalists. News production may still be geared toward a domestic audience (WahlJorgensen & Hanitzsch, 2009), but global tendencies emerge among normative ideals. The comparative perspective indicates that the extent to which journalists identify with a particular role or function varies across cultures and in its relation to heteronomous pressures, initial formation, and the subsequent historical trajectory of the field (Hanitzsch, 2011). However, what happens if journalists are more likely to be exposed to ideas of a particular kind of cosmopolitan journalism, which may conflict with heteronomous pressures on their work (e.g., Reese, 2001)? Hence, this chapter investigates how social-system structures shape individual-level characteristics.The following research questions are posed to peel the onion framework of gatekeeping theory. RQ1: How are U.S. and foreign correspondents distinct in their access to politicians in Washington, DC? RQ2: Under different structural settings and circumstances, how do journalists legitimize truth (in relation to their sources) in a transnational field? RQ3: How do journalists’ truth legitimization routines affect the way they perceive their professional roles? The purpose of these research questions is to explain individual-level factors based on structural factors as a way to link levels of influence and provide a theoretical contribution to the individual level of influence.

Methodological Approach To address the aforementioned research questions, this chapter combined quantitative and qualitative methods (see Table 3.1). The first goal was to describe structural settings and access to sources in a transnational news environment. An online survey was conducted based on contact details provided by Hudson’s Washington News Media Contacts Directory 2010 (Mars, 2009). This descriptive stage was intended to gather data from correspondents working for a variety of news organizations. A stratified sampling method helped avoid oversampling one group of correspondents working for the same news organization. Four hundred sixty correspondents (U.S. and foreign) were contacted from May to September 2011, resulting in 155 valid responses (response rate: 33.7%). In terms of demographics, there were 65 U.S. correspondents (43.9%) and 83 foreign correspondents (55.7%). Among them, 58% reported that they had been working in the DC area for more than nine years. Two measures of the survey gauged correspondents’ access to sources and their perception of professional

Journalists’ Truth Justification  53 TABLE 3.1.  Research Steps and Goals of Mixed Method

Description

Exploration

Explanation

Method

Web survey

Web survey

Sampling

Stratified sampling (N = 155)

Research goal

Structural distinctions among DC-based reporters

Semi-structured interviews Theoretical sampling based on survey results (N = 12) Constant comparative method to explore truth justifications based on structural distinctions

Testing hypotheses based on grounded theory analysis (N = 155) Developing an understanding of professional roles and their dependence on structural distinctions

roles. Correspondents were asked to refer to their most recent work in evaluating how much access they had to sources and rate the importance of personal access. For professional roles, journalists rated their agreement with 34 statements on a 5-point scale. Thirteen of these items were culled from Weaver et al. (2007), and 21 were culled from the results of a pretest at the Missouri School of Journalism in 2011. The survey showed that U.S. correspondents are significantly more likely to conduct a phone interview (63.1%) than foreign correspondents (37.3%).1 This aligns with findings from Willnat and Weaver (2003) that a big challenge for DC foreign correspondents is accessing sources via phone. In addition, foreign correspondents rely more on other media’s stories (44.6%) than U.S. correspondents (24.6%).2 After the survey, qualitative interviews were conducted with correspondents who were willing to participate (N = 33). These participants were divided into high, medium, and low personal access to politicians based on the survey results. From the total sample of 33 correspondents, 11 scored high on access to politicians, 15 were in the medium-access group, and 7 were in the low-access group. The qualitative sample tried to reach theoretical saturation by including journalists from different media systems (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) such as Chile, Lebanon, Italy, France, Switzerland,Venezuela, Spain, and the U.S., as well as junior and senior journalists (range in years of experience: 3–20). In-depth interviews elicited an interpretation from correspondents of their daily news-gathering experiences, with initial open-ended questions (e.g., “Tell me about your background:What motivated you to work as a political correspondent in the DC area?”); intermediate questions (e.g., “What does truth mean to you? What does good reporting imply?”); and ending questions (e.g., “What does journalistic freedom mean to you?”).

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The coding process attempted to build a framework for an analysis that was based on analytic frameworks of truth justification and gatekeeping (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser & Strauss, 1967). The comparisons of the three different groups of correspondents revealed similarities and differences that built up the conceptual categories of interest for this study.  All answers were grouped to the overall research questions according to correspondents’ amount of access and their understanding of justification of truth and were then coded in relation to their theoretical categories. Analytical distinctions were drawn to account for different amount of access to politicians and their explanations. Such distinctions further served validity claims in quantitative research, as it allowed the testing of theories in different contexts and enabled discussion of the conceptual categories’ construct validity (e.g., under what condition does this phenomenon occur?). After conceptual categories were established, the research questions were answered by synthesizing and explaining the relationship between access findings and truth justification routines.

Results Finding 1: Structural Forces of the Political Field It would be naïve to believe that journalists are not exposed to news-gathering constraints other than their own ideals of normative standards. In fact, their sensemaking processes are highly influenced by forces that structure their resources in terms of access through rules that politicians set to take control of media messages. Two main principles stemming from the political field emerged from the data. First, foreign correspondents still struggle in getting access to important policy makers; for example, if they are not U.S. citizens, they have to show their passports when attending a press briefing at the White House. One foreign correspondent explained: They simply don’t care about foreign media, because they don’t bring them any votes, and U.S. politicians are on a permanent campaign. As an example, even when we had to cover the controversy surrounding [Swiss financial services company] UBS, the senator in charge of the Congress hearings never accorded us an interview, simply because his agenda is already charged, and giving an interview to a foreign journalist is definitely not a priority. (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012) In addition to U.S. politicians’ awareness of tailoring messages to a U.S. audience, the political field may lay out strict rules on how to interact with and quote official sources. For example, the State Department and the Obama administration have ground rules for interviewing officials. As one foreign

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correspondent stated, “America under this president [President Obama] is very tightly controlled; they will only tell you what they want to tell you. It is very orchestrated” (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012). Following the rules is the ticket into the White House. Correspondents follow the rules because they are granted access in exchange. “If you break the ground rules, you will no longer go to the White House, period. This is frustrating because you are reporting what is happening, you are part of the rules, you follow them blindly” (foreign correspondent, personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012). Table 3.2 lists the ground rules for interviewing U.S. State Department officials. These rules must be agreed upon at the beginning of any conversation. The officials determine most of the ground rules, which reflects the political field’s structuring power of the autonomy of correspondents. By decreasing correspondents’ power, politicians increase their power of delivering their message to an audience. The U.S. State Department represents one of the most important sources for foreign correspondents because of its nature of dealing with foreign issues. A foreign correspondent explained the structured setting of news gathering at the White House compared with the State Department: TABLE 3.2.  Rules for Interviewing U.S. State Department Officials (as of May 2012)

On the record On background

On deep background

Off the record

Information may be quoted directly and attributed to the official by name and title. The official’s remarks may be quoted directly or paraphrased and must be attributed to a “State Department official” or “administration official,” as determined by the official. The source cannot be quoted or identified in any manner, not even as “an unnamed source.” The information is usually couched in such phrases as “it is understood that” or “it has been learned that.” The information may be used to help present the story or to gain a better understanding of the subject, but the knowledge is that of the reporter, not the source. No information provided may be used in the story. The information is only for the reporter’s background knowledge. Nothing of what the journalist is told may be used in the story. The information is meant only for the reporter’s knowledge.

Source: U.S. Department of State, 2012. Note. The tables in this study are reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan from the following publication: Hellmueller, L. (2014). The Washington, DC Media Corps in the 21st Century: The Source-Correspondent Relationship. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

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If you go to the White House briefing, in the front row, AP will always get the first question.Then you have the correspondents of the major networks and media organizations, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, and Reuters. Those people are gathering for an American audience with 300 million people in this country. At the White House, if you are giving a briefing, you are not giving a briefing to someone in Saudi Arabia; you are addressing the American audience. Then, Jay Carney [Obama’s spokesperson], when he answers a question by CNN, he knows that he is answering for the American audience, and CNN is influential, because it is reaching them. Now, if I want to ask a question, he may give me the chance to ask the question. But I’m not important. They [the briefings] are usually geared at the White House for an American audience. Now, if you go to the State Department, it’s totally different. Most people of the State Department are foreigners; more than 75% sitting in the briefing rooms are foreigners.They will give you an equal chance because we are gathering for a foreign audience. (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012)

Finding 2: Truth Claims as Language of Legitimization Based on Social Systems Correspondents with a high amount of access to sources share the presumptions or the tendency of an absolute sense of objectivity (“true objectivity is important”), a perception of reality that guides their interactions with sources. Foremost, a strong professional distance between sources and reporters is not necessary, as truth ought to be in the sources and not created. Hence, the empirical justification of truth provides the basis for such a social relationship because experience and empirical evidence are tools for establishing a truth claim. There is a correspondence between “what is said” and “what exists” (Hanitzsch et al., 2011). On the other hand, journalists who are “not on the ground,” as one TV correspondent from Lebanon mentioned, “are not doing a proper job.” For this correspondent, a proper job based on truth justification can be converted into trust on the side of the audience: “Audiences prefer eye-witnesses” (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012). Hanitzsch and colleagues (2011) compared how different countries approach truth on an objectivism dimension. However, their findings did not reveal any consistent pattern for both objectivism and empiricism when comparing different countries. By bringing access variations into the analysis, it seems plausible that the medium itself might be the stronger force of objectivism as a form of reality perception than the country as a unit of analysis. For example, for TV journalists— as is the case for most of the interviewed journalists in the high-social-capital category—TV as a medium depends on eyewitness material; it is different from print in that the accounts are based on eyewitness facts:

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My number one goal is very simple: it is to get a sound bite.You know, you could tell the story yourself. . . . And there is this distance you should keep, of course, we use [sources] and they use us. They want to get their message across and we need sound bites. (U.S. TV correspondent, personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012) In other words, if the audience is used to trusting the pictures and sound bites on TV, then the sound bites are a strong force to establish a conversion rate of how trust on the audience side can be established in exchange for professional skills. In such a case, then, providing an understanding of who has the better position is secondary, as the audience members can draw their own interpretations. Because of the established rules of verifying a story, the closeness to political sources is based on the aim of verifying information: “You establish trust if you reveal exclusive information—two sources who were established within an executive office—that is the simple secret” (foreign correspondent, personal communication,Washington, DC, January 2012).The correspondent gave an example: I wrote a story that Vice President Biden will go to Iraq to finalize the deal with the Iraqis. And I said that he would go there the first week of December [2011] and troops will be out ahead of schedule. For two weeks, I was very nervous, because of the story I wrote. But it indeed happened. And all troops left before Christmas. Whoever received my story remembered that I predicted that “Oh my God, XX told us about this a month before.” T   his is how you establish trust. I just knew from my sources. But it was not only one source. (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012) Because truth measurements rely on eyewitnesses, a close relationship with a source benefits such an epistemological logic.3 As one correspondent detailed, a well-established newsroom “will not publish any piece of information without making sure through the filters that it is trustworthy.”  This is extremely important because “You make one mistake and you ruin everything. Any mistake that is made by you or your company ruins your relationship with your sources.” Hence, a falsification method as an empirical justification of truth is established, and correspondents are aware that sources are their most critical judges. As one foreign correspondent with high access mentioned, “If you are faithful to the source, then you are good and you can maintain a trusted relationship with the source” (personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012).

Low Access For correspondents with low access, closeness to a source is not the only means to the truth: “You can be friendly with sources but not friends” (U.S. correspondent,

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personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012). Most of the respondents in this group do not believe that objectivity exists. Furthermore, they believe that keeping a professional distance from sources is crucial so that trust can be established among their audiences. However, even if a social relationship with sources is based on a rather subjective or multi-perspective analysis, the epistemic relation is still key to understanding how truth is established based on knowledge. Personal contact may be beneficial, but it is not the foundation of epistemic relations; it does not reflect the epistemic relation to objectify knowledge into truth. One of the correspondents, for example, mentioned time as a crucial element to a move toward truth: “I like spending a lot of time on a story, I enjoy it; it is my pride.” Organizational guidelines are less important in understanding facts, and self-reflection is more important. The underlying idea is that an understanding of journalists’ resources can illuminate how access can be conceptualized differently in its conversion with epistemic relations. The idea of sources as resources does not so much reflect an empirical justification of finding two sources to verify information, for example, but to cover multiple views of a story (i.e., similarities and differences that emerge from source material that does not have to be accessed in person). Hence, an analytical justification of truth is based on the epistemic relation of finding multiple sources to establish truth claims that are not value free, but if similarities and differences of source material are included, then an analytical truth claim can be established (i.e., an idea of pluralist subjectivity to move toward truth). Such an undertaking costs time, as sources who provide opposite views may be harder to find than two sources who verify the same information.

Finding 3: Justification of Truth and Professional Role Conceptions The aforementioned findings suggest differences in access based on journalists’ perceptions of reality. Perceptions of reality influence how journalists interact with sources (i.e., amount of access) and how they justify truth (i.e., epistemic relation from knowledge to truth). In fact, those predictive findings were grounded in the data and hence inductively deduced from the categories. Hence, perceptions of reality based on an analytical justification of truth stand in contrast to an empirical justification of truth. In other words, there are two justifications of truth that manifest in the different ways reporters interact with sources: Correspondents who attempt to mirror a truth out there, which has to be empirically tested, are more likely to seek to be physically close to the events and sources they are covering. The meaning of an empirical justification of truth is conceptually close to a meaning of objectivity that touches on an ontological notion, which “is closely associated with a realistic theory of truth as correspondent with external objects” (Ward, 2009, p. 72). On the other hand, correspondents who are more likely to approach truth by embracing an ideal of pluralist subjectivity will be more likely to keep their distance to filter out the multiple arguments.

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Disagreements about the epistemological foundations that implicitly underlie the perception of objectivity are well documented in comparative journalism research (Donsbach & Klett, 1993; Hanitzsch et al., 2011). For example, Donsbach and Klett (1993) surveyed journalists to have them define objectivity in Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and the U.S. They found two different professional cultures: the Anglo-Saxon journalists on one side and the continental European journalists on the other side. Donsbach and Klett (1993) referred to two working worlds based on differences in editorial control over news content and differences in role conceptions. Compared with Anglo-Saxon journalists, objectivity is not a strong professional value for journalists in continental Europe. This may well result from the fact that northern European countries have the highest amount of newspaper readership, whereas in the U.S., television plays more of an agenda-setting function (Hallin & Mancini, 2004; Roper, 1985). In other words, the agenda-setting function of a medium may be important to understanding epistemic relations because of their powerful position and their approach to truth telling. As pointed out previously, an empirical justification of truth is a strong force for TV journalism, in which viewers trust sound bites and pictures. Thus, if TV journalism is setting the agenda, such epistemic relations become important mechanisms that define the entire field. Hence, it is not surprising that objectivity plays an important role in the U.S. nor that U.S. journalists are more likely to embrace a disseminator role than their foreign colleagues (Tandoc, Hellmueller, & Vos, 2013). Social perceptions of reality and of the professional ideology of journalism have been widely studied (e.g., Hanitzsch et al., 2011; Weaver et al., 2007), with surveys assessing journalists’ conceived roles (i.e., their understanding of their normative tasks as journalists). However, implicit disagreements of epistemological foundations that underlie role conceptions would benefit role conception research to explicate the contradictory forces of mirroring a truth compared to a multi-perspective ideal of subjectivity. Such tendencies were thus tested herein with the survey data to account for differences in the justification of truth based on the newly established global understanding of a relationship between access and justification of truth. The results confirm the claim of an objective and ultimate truth out there, which ought to be mirrored, versus the idea of pluralist subjectivity by means of including different voices and analyzing such voices. Correspondents who embrace a more analytical justification of truth might be more willing to include multicultural voices as a means of providing orientation. The interaction with sources offers an insight into an evaluative component of journalism (i.e., norms, values, or roles of journalists) explicitly grounded in practice (i.e., in their interactions with sources). The ways in which journalists attempt to cover stories vary based on the journalist’s perception of reality. If journalists empirically “test” a claim, their attempt to influence their audience is significantly stronger than for journalists who apply

60  Lea Hellmueller TABLE 3.3.  Professional Roles in Terms of Dependence on Amount of Access to Politicians

Input

Low access High access Output

Low access High access

“I try to maintain a professional distance from my sources.” 4.08 (0.70)a 3.73 (0.94)

“My task is to get at “True objectivity is the truth.” impossible.” 4.21 (0.69)b 4.64 (0.49)

3.39 (1.05)a 2.87 (1.20)

“I tell my audience if “It is my job to get “I attempt to produce a political claim is information to the news stories that obviously wrong.” public quickly.” influence the opinion of my audience.” 3.92 (0.84)a 4.06 (0.78)b 2.78 (1.10)a 4.24 (0.74) 4.41 (0.78) 3.29 (1.23)

Significant at the 0.05 level. Significant at the 0.001 level.

a

b

more of a subjective idea that truth cannot be separated from context and human subjectivity and believe that the “audience should draw their own conclusion” (foreign correspondent with low access, personal communication, Washington, DC, January 2012). Hence, an empirical justification of truth is significantly more geared toward an agenda-setting function of a media organization and a rather top-down form of communication. Meanwhile, the study also found that journalists’ task to get at the truth significantly reduces the ideal of journalists keeping a professional distance from their sources (see Table 3.3). Correspondents with low access believe more strongly that true objectivity is impossible, whereas correspondents in the high-access group embrace the task to get at the truth to a significantly higher extent than correspondents with less access to politicians. Furthermore, journalists with high access are significantly more likely to think that it is their job to tell their audiences if a political claim is obviously wrong. It is also significantly more important for journalists with high access to get the information to the public quickly. High access enables correspondents to more strongly believe that their reporting should influence the opinions of their audiences. Hence, to answer Research Question 3, we can explain individual-level characteristics of role conceptions by outlining differences in structural resources, which trigger variations in how journalists justify truth.

Discussion This chapter maps out how globalization has set new contexts in which journalists gather news. Qualitative interviews reveal how journalists’ truth justification strategies are expressions of journalists’ structural positions in the field (i.e., shaped

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by social systems’ characteristics and media organizations), legitimizing such structures through their articulation in news. While truth justification structures might remain resilient to change, social geographical spaces such as transnational news environments nevertheless challenge the way we think about gatekeeping. Most gatekeeping studies on the individual level contextualize the results of their studies on either the local, national, or international level (Reese, 2008). For example, the nation-state is taken as the independent variable, the one affecting individual professional attitudes when comparing journalists from the U.S. to those from the United Kingdom, or the local versus the national level is assumed to shape journalists working for local or national stations. However, this chapter suggests a way of thinking about the individual level that challenges the structure of gatekeeping theory: to consider the nation-state as a variable among others to organize social space (Wiley, 2004) and to move away from the interpretation of the geographical space being the defining social space. Globalization has affected the way journalists are connected and has opened new networks apart from geographical space and national borders. These connections are important to consider when thinking about the individual level of analysis. Correspondents in Washington, DC, are working in the nation’s capital but are connected to their home countries and audiences through a variety of networks, which may shape their individual professional attitudes. This research provides empirical support to a claim by Reese (2010): (O)n the institutional surface, perhaps . . . globalization has not yielded much systemic change for journalism. Taking the network level of analysis, however, encompasses the burgeoning connections to media, among media, and among the people involved with them to better account for a life in a globalized world. (p. 352) While the question of access has yielded little change, and foreign correspondents still do not enjoy more access and are less likely recipients of exclusive information than domestic reporters, the organizing news-gathering principles change when working in DC. Foreign correspondents complain about limited access because they compare the news environment to their home countries and in relative terms to other correspondents in the U.S. Understanding the network level helps gauge how individual-level characteristics reflect important interpretive categories of those experiences in a transnational news environment. Differences based on nation-states become more visible in a transnational environment. Journalists become more aware of differences because their own ways of news gathering are set in contrast to others in the same environment as they compete for the same resources and the exclusive sound bite. How these new experiences and perceived differences are negotiated remains an important empirical question. What this study shows is that the nation-state is not the main determining

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variable in shaping individual-level characteristics and access to sources.To follow this empirical assumption, the correspondents were divided into high-, medium-, and low-access groups in this study rather than according to their home countries. This choice assumes individual-level flexibility and some autonomy at the individual level in how journalists negotiate the transnational news environment. With that said, this research challenges Western normative ideas of source access among correspondents. Access has long been believed to be the indicator of success for journalists across the globe (Willnat & Weaver, 2003), but the results showed that access did not correspond to a higher amount of truth justification in most instances, as spelled out in cases with a multi-perspective ideal of truth justification. Individual-level characteristics are important indicators of interpretative strategies of correspondents in a transnational news environment. On the network level, we can observe how individual-level factors remain important categories to justify the journalistic profession and how such characteristics distinguish themselves from other journalists covering the same beat. More taken-for-granted assumptions in journalism research should be tested under a transnational and multi-cultural logic. The purpose of this chapter was to explain individual-level professional factors based on structural factors as a way to link those levels of influence and provide a theoretical contribution to the individual level of influence. Studying truth claims provides a framework to understand how information from sources becomes journalistically justified in a specific journalistic environment. Thus, in this chapter, I tried to conceptualize the normative stances of journalists as part of their external ties in the way they seek out sources. And while the chapter’s main focus is on the individual level, it maps out how our thinking, starting at the individual level, can be linked to other levels of analysis, such as the social-system level, to explain how these analytical levels shape news coverage simultaneously as an outcome of gatekeeping. This research sheds light on gatekeeping in transition in DC and how journalistic life in a globalized world involves understanding a global journalism culture as it shapes our knowledge and experience of the world. Gatekeeping theory contributes to that understanding by providing the analytical framework to understand how to organize and interpret our findings. As a next step, it seems important to analyze how much these news-gathering strategies differ from the countries those journalists are from, taking into account the possible socialization effect of working in a transnational media environment that might be quite different than how those journalists were socialized into their profession. From a macroperspective, social-system structures may become more blurred, but how they restructure the network level between journalists and sources in a global context may reveal the important empirical question about gatekeeping in a transnational environment. And as journalists’ individual knowledge of structural influences on their work increases, there is more work for scholars ahead to investigate whether such knowledge empowers journalists to negotiate new ways of producing news.

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Notes 1 χ2(1, N = 148) = 9.658, p = 0.002. 2 χ2(1, N = 148) = 6.320, p = 0.01. 3 This paper focuses on the epistemological logic in the journalistic field. For a more indepth discussion on epistemology and journalism, see Hanitzsch (2007).

References Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualiative analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Deuze, M. (2005). What is journalism? Professional identity and ideology of journalists reconsidered. Journalism, 6(4), 442–464. Donsbach, W. (1987). Journalismusforschung in der Bundesrepublik: Offene fragen trotz forschungsboom [Journalism research in Germany: Research questions still remain]. In J.Wilke (Ed.), Zwischenbilanz der Journalistenausbildung (Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft Band 14) (pp. 105–142). Munich, Germany: Communication Science. Donsbach, W. (2004). Psychology of news decisions: Factors behind journalists’ professional behavior. Journalism, 5(2), 131–157. Donsbach, W., & Klett, B. (1993). Subjective objectivity: How journalists in four countries define a key term of their profession. International Communication Gazette, 51(1), 53–83. Glaser, B. G., & Strauss, A. L. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago, IL: Aldine. Hallin, D. C., & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems:Three models of media and politics. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Hanitzsch, T. (2007). Deconstructing journalism culture: Toward a universal theory. Communication Theory, 17(4), 367–385. Hanitzsch,T. (2011). Populist disseminators, detached watchdogs, critical change agents and opportunist facilitators: Professional milieus, the journalistic field and autonomy in 18 countries. International Communication Gazette, 73(6), 477–494. Hanitzsch, T., Hanusch, F., Mellado, C., Anikina, M., Berganza, R., Cangoz, I., Coman, M., Hamada, B., Hernandez, M. E., Karadiov, C. D., Moreira, S.V., Mwesige, P. G., Plaisance, P. L., Reich, Z., Seethaler, J., Skewes, E. A., Noor, D. V., & Kee-Wang Yuen, E. (2011). Mapping journalism cultures across nations: A comparative study of 18 countries. Journalism Studies, 12(3), 273–293. Hellmueller, L. (2014). The Washington, DC media corps in the 21st century: The source-correspondent relationship. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Kovach, B., & Rosenstiel, T. (2001). The elements of journalism. New York, NY: Three Rivers Press. Kunczik, M., & Zipfel, A. (2001). Publizistik [Journalism]. Köln, Germany: Böhlau. Mars, L. (2009). Hudson’s Washington News Media Contacts Directory: 2010. New York, NY: Grey House Publishing. Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism (2009).The new Washington press corps.Retrieved from www.journalism.org/analysis_report/new_washington_press_corps Reese, S. D. (1990). The news paradigm and the ideology of objectivity: A socialist at the Wall Street Journal. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 7(4), 390–409. Reese, S.  D. (2001). Understanding the global journalist: A hierarchy-of-influences approach. Journalism Studies, 2(2), 173–187.

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Reese, S. D. (2008). Theorizing a globalized journalism. In M. Loeffelholz & D. Weaver (Eds.), Global Journalism Research: Theories, Methods, Findings, Future (pp. 240–252). London, UK: Blackwell. Reese, S. D. (2010). Journalism and globalization. Sociology Compass, 4(6), 344–353. Roper, B. W. (1985). Public attitudes toward television and other media in a time of change. New York, NY: Television Information Office. Shoemaker, P. J., & Reese, S. D. (2013). Mediating the message in the 21st century: A media sociology perspective. New York, NY: Routledge. Shoemaker, P. J., & Vos, T. P. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. New York, NY: Routledge. Tandoc, E., Hellmueller, L., & Vos, T. P. (2013). Mind the gap: Between role conception and role enactment. Journalism Practice, 7(5), 539–554. U.S. Department of State (2012). Ground rules for interviewing State Department officials. Retrieved from www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/17191.htm Wahl-Jorgensen, K., & Hanitzsch, T. (2009). The handbook of journalism studies. New York, NY: Routledge. Ward, S.J.A. (2009).Truth and objectivity. In L.Wilkins & C. G. Christians (Eds.), The Handbook of Mass Media Ethics (pp. 71–83). New York, NY: Routledge. Weaver, D. H., Beam, R. A., Brownlee, B. J.,Voakes, P. S., & Wilhoit, G. C. (2007). The American journalist in the 21st century: U.S. news people at the dawn of a new millennium. Mahweh, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. White, D. M. (1950). The gatekeeper: A case study in the selection of news. Journalism Quarterly, 27, 383–396. Wiley, S. (2004). Rethinking nationality in the context of globalization. Communication Theory, 14(1), 78–96. Willnat, L., & Weaver, D. H. (2003). Through their eyes: The work of foreign correspondents in the United States. Journalism, 4(4), 403–422.

4 FUTURES OF JOURNALISTS Low-Paid Piecework or Global Brands? Angela Phillips

In earlier work on the role of journalists as gatekeepers, the job of the journalist/ gatekeeper appeared to be relatively stable.Writers asked questions about the relative power of the journalists and their sources (Hall, 1978; Herman & Chomsky, 1988) or about the ways in which ideology is operationalized or constructed via routine decision making (Entman, 2003; Gans, 1979; Golding & Elliott, 1979; Tuchman, 1978). In analyzing the job of the journalist, Golding and Elliott (1979) looked at the issues of access that limit which people are likely to appear on broadcast news. Gans (1979) and Tuchman (1978), meanwhile, noted the impact of speed and hierarchy on decision making and the presence of a strict pecking order in the newsroom, which ensure that the autonomy of journalists is always, to some extent, constrained. In these studies, power relationships inside the newsroom reflected those outside it: one hierarchy mirroring the other and shaping what items of information became news. The analysis of source relationships took these internal and external power relationships more or less for granted. In some studies, it was the power outside the newsroom that held sway (Hall, 1978; Herman & Chomsky, 1988), with journalists operating almost as stenographers to the powerful. In other research, it appeared that the power relationships were more equal. Schlesinger and Tumber (1994) suggested more of a tug-of-war; Gans (1979), a dance between journalists and elites. But in all these differing accounts, the newsroom is seen as a structure that confers power on its members: “[J]ournalists . . . have enough power in the firm to reject the supposedly sure-fire way of enlarging the audience: resorting to ‘sensationalism’ and ‘yellow journalism’ ” (Gans, 1979, pp. 83–84). Since the advent of the internet, research has mainly been occupied in considering whether new technologies are democratizing the news media and altering the role of the gatekeeper by allowing ordinary people to share power with

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journalists via electronic media and blogs (Beckett, 2008; Jarvis, 2009; Russell, 2011).Where predictions were made about the impact of such change on journalism and journalists, they appeared to be seen as benign: [Future journalism will be] . . . connecting with the world beyond the newsroom; listening to people; giving people a voice in the media; responding to what the public tells you in a dialogue. But it has the potential to go further than that in transforming the power relationship between media and the public and reformulating the means of journalistic production. (Beckett, 2008, p. 43) To be sure, recent research (Singer et al., 2011) has suggested that journalists are finding collaboration with their audiences to be rather trickier than had been expected. Audiences had not yet had a great deal of impact on the working practices of journalists, who were still operating as gatekeepers in the traditional way. The assumption underlying this research seemed to be that journalists were reluctant to cede power to audiences and were fighting a kind of rearguard action against the forces of democratization. What the more optimistic predictions left out of the equation were structural factors that would have a rather more far-reaching effect on journalism than the role of its audience. Three different shock waves hit the industry. The first was technological: The internet opened the floodgates to huge quantities of information that required careful and time-consuming analysis. The second was spatial and temporal:Where news had been constrained in space and time, now both had become elastic; there was unlimited space to fill, and updating had become instant. The third was financial: Advertising revenue started to drain away as advertisers looked toward search engines and social media to deliver messages that had previously run alongside the news and paid for it to be processed. These three factors, combined with the fear of challenge from new entrants with lower operating costs, led to changes in the journalistic “field.” The industry was already under considerable pressure when the economic crisis began to hit most Western democracies in 2007 and 2008. In just four months between December 2008 and April 2009, the number of jobs in journalism shrunk by 8,800 across the U.K. and Ireland. In the U.S. over the same period, the print sector lost 24,500 jobs (Phillips & Witschge, 2011, p. 22). By 2013, 25% of boroughs in the U.K. had no daily local newspaper, and most of those that did were dominated by a single news provider, often based outside the area (Media Reform, 2013). The journalists who remained were expected to work faster and fill more space with fewer staff than before as news organizations struggled to contain costs (Singer et al., 2011). Journalism jobs had also become increasingly unstable, temporary, and low paid (Cushion, 2007; Deuze, 2007). The results of economic pressure on the gatekeeping role were predicted by Bourdieu (2005, p. 33), echoing the earlier predictions of Gans, who said in 1979:

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“Only when economic indicators fall drastically are journalists forced to alter story selection practices, but none of the media I studied was in such dire circumstances at that time” (pp. 83–84). According to research published by Nick Davies in Flat Earth News (2008, p. 60), the immediate impact of this increased commercial pressure was an increasingly shallow form of journalism he dubbed “churnalism.” It was in this context that the Leverhulme Space of the News Research Group set out to examine the role of journalists in more detail and to consider the effect of this combination of factors on news output.

The Research Research Method A large-scale study of journalism in the U.K. was carried out by a team of researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 2007 and 2008.The data included 170 semi-structured interviews, ethnography, and qualitative content analysis of news stories. The project encompassed a number of different questions. This chapter will make use of insights from across the body of research, but it will focus initially on a small study of journalists’ use of sources, which is described in more detail elsewhere (Phillips, 2010). The research examined 89 single-bylined news stories taken from a range of British national daily newspapers. The journalists who wrote them were then interviewed in detail about the sourcing of each story.  The interviews were semistructured, and the journalists answered a series of questions about the initial source of each story and the means by which they accessed any follow-up or contextual information. It was made clear to those participating that no sources needed to be named or identified.  The purpose of the research was to discover by what means the information had been accessed.

The Sample Three national newspapers and three local newspapers were selected with differing ownership structures: A was a well-established, commercially successful newspaper; B and C were both loss-making newspapers supported by other publications in the same organization.  All three nationals catered to an educated (elite) audience. They all had a significant online presence, and one (A) had recently adopted a “Web-first” news strategy, with significant investment in training “multiplatform” journalists. Newspaper B was about to embark on a similar shift. Newspaper C still had a separate Web operation, but trainee journalists were expected to write “for the Web” as part of their jobs. More senior journalists would write for the paper and have their work “re-versioned” for uploading to the Web. Six journalists were selected from each national publication, covering a range of ages and experience, from trainees to senior reporters. The researchers selected

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a series of single-bylined news stories from the newspapers’ websites. The selection criteria were only that they were each a separate story (not a continuation of a running story); that they had a single author; and that they were, as far as possible, sequential. The journalists were given a list of the preselected stories to discuss and were asked in addition to choose one story that they considered particularly important.

The Interviews The interviews were face to face and lasted between one and two hours each. T   he journalists went through each story and identified both its initial source/idea and its follow-up sources. They then said whether the initial sources were:   1. A tip-off   2. An unsolicited press release (by known or unknown contact)   3. A news diary—self-accessed or assigned   4. A news agency   5. Other media (TV, newspapers, etc.)   6. A court case or a Parliament or Council meeting   7. A press conference   8. A blog or unofficial website   9. A Web  forum 10. Self-initiated 11. Other Similar questions were asked about follow-up research (a small sample of local newspaper journalists also participated, but this analysis will focus mainly on the national newspaper journalists). Additional questions were asked about changes in working practices and training—whether journalists had been specifically trained to find information online and the degree to which journalists were trained to work across platforms. The interviews were coded and then analyzed to look for key issues about story origination. In the course of coding, it became clear that there were also major concerns about pressures of work, so this aspect was taken into consideration; the same concerns came up in the mini-ethnographies carried out in different workplaces.

The Findings Self-Generated Stories When asked to identify a story that they considered important, the journalists interviewed always referred to ones that they had found themselves, which were original and had required a fair amount of research.Young journalists in all three

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newsrooms were prepared to work during their time off to find original material. This finding is consonant with other research that recognizes the importance of the “scoop” to a journalist’s self-image and place in the journalistic field (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 44). Clearly, for journalists working on national newspapers, the self-generated story was still the pinnacle of their work and, for many, their raison d’être. One senior reporter said: You’re only going to get like six of these a year. I mean this is a big thing. Like that gang boy that I got, I’m really proud of that. That’s a kind of completely different thing. That’s flying by the seat of your pants. Going out on a cold wet rainy night and finding some little shit to talk to. And, you know, I transform my personality when I do that, and that’s kind of, and then turning it into a front page piece, and that’s really exciting as well. The number of self-generated stories varied according to the position in the hierarchy. Junior staff members had little time to work independently, and the bulk of their work was directed by the news desk. The findings also suggest that, for a number of journalists, particularly on Newspaper A, opportunities for finding original stories were rare. On Newspaper B, more than half of the stories were original, self-generated, or from tip-offs; on Paper C, one third were. On Paper A, only 14% of the stories fit that description.

Sources and News Cannibalism On both Newspapers A and C, reporters were more likely to say that a story had initiated in another newspaper than from a news agency that they subscribed to or from their own investigations. Indeed, some journalists interviewed were unable to identify a single recent self-generated story. The prevalence of “news cannibalism” was backed up by research carried out by Witschge and Redden (2010, p. 171), who traced five news events across 20 online news outlets (2,341 articles) and found a very high level of re-use of copy across different sites. The presence of shared material is not surprising or new. Since the advent of the wire service in the 19th century, newspapers have always shared material. The less accessible a story, the more likely it is that material generated by the news agencies and paid for by subscription will be used right across the news media. This “vanilla” journalism (Phillips, 2011, pp. 81–99) plays an important role in ensuring that all news outlets are able to offer the widest possible range of coverage. The material will often be cut and mixed with material that has been researched and written in the newsroom. What had changed now was the manner and speed with which newsrooms were able to take material from each other (without payment or attribution). On Paper A, one third of all stories selected had, according to the journalists

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interviewed, been originated by another, rival, news organization. As one experienced reporter said: Journalism isn’t really about going out of the office and actually getting stories yourself any more. It’s about using other people’s material and turning it around . . . there’s enormous amounts of cannibalism between newspapers, organizations like the BBC, which I don’t think there used to be. (Reporter, Newspaper A)

Traditional Sources The majority of online sources mentioned in follow-up stories were either other news organizations or the websites of official organizations or non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Journalists would either quote from these directly or follow up with a phone call in order to get a different “quote.” Some journalists (particularly those at Newspapers B and C) talked about how online sources had improved their efficiency, allowing them to access material that, in the past, would have taken much longer to find. However, they also mentioned that it was less likely that they would attend events. One explained that they could view a select committee of Parliament online and had no need to visit Westminster—the seat of the Parliament—any more. Specialist journalists likewise had direct access to senior people in government via mobile phone, making it much easier to get comments on stories and reducing the need for face-to-face contact. If a big story was running, all the relevant organizations with an interest in the story would send press comments directly to the journalist’s email inbox, often tailored to the specific publication. This finding was consonant with parallel research into the relationship between NGOs and journalists carried out by Natalie Fenton (2010). Fenton (2010) found that NGOs were increasingly publishing online material in formats that made it easier for journalists to use. She also found that it was harder to get journalists to leave their desks and that “talking to a journalist was a rarity.”

Nontraditional Sources Some journalists followed specific online forums with connections to their area of specialization. Only political journalists mentioned blogs as a source of stories. The journalists interviewed were also very wary of unknown sources or sources that they could not verify fairly swiftly via another known source (though local newspapers, unsolicited phone calls, and emails were still an important source of stories). The major change identified was not that journalists were easier for the public to contact but that journalists found it easier to contact others. The job of tracking people had been speeded up. Social media and forums tended to be used to find specific people who, in the past, would have required many hours

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of legwork and door knocking to track down. Electronic sources were clearly increasing the power of journalists rather than equalizing their relationship with audiences.

User-Generated Content Where journalists mentioned comments or information sent in to newspapers, they rarely saw them as opportunities for collaboration. Only two mentioned finding important information in user-generated content. Reporters did not trawl through user-generated content because it was perceived to be too time consuming, untrustworthy, and rarely produced genuinely new information. Most original stories were found the “old-fashioned way” through talking to people, listening, and following hunches (Phillips, 2010, p. 93).

Speed and Sourcing Questions about working conditions were asked in all interviews by all researchers, and concerns about the increasing pressure of work were ubiquitous. One experienced reporter said: “The trouble is that the newspapers, I think, have cut down on staff so much that we just don’t have time to do any of these things properly. There is a lot of people unhappy.” A trainee journalist on Publication A had produced 13 articles the day before the interview. The journalist said: “We do these stories in 15 minutes. I mean we’ve got so much work now.You are given six or seven stories a day, you don’t have time to do much with them.” Research by Lewis, Wren, Williams, and Franklin (2008) also found an average output in their sample of 4.5 articles per day. In the Leverhulme research, it was clear that pressure on output was particularly acute among the youngest journalists, who were not learning how to source stories but only how to churn them out as fast as possible. In this context, they were more likely to look for sources that they already knew to be reliable rather than seek out someone new whose testimony might take time to verify. They were finding that the sheer volume of incoming material was making it harder for them to seek out new voices. One senior political correspondent described his daily job as like “standing in the middle of a hurricane trying to pick out twigs” (Phillips, 2010, p. 94).

Training Although some sporadic attempts had been made to train journalists so that they could report with video or audio, there was no evidence of any systematic attempt to provide training in online research techniques. This was a surprising finding because none of the national newspaper journalists interviewed were actually using their multi-platform training beyond being interviewed occasionally on

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video, whereas all of them were making daily use of the internet for research purposes. The lack of training meant that many older journalists expressed anxiety about their jobs and their fear that young reporters straight out of university would have access to stories that they were unable to find because of their lack of technical know-how.

Discussion Commercial Pressure Reduces Autonomy The research findings provide a useful illustration of Bourdieu’s (2005) theoretical model of the journalistic field. He described journalists as “weakly autonomous” actors whose agency is constrained by commercial interests: The more commercial (heteronomous) the news organization, the less the agency of individual journalists and the more they will be forced to pander to audience ratings (Bourdieu, 2005). However, as he also observes, individual journalists are conflicted by this pull toward the “heteronomous pole” because “cultural capital remains on the side of the ‘purest’ journalists of the print press” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 42). He also points to “precarious employment” as a means of “exercising political or economic control” (Bourdieu, 2005, p. 43). In other words, the greater the insecurity of journalists, the more likely they are to go along with demands to follow advertisers and “ratings” as opposed to their journalistic consciences. In this conception, audiences are seen not so much as individual consumers who are demanding a greater say in how stories are covered but as people being sold to advertisers (Adorno, 1963/1991). This view of the audience follows the Frankfurt School theorists, who see audience pressure as synonymous with commercial pressure. Bourdieu’s (2005) assumption that it is the autonomy of journalists that protects the interests of citizens and the “purity” of information is challenged both by those critical theorists who see journalists as part of the elite (Fiske, 1992; Herman & Chomsky, 1988) and by those who see citizen involvement in the production of news as a move toward a more equal and plural form of media (Beckett, 2008; Russell, 2011). All the newspapers studied aim at a highly educated readership and see themselves as occupying important—albeit politically polarized—positions in the public sphere. They all regularly cover public policy matters in some depth. Of the three national newspapers examined, B and C are cross-subsidized by other businesses and are therefore less exposed to the immediate pressures of the marketplace.The third newspaper, A, had recently been acquired by a new private owner who had instituted job cuts and changes in work patterns, bringing in a new and more directive middle management. The research provides a look at the work of journalists, but it is necessarily a snapshot of a particular moment in the history of the press. In discussing the findings, I am mindful of the fact that the research was small in scale and that further

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changes have occurred, particularly at Papers B and C. I will reference those changes where they provide a useful perspective on the changing role of journalists as gatekeepers. On all newspapers, the autonomy of individual journalists is limited because a large proportion of their work (particularly if they are young) is directed by the news desk or the duty news editor and consists of following up on routine news stories (Phillips, 2011). Gatekeeping research has demonstrated the pivotal position in daily news gathering of the “copy taster” and of news editors, who look at the incoming material and decide which stories should be followed up on, as well as what emphasis should be given to them in the paper. Alongside routine news reporting and writing, journalists have a varying degree of autonomy in pitching and following up on stories that they have themselves sourced. Opportunities for pursuing these original stories varied among the three different publications. On Newspaper A, the most commercially driven of the publications, there appeared to be virtually no opportunity for autonomous work. Even the most senior member of the staff, who was largely positive about his work, was interrupted several times by the news desk during our hour-long interview. They were clearly unhappy about the fact that he was not at his desk. Gans (1979) referred to the fact that news organizations are in competition with one another and constantly compare their work with that of other news organizations. In the U.K. during the research period, this constant watching to ensure that an important story is not missed had morphed into a hyper-vigilance that resulted in simply lifting and rewriting material as soon as it was published on another site (Phillips, 2011, p. 92). Journalists on Newspaper A in particular were aware of and concerned about the number of stories that were taken from the sites of other news organizations. Reporters referred to several stories that had been effectively copied from other websites (even copying case studies in some instances). Indeed, so fixated was the “desk” on what others were doing that a reporter told of one story that he had been researching independently that didn’t make the paper until it appeared on another site. At that point, he was told to prepare a story using the material generated by the rival news organization rather than pursue the work he had already begun. This interviewee was very concerned about the de-skilling of his job, which he put down to financial pressure and the endless appetite of the website: [W]e don’t go out because there’s not enough of us to fill all the holes in the website and the paper so it just becomes a sort of vicious circle I think. The sources become ever fewer sources and more and more outlets for them so I wouldn’t be surprised if PA [the news agency] turns around at one point and just asks for double its price because it could do, because we rely so heavily on it now. They’d cripple us if they were to turn the tap off. Everyone, that’s every newspaper, would be like that. (Senior reporter, national newspaper)

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The same reporter offered another example that demonstrated just how much autonomy is constrained by commercial demands and the need to keep journalists at their desks. He told the story of an elderly reader who had traveled for some hours to visit the paper and tell her story. “She just came down to the coach station, walked here. Well they [the news desk] didn’t want me to go down and see her. . . . Well I said look, I’ve got to go down and see her and they went: ‘All right but you can only be ten minutes.’ ” On Newspaper C, another journalist explained that they got around the pressure to sit at their desk and churn out copy by arranging meetings with sources first thing in the morning. They found that, if they came into work first thing, it was increasingly difficult to get out again.

Commercial Pressure Increases Sensationalism Gans (1979) claimed that without acute economic pressures, journalists “have enough power” to reject “sensationalism” or “yellow journalism” (p. 84).That may have been true at some point. A specialist reporter from Paper A recalled: [We] had a quite light touch news desk with some very good specialists who really knew their fields, great contacts, great writers, and they would be left to get on with stuff . . . you could say look, this is rubbish, you know, you trust me, I’m a specialist, I’ve looked at this. (Specialist reporter, national newspaper) At the time of the interview, however, things were very different: Freelance sends in a piece saying electric blankets give you cancer based on some research, and so I look at the research and I send back an email saying there are five reasons we shouldn’t run this story—and they put it in. I mean, you know, it’s fairly clear what they’re doing, they’re not very bothered at all. Now I just say yeah, fine, 600 words by 2 o’clock and, you know they don’t care whether it’s true or not. They literally do not. Not only were journalists being forced to work much faster but, at Newspaper A, the impact of search engine optimization (SEO) and the perceived need to chase “hits” meant that they were more worried about failing to “get” the story before it appeared on a rival site. News desks (at least on this newspaper) were much more likely than in previous times to cover stories that had a sensational element—particularly in the online version, where there was an almost manic drive to garner online “hits.” News desks now closely follow the analytics telling them exactly what words audiences are clicking on. One interviewee mentioned a directive to produce as many stories as possible that could include the word “breasts,” as this is a word that is often searched for online. There were indeed a

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number of stories posted around that time about “extreme” breast enlargement— not the kinds of stories that the paper would have touched in the past. At the time, there was a general debate in the professional press about the wisdom of following internet search engines and moving in an ever-moreheteronomous direction. For the three newspapers under discussion, this raised the possibility of alienating existing readers. Interviewed in the U.K. Press Gazette, Anne Spackman, then-Editor-in-Chief of the Times Online, explained the need for elite news organizations to consider their specific audiences rather than giving in to populism in the attempt to attract more readers: “If we want to play the traffic tart game, there are certain things that we could write about all the time, like Britney Spears. But that’s not really what the Times is for,” (Stabe, 2008). For Newspaper A, a fair proportion of the material that appeared online was not published in the newspaper. Although they were ostensibly the same operation, “gatekeeping” decisions about what material was allowable online and what would make it to the paper demonstrated that the two audiences were conceived of as quite different in composition. The stories about breast enhancements were not published in newsprint. They functioned entirely to increase online hits.

Commercial Pressure Drives Out Older, More Experienced Journalists On all three newspapers, there were financial constraints leading to staff reductions. On Paper B, costs were managed mainly by a staff freeze, which reduced the number of junior staff members. In the period shortly after the research was carried out, an editorial decision was made to publish agency copy unaltered (where stories were purely informational) and credit the agency rather than using junior staff members to dress it up as original material.This decision was aimed at releasing journalists from the task of simply cutting and pasting stories from secondary sources, giving them more autonomy and encouraging them to pursue stories in more depth. However, as the staff numbers decreased, it was increasingly difficult to maintain breadth of coverage. On Paper A, staff reductions (though ostensibly voluntary) resulted in the loss of large numbers of higher-paid specialists. One interviewee remarked that they had taken to reading the media pages of another newspaper to see which of their colleagues had been sacked. Their places were often taken by much younger, less experienced, and cheaper reporters. One of the news specialists interviewed explained that she had been moved into a specialist job with no time at all to prepare and, for the first year, would ring up a reporter at a rival paper every day just to make sure that she wasn’t missing an important story. According to the journalists’ union (the National Union of Journalists [NUJ]), the move to rid organizations of older, more experienced, and higher-paid journalists was often couched in arguments about their inability to adapt to the new multi-platform world (Stanistreet, 2011, p. 3). But in the Goldsmiths’ research, there was no evidence that people were refusing to retrain. On the contrary—and

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with the exception of SEO—none of the journalists appeared to have been offered any relevant training that might have allowed them to make better use of the internet to do original research. One general reporter on Paper B said: “We’ve just got a new lad who’s started and he’s really good and he keeps bringing in really good stories and they desperately like him and it keeps everyone a bit more . . . It makes it a bit harder.” Another senior reporter on Paper C said that they had to ask young reporters to help them search chat rooms because they were not “technically minded.” They had never been offered any training. The shedding—and, to some extent, the denigration—of older and more experienced journalists, coupled with the inadequacy of training in the use of online search engines (at all levels) for all journalists, clearly had a demoralizing effect on news staff. It is noteworthy that this was also the period in which some British news journalists started hacking phones—a practice that, as the Leveson Inquiry discovered, was widespread in the tabloid press at the time. Nobody mentioned hacking during this investigation (though veiled reference was made to the “dark arts”), but senior journalists were clearly uncomfortable about their lack of a sophisticated understanding of new online technologies and their fear of being overtaken by younger and more “tech-savvy” rivals. This anxiety was the motive that former News of the World reporter Paul McMullan, in his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, attributed to the convicted phone hacker Clive Goodman: I think Clive Goodman fell foul of phone hacking because he was getting on a bit, he was royal editor, he had a really high salary—there were plenty of people who were 25 years old who would have taken his job and spent longer on doorsteps and worked hard, and were always constantly snapping at his heels, and to stay one step ahead of them, he got sucked into phone hacking. (McMullan, 2011, p. 33)

Differentiation as a Market Strategy Bourdieu (2005), writing in France in 1995, saw television as the disruptive agent in the journalistic field, dragging the news media in a more commercial (heteronomous) and less independent direction. The more serious print media were, at the same time, held in check to some extent by the need to maintain cultural capital and influence. But the move online changed the field of journalism even more sharply than the advent of commercial television. Print news organizations now find it increasingly difficult to maintain their differentiation from one another and from organizations in other media. Search engine technology means that pieces of news can be accessed out of their original production context. Audiences are

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reaching material by “the side door” of search and social (Newman, 2012; Purcell, Rainie, Mitchell, Rosenstiel, & Olmstead, 2010) rather than by purchasing a discrete package. Research demonstrates that news is, as Bourdieu (2005) predicted, increasingly uniform as news outlets vie for the biggest audiences (Hindman, 2005). In this context, news organizations have two options.They can follow the logic of search engines and simply offer whatever pieces of news that their analysis tells them will be read by the biggest possible audience. Alternatively, they can try to build a specific audience for their product by differentiating it as much as possible from the increasingly homogeneous news available online. On all three newspapers, there has been some effort to differentiate, largely by building the profiles of individual journalists and encouraging readers to build a direct relationship with them. Perhaps ironically, the newspaper that seems least concerned with ensuring that work is attributed to the actual authors is also the one that seems most keen on projecting the appearance of personal authorship. On Newspaper A, where two journalists mentioned that work that they had never seen was routinely published under their bylines, a byline picture and Twitter handle are now regularly used alongside even quite routine news stories. This strategy of personalization encourages a faux intimacy with readers, which goes hand in hand with the growing practice of passing news around via social media (Newman, 2011; Purcell et al., 2010). Newspaper B, in 2007 and 2008, had yet to make the full transition to “Webfirst” news delivery. The least commercial of the three newspapers, management had already started to make decisions about embracing the new technology and establishing a more collaborative relationship with its audience. Newspaper B was also the one with the strongest trade union presence and a clear policy of resisting compulsory redundancies; so, although there was a sense of anxiety about the changes, there was also a greater sense of excitement about the new possibilities of the technology. At the time, this newspaper had the highest number of original news stories produced by individual journalists. Speed of work was not mentioned as a major concern, and reporters still felt that they had a high degree of autonomy in how to cover stories. Although they still had to do as the news desk requested, reporters were encouraged to follow up on their own leads. Only one reporter complained of being prevented from following up on a story of her own by what she considered an unreasonable demand from the news editor. She put this down to conflict between different desks. The sense was that journalists here and at Newspaper C used the internet primarily to access sources, using the Web to track people and to discover hidden pockets of information (albeit without serious training in how to use it). However, they also observed that as journalists became more skilled at finding information, the relative competitive advantage of online research was declining; if everyone knows where to look for information, then it is no longer special but routine.

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At the time of the research, collaboration between journalists and audiences on Paper B was largely theoretical. Journalists were no more likely to read comments on this newspaper than on the other newspapers. Although the comments section encouraged participation from knowledgeable members of the audience, it was run separately from the news operation, and none of the journalists mentioned using it to inform their own work. Research by Fenton and Witschge (2010) backs this up by suggesting that journalists did not see the comments section as part of a collaboration with the audience nor as a possible way of informing their journalism.

Recent Changes Live blogging and Twitter had only just emerged at the time of this research and had yet to become major forces. Twitter now provides journalists with a far more focused way of searching incoming material than the unsolicited content via newspapers’ own email and websites. Live blogs allow journalists to pull in comments from less mainstream sources and link to them. Newspaper B has now embraced live blogging for a wide range of stories. Newspaper A has also given the appearance of live blogging but, in line with its far more centralized approach, it tends not to link out (other than to the occasional Twitter feed). Paper B uses Twitter, links to other accounts of events, pulls in video from amateurs and bystanders, and generally brings together a broad range of sources. For Paper B, this move toward interaction with a specific (rather than a general) audience fits in with a strategy of building a brand rather than creating a platform for passing news browsers. Its early embrace of Facebook as a means of disseminating stories (Phillips, 2012) fits in with a strategy of building trust through personalization. Journalists are being developed not as interchangeable robots whose work is processed by others but as personalities. While this seems to indicate a more collaborative relationship, giving more power to the audience, the change is in fact illusory. Journalists do not link at random.The sources they embrace online are those they would be likely to access for information as journalists. The inclusion of Twitter comments is no more authentic a representation of public opinion than was the use of  “vox pops” (short interviews culled from passersby on the street). Newspaper B allows its journalists more autonomy in following stories and also allows them more autonomy in linking out. But it is still the job of the journalist to operate a process of selection; the process has just become much faster. In a sense, journalists are now playing out in public the source selection process that would formerly have happened behind the scenes. One new trend in all three newspapers is the use of “data journalism.” Access to simple tools for data analysis allows journalists to process raw numbers rather than using intermediaries (gatekeepers) appointed by the institutions that generate the data. In the U.K., there are as yet very few journalists on general interest newspapers who are capable of this kind of analysis, but future research on the

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use and interpretation of data by journalists—as compared to those generated by sources themselves—could be a fruitful area of study. Data journalism requires a very high level of skill compared to general news journalism and moves gatekeeping power back into the hands of the most skilled journalists, who are now increasingly able to bypass intermediaries and access information directly.

Conclusions The Goldsmiths research took place during a period of significant transition and captured a moment of flux in the role of journalists as gatekeepers. On the most commercial of the three newspapers, the overwhelming sense was that of a sharp reduction in the autonomy of journalists. News selection was based, to a large extent, on the interpretation of quantities of data about the behavior of audiences. Stories were written at high speed and tuned to ensure that currently “trending” keywords would appear on the site and draw in casual visitors. Standards of reporting, developed over many years to attract a particular audience, were apparently being abandoned in pursuit of a casual audience that might come to the website but would be unlikely to stay and read on. It is noteworthy that, of the six journalists interviewed, three no longer work for their respective companies. At the newspaper with the least commercial pressure, audience analytics were (and are) also being monitored, but here the journalists had a far greater level of autonomy. They were more like the “pure” journalists described by Bourdieu (2005, p. 42) as those closest to the autonomous pole in the field. On this newspaper, specialist journalists still pursued their own stories and were expected to spend time developing their own contacts. Stories that have little general appeal are still published if the reporter believes that they are important or are likely to build toward a bigger future story. For the newspapers (B and C) that were less overwhelmingly driven by audience data, there were other changes to consider. Although journalists on both newspapers spoke appreciatively about the opportunities offered for research and for finding contacts, there was also a concern for the sheer volume of material that they now had to deal with. Monitoring the massive flow for useful nuggets seemed to be militating against any move toward meaningful collaboration or opening up of the control over material being published. Journalists in this study were forced to ignore most of the information coming in unless they were certain of where it came from. The fear of making mistakes when working at a very high speed tends, if anything, to narrow rather than widen the choice of sources. Right now, interaction between reporters and audiences is proving to be illusory.  There is less rather than more direct contact between journalists and sources. Where journalists do have a greater degree of autonomy, the trend seems to be in the direction of greater gatekeeping control by a smaller number of elite journalists who now have access to vast reserves of material that they can access without going through intermediaries.

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While wage levels and staff numbers are dropping across the news media and there has been a big shakeout of senior reporters right across the national press, we are also seeing a contradictory trend: an increasing number of journalists are being promoted as brands by their publishers.The objective of this is to deliver audience loyalty to the publication, but the effect could also be to create a group of journalists with a far higher degree of personal autonomy—responsible as much to their audiences as to their editors, much like the “star” system in the U.S., where news anchors and Pulitzer Prize winners can compete for high pay and get considerable autonomy (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009, p. 67). This form of loyalty does not, however, appear to be collaborative. Journalists are still asymmetrical “broadcasters” who limit the people they follow but are often followed by very large numbers of individuals. Nevertheless, the contradictions inherent in personalization—when individual journalists are not, in reality, speaking for themselves—may not be sustainable in the long term. Commercial news organizations may have difficulty in maintaining the centralizing grip of the news desk while at the same time expecting journalists to present a personal profile to the world and be held publicly accountable for what they write. Such changes, however, are speculative. As things stand at the time of writing this chapter, the gatekeeping role is being centralized—editors, armed with audience analytics, maintain iron discipline in British newsrooms. The gatekeeper is now computer operated.

References Adorno, T. (1963/1991). Culture industry reconsidered. In T. Adorno (Ed.), The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture (pp. 85–92). London, UK: Routledge. Beckett, C. (2008). Supermedia: Saving journalism so that it can save the world. London, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Bourdieu, P. (2005). The political field, the social science field, and the journalistic field. In R. Benson & and E. Neveu (Eds.), Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field (pp. 29–47). Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Cushion, S. (2007). Rich media, poor journalists: Journalists’ salaries. Journalism Practice, 1(1), 120–129. Davies, N. (2008). Flat earth news. London, UK: Chatto & Windus. Deuze, M. (2007). Media work. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Entman, R. (2003). Projections of power: Framing news, public opinion, and U.S. foreign policy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Fenton, N. (2010). NGOs, new media and the mainstream news: News from everywhere. In N. Fenton (Ed.), New Media, Old News (pp. 153–169). London, UK: Sage Publications. Fenton, N., & Witschge,T. (2010). “Comment is free, facts are sacred”: Journalistic ethics in a changing mediascape. In G. Meikle & G. Redden (Eds.), News Online: Transformations and Continuities (pp. 148–164).London, UK: Palgrave. Fiske, J. (1992). Popularity and the politics of information. In P. Dahlgren & C. Sparks (Eds.), Journalism and Popular Culture (pp. 45–64). London, UK: Sage Publications. Gans, H. J. (1979). Deciding what’s news. New York, NY: Pantheon.

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Golding, P., & Elliott, P. (1979). Making the news. London, UK: Longman. Hall, S. M. (1978). Policing the crisis: Mugging, the state, and law and order. New York, NY: Holmes & Meier. Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent:The political economy of the mass media. New York, NY: Pantheon. Hindman, M. (2005). The myth of digital democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Jarvis, J. (2009). What would Google do? New York, NY: HarperCollins. Lewis, J., Wren, J. M., Williams, A., & Franklin, B. (2008). Compromised fourth estate? U.K. news journalism, public relations and news sources. Journalism Studies, 9(1), 1–20. Media Reform (2013). Local media plurality stinks, but democratic owners could revive it. Retrieved from www.mediareform.org.uk/media-ownership-2/local-media-pluralityis-dead-but-democratic-owners-could-revive-it McMullan, P. (2011). Transcript of afternoon hearing 29 November 2011. Retrieved from www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/?witness=paul-mcmullan Newman, N. (2011). Mainstream media and the distribution of news in the age of social discovery. Oxford, UK: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Newman, N. (Ed.). (2012). Reuters Institute digital news report 2012:Tracking the future of news. Oxford, UK: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Phillips, A. (2010). Old sources: New bottles. In N. Fenton (Ed.), New Media, Old News (pp. 87–102). London, UK: Sage Publications. Phillips, A. (2011). Faster and shallower: Homogenisation, cannibalisation and the death of reporting. In P. Lee-Wright, A. Phillips, & T. Witschge (Eds.), Changing Journalism (pp. 81–99). London, UK: Routledge. Phillips, A. (2012). Sociability, speed and quality in the changing news environment. Journalism Practice, 6(5–6), 669–679. Phillips, A., & Witschge, T. (2011). The changing business of news: Sustainability of news journalism. In P. Lee-Wright, A. Phillips, & T. Witschge (Eds.), Changing Journalism (pp. 3–21). London, UK: Routledge. Purcell, K., Rainie, L., Mitchell,A., Rosenstiel,T., & Olmstead, K. (2010). Understanding the participatory news consumer. Retrieved from www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/ Online-News.aspx Russell, A. (2011). Networked: A contemporary history of news in transition. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press. Schlesinger, P., & Tumber, H. (1994). Reporting crime: The media politics of criminal justice. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Shoemaker, P. J., & Vos, T. (2009). Gatekeeping theory. New York, NY: Routledge. Singer, J. B., Domingo, D., Heinonen, A., Hermida, A., Paulussen, S., Quandt, T., Reich, Z., & Vujnovic, M. (2011). Participatory journalism: Guarding open gates at online newspapers. London, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. Stabe, M. (2008, May 7). Spackman: Journalism and search optimisation are “completely interwoven” at Times Online. Press Gazette. Retrieved from www.pressgazette.co.uk/ node/41073 Stanistreet, M. (2011). Witness statement of Michelle Stanistreet. Retrieved from www. levesoninquiry.org.uk/evidence/?witness=michelle-stanistreet Tuchman, G. (1978). Making news:A study in the construction of reality. New York, NY: Free Press. Witschge, T., & Redden, G. (2010). A new news order? Online news content examined. In N. Fenton (Ed.), New Media, Old News: Journalism and Democracy in the Digital Age (pp. 171–187). London, UK: Sage Publications.

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PART III

News Routines New and Old

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5 ON A ROLE Online Newspapers, Participatory Journalism, and the U.S. Presidential Elections Jane B. Singer

Right from the start, journalists recognized—many with considerable alarm—that digital media would change the nature of gatekeeping profoundly and permanently. What, they wondered, would civic society do without them? Journalists have long seen themselves as central to the democratic process. The provision of information that citizens need to be free and self-governing (Kovach & Rosenstiel, 2007), along with the vetting of potentially harmful misinformation or disinformation, is foundational to their self-perception as the linchpin of citizen sovereignty. In what Gans (2003) calls the journalist’s view of democracy, this occupational role as gatekeeper is vital to a properly informed electorate. Normative journalistic behavior involves ethically exercising this gatekeeping control over news content on the public’s behalf (Lewis, 2012a). This civic responsibility is most clearly delineated in coverage of politics and government. Yet it is obvious to everyone, including journalists, that the steadily and rapidly increasing prominence of the internet as a key vehicle for both obtaining and providing political information undercuts their role as the gatekeepers to democracy. Indeed, no sooner had news outlets ventured online in the mid-1990s than observers began highlighting the challenges stemming from its potential to displace journalists as providers and analysts of civic information (Tumber, 2001). The emerging media world clearly was one without traditional gates and thus, presumably, had no need for someone to guard them (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2000). It took barely a decade for the internet to overtake newspapers as a major source of U.S. campaign news (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2008). Social media, which began to be widely used in the latter part of the 2000s, became embedded in the political life of the nation even faster; by the 2012 campaign season, two thirds of social media users were employing the platforms

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to post views on civic issues, follow candidates, lobby friends, and more (Rainie, Smith, Schlozman, Brady, & Verba, 2012). Meanwhile, affiliated websites of traditional outlets had migrated from a largely disdained and easily ignored offshoot of the “real” newsroom to a centerpiece of today’s multi-platform news strategy. During campaign season, these news outlets now devote enormous quantities of staff time and energy to online political coverage. This chapter presents results from a 2012 study of campaign and election coverage provided by online U.S. newspapers. The fourth in a series of similar studies begun in 2000 and outlined below, it offers a unique longitudinal view of how journalists perceive their role as gatekeepers of political information in the face of a steady diminution of their ability to exercise control over that information. It summarizes newspaper editors’ thinking over a dozen years in which user capabilities to create and share news and views have gone from limited and cumbersome to ubiquitous and ridiculously easy, with the sequential rise of blogs, comment capabilities, mobile media, and social media, among other participatory innovations. The findings suggest that while numerous options for users to contribute to political coverage are now widely available, there has not been a corresponding increase in editors’ willingness to foreground these capabilities or fold them into their own coverage goals. After a small surge of excitement in 2004, as blogs were becoming prominent, online editors generally have retreated from an emphasis on political content from outside the newsroom. Instead, they continue to see the newsroom’s output—in particular, technologically enhanced forms of traditional political information—as their most noteworthy contributions to the democratic process.

Guarding Open Gates: The Rise of Participatory Journalism As the internet has developed into a dominant news source for citizens of advanced democracies, and as “user-generated content” has evolved alongside more traditional formats in a networked news environment, scholars have tracked challenges to a professional gatekeeping role. This section summarizes a sampling of that work, most of which has pointed to journalists’ continued valuation of their traditional role and function amid a dramatic growth in user participation options. Although users are gaining influence over some stages of news production, both before and after an item is published, many journalists resist relinquishing control over decisions about what passes through the news gate (Domingo et al., 2008; Singer et al., 2011). The idea that newsroom practices mediate between events and consumers of information about those events is ingrained in journalism students and practitioners (Boczkowski, 2004) and undoubtedly contributes to print journalists’ general disregard for user contributions. Most research on newspapers’ first decade on the internet—from the mid-1990s to around 2005—suggested an industry

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determinedly clinging to the conviction that their gatekeeping role remained essential. At best, many acknowledged a potential shift in emphasis: away from control over the availability of information to control over its quality.  And it went almost without saying that they believed that what they provided would be of higher quality than the rest (Singer, 1997). Additional work consistently bore out this initial occupational reaction that journalistic control was necessary to separate the proverbial wheat (content from journalists) from the chaff (content from everyone else), particularly in newsrooms where online news production reproduced the one-to-many message flow of print (Boczkowski, 2004). For many journalists, such sentiments seem to have changed relatively little with the advent of social media and its greatly expanded co-production options. Robinson’s 2007 study of online newspaper editors offers some of the clearest support for this editorial perspective of the newspaper as an authoritative institution. Although many of her interviewees were increasingly looking to new sources for story ideas and feedback, they were generally reluctant to give users the ability to turn those ideas into stories themselves. “We have to keep asking, who’s in charge?” one editor asked rhetorically, citing a need to maintain standards of fairness, accuracy, and civility. “Someone has gotta be in control here” (Robinson, 2007, pp. 310–311). Gatekeeping, she concludes, remained a central component of news routines even as the role enactment shifted to accommodate new audience relationships and capabilities. Despite indications that some journalists may be inching toward acceptance of loosened control as a potentially good thing (Lewis, 2012b; Robinson, 2011), much of the work in this area suggests slow going. For instance, Jönsson and Örnebring (2011) found that online newspaper users are empowered primarily to create content related to popular culture, travel, and health rather than political information or other hard news. “There is not really a shift in power over media (news) content in the mainstream online news media, even if there is a higher degree of participation and interactivity,” they wrote (p. 140). Others have similarly found that reporters do not see participatory journalism as “real” journalism (O’Sullivan & Heinonen, 2008); that its emergence has prompted the reiteration and reinforcement of gatekeeping norms (Hermida & Thurman, 2008) rather than seriously challenged long-established news values (Harrison, 2010); and that at least at such major news institutions as the BBC, “the democratizing potential of increased citizen participation in news production has been blunted” by unwillingness to accept their enterprise as a civic partnership (Williams,Wardle, & Wahl-Jorgensen, 2011, p. 94). Although the studies reported here focus on online editors of relatively large newspapers, even journalists working in much smaller communities have sought to preserve barriers between themselves and their audience and thus their social capital as gatekeepers (Shoemaker & Vos, 2009). Lewis and his colleagues (2010) found that Texas community newspaper editors who disliked the idea of citizen journalism implicitly drew on gatekeeping rationales, emphasizing a need

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to safeguard the integrity of their content and preserve traditional journalistic routines and values. Singer (2010) found that British community newspaper editors felt much the same way; user-generated content, they said, could undermine journalistic norms and values unless carefully monitored by newsroom gatekeepers. Particularly among editors with relatively lengthy experience in traditional media, there seems little inclination to view citizen journalists’ roles as critical in relation to the editors’ own roles (Nah & Chung, 2009). Most of these studies have considered news decisions in general. But with provision of political information at the heart of journalists’ perceived reason for existence, they seem unlikely to be enthusiastic about sharing that role with members of the public they claim to serve. Williams and Delli Carpini (2000) were among the first to suggest that political information could easily bypass journalists to reach the public, using Matt Drudge’s Clinton–Lewinsky scoop as an exemplar. Since then, despite being significantly outnumbered by alternative gateways to political information, journalists appear less likely than their audiences to readily adopt newer genres such as citizen blogs and viral political videos (Hussain, 2012). Again, there are hints that for at least some journalists, attitudes are changing. Meraz and Papacharissi (2013), for example, look at the impact of Twitter on coverage of the 2011 Egyptian uprisings, identifying “hybrid and fluid journalisms that rely on subjective pluralism, cocreation and collaborative curation” (p. 138). But to what extent do these shifts in mind-set extend beyond major breaking news events (particularly those in distant and dangerous lands) to comparatively routine campaign coverage? The studies reported here attempt to address this question. Relatively little work has sought to connect the rise of social media and participatory journalism with the persistence of traditional gatekeeping perceptions in the context of a contemporary election campaign. To what extent are editors incorporating new, interactive, participatory capabilities in their coverage? What weight do they give these initiatives, and how, if at all, are novel forms of civic engagement shaping their own content choices?

Campaign Coverage of U.S. Presidential Elections in the 2000s The 2012 study is the fourth in a series that began with the 2000 U.S. presidential election. The goal has been to trace the ways in which editors of leading American newspapers have incorporated (or not) the internet’s continually expanding capabilities into decisions about the political campaign and election coverage that they see as so vital to the democratic process. Post-election questionnaires about their coverage were distributed each year to online editors of the largest-circulation newspaper in each state and to any additional papers with circulations of 250,000 or above. Closed- and open-ended questions provided information not only about what the sites included but also about why, in editors’ views, that content was there. The closed-ended questions

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were used primarily to obtain concrete data about the presence or absence of particular features. The open-ended ones yielded richer data related to editors’ goals for their sites and up to three content areas that they were most proud of, among other topics. The technology used to obtain the data evolved over the four election years. In 2000 and 2004, the questionnaire was distributed by email; editors were asked to enter their responses directly into the body of a message containing the questions, then send it back to the researcher. This simple technology required relatively little respondent effort or expertise, and response rates were high; however, it necessitated manual transfer of the data into Excel and Word for analysis. In 2008 and 2012, online software provided by SurveyMonkey was used to administer the questionnaire. This made things much easier for the researcher but somewhat harder for the respondent, who had to access and navigate through a multi-page online questionnaire. Response rates fell in 2008 and dropped even further in 2012, when usable responses were obtained from barely 20% of the editors surveyed. Nonetheless, the questionnaires yielded considerable insights about gatekeeping without actually asking editors explicitly about that role, mitigating the likelihood of obtaining defensive or “desirable” responses. Instead, editors were given the opportunity to describe, in their own words, various aspects of their campaign and election coverage. Responses were analyzed in the context of traditional journalistic roles and the extent to which editors gave weight or credence to alternatives. Of particular interest were the ways in which editors were or were not accommodating a sharply and steadily growing number of options for user contributions that might help create an interactive and engaged political community rather than merely people informed by content that the journalists chose to provide. The rest of this section highlights key findings from the 2000, 2004, and 2008 studies.

The 2000 U.S. Presidential Election Eighty newspapers met the study criteria in 2000. Responses were obtained from 57 editors (71%), all but four of whom reported offering special online sections dedicated to campaign coverage (Singer, 2003). Nearly all the editors (45 of 49 who answered the question) cited a goal directly related to informing users. Of those, 19 referred specifically to the ability to provide timely news, particularly on election night. Several crowed that they could finally beat television—despite the fact that in 2000, some TV news outlets infamously got the results wrong, erroneously announcing that Al Gore had won in Florida and was therefore elected President. The internet’s unlimited news hole also was cited—for instance, in describing voting guides that gave readers “the ability to understand the choice they were about to make,” as one editor said (p. 45). In general, editors in 2000

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saw the website as extending the franchise of the print newspaper rather than as a separate entity in its own right. Only four editors diverged from an emphasis on traditional gatekeeping roles as information providers, instead describing goals related to stimulating political discourse among a community of online users. However, those four were eloquent about its benefits. “This medium is about the empowerment of our community, to facilitate interaction with interesting or meaningful people,” one editor wrote. “This is the place the readers have a voice, have a stake in the ‘community’ that a good newspaper nurtures” (Singer, 2003, pp. 49–50). Among the 44 editors who described at least one online-only content area as a source of pride in 2000, information-related attributes were again dominant. Of a total of 95 areas cited either first, second, or third as a source of pride, more than two thirds related either to the depth and detail of the information provided or to its timeliness. Although only a few editors described facilitating discussion as their primary goal, chats and discussion forums—the primary options for user participation in 2000—were cited 14 times as a source of pride. Editors saw the key advantage as the ability to offer something impossible in print; for instance, one editor described chats with candidates as adding “a previously non-existent dimension to the voter-candidate relationship” (Singer, 2003, p. 47). Multimedia features also generated 10 mentions, and “candidate match” options enabling users to identify the candidate whose issue positions best matched their own were cited as the top source of pride by another four editors. Overall, the initial 2000 study found that as journalists were moving online, a “normalization” process was occurring: Traditional information-oriented functions, particularly related to getting political news out quickly, remained central to their self-perception as democracy’s gatekeepers. They saw the medium as a way to address ongoing criticisms about the superficiality of political coverage, citing pride in their new ability to offer breadth, depth, and utility not easily available in print. But they viewed their goals and achievements primarily in the context of good newspaper journalism—which could at least potentially be done better online. With a few exceptions, most gave little attention to the ability to help foster an engaged, active citizenry as well as an informed one.

The 2004 U.S. Presidential Election Editors of websites affiliated with major U.S. newspapers continued to emphasize their role as providers of credible information in the 2004 election campaign. But as blogs and other platforms began opening up websites to user contributions, they seemed to edge away from this traditional gatekeeping role and see their coverage as more open to shaping by those users. The 2004 questionnaire was again distributed by email to online editors of the largest-circulation newspaper in each state and to additional papers with over 250,000 print readers, a total of 77 editors in that year. The response rate dipped

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to just over 61%—47 of the editors who were initially contacted. Again, a large majority—39 editors—identified informing the public as their primary goal, citing the internet’s ability to provide greater speed, volume, and detail than was possible in print. Only three of those 39 emphasized the role of information in fostering civic engagement; for instance, one editor cited a desire to “increase interest in the process, encourage more people to vote, and give voters the information they needed to make an informed choice” (Singer, 2006, p. 270). Just two editors in 2004 offered overall goals directly related to engaging citizens in a more explicitly discursive form of democracy—for instance, through “blogs and forums, giving the voters the interactive ability to discuss the issues and candidates and also to interact live with the candidates” (Singer, 2006, p. 270). However, when asked about their sources of pride in 2004, editors seemed to place greater emphasis on these participatory options. T   here was a notable decline in the percentage of responses related to the timeliness of information, from 29 of the 95 total responses in 2000 to just 12 (of 87 responses) in 2004. But blogs, which were not available in 2000, were cited 16 times, while options for user participation in and personalization of online offerings earned 11 mentions, a three-fold increase over 2000. Indeed, almost all the newspaper websites in the 2004 study complemented newsroom-generated political content with opportunities for users to contribute information or ideas. The 2004 study identified three primary ways in which journalists stepped aside from their gatekeeping role over campaign and election coverage (Singer, 2006). One involved sections in which journalists provided baseline information that users could manipulate to suit individual needs or interests—for instance, through interactive maps or postal code–tailored ballot builders. A second was the adoption of blogs, including those from local opinion leaders and from users themselves. “They were interesting, smart and lively,” said one editor whose website offered three blogs, one featuring reader viewpoints. “Our live debate blog between two readers/contributors . . . was some of the best commentary and analysis anywhere” (Singer, 2006, p. 273). Chats, discussion forums, or message boards constituted the third broad area of user participation in 2004, with 33 of the 47 editors saying that their sites offered such features. While some said that the quality of the discourse was uneven, others praised their engagement function as a place for people “to vent, to discuss, to congregate, to have their say” (Singer, 2006, p. 273). In general, then, the 2004 study suggested an evolution in online editors’ thinking about their gatekeeping role during an election campaign. Although they continued to see the delivery of credible information as central to their function, that information was less likely to be static and more likely to be open to user input in various ways. The findings suggested a move toward integration of the journalist’s traditional role in a democracy—providing trustworthy, accurate content to inform the electorate—with the more open and participatory nature of the internet. Although online editors continued to act as political

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information gatekeepers, they also took steps toward a “new normal,” enabling and even encouraging users to reconstruct that information, creating and potentially sharing personally relevant meaning (Singer, 2006).

The 2008 U.S. Presidential Election If the 2004 election signaled a step forward in online editors’ thinking about collaborative approaches to campaign and election coverage, the 2008 study suggested two steps back. Despite a sharp increase in the number of options for user input in an election year during which social media gained importance and the internet overtook newspapers as a primary source of presidential campaign news (Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 2008), online editors who responded to the 2008 questionnaire generally reasserted their traditional gatekeeping roles (Singer, 2009). A link to the 2008 SurveyMonkey questionnaire was sent to 76 online editors; 46 answered at least one question but only 32 got to the end, a 42% response rate for completions. The 2008 version was similar to the 2000 and 2004 questionnaires but included questions exploring how social media and other online innovations were affecting coverage. All 36 of the editors who answered the question about coverage goals in 2008 cited an aspect of their role as information providers—as in 2000, typically stressing the greater speed, volume, and capacity for detail provided by the internet. Although about half a dozen highlighted the contribution of this role to a broader goal of civic engagement, virtually none cited goals related to discursive democracy—that is, use of the website as a platform for civic or political discourse. Despite a greatly enhanced capability to handle user input, and despite the fact that nearly all the sites did include campaign-related contributions from users, only one editor alluded to this capability in describing website goals—and his reference was to providing a platform for candidates, not users in general, to “describe themselves and discuss issues” (Singer, 2009, p. 833). Six editors cited goals connected to revenue. About two thirds—or 20 of the 31 editors answering the question about up to three sources of pride—cited one or more features in their 2008 campaign and election coverage that provided deep or detailed information; the ability to provide timely information on election night was mentioned a dozen times. Multimedia content—primarily video and journalist blogs—also was highlighted 15 and 18 times, respectively. Editors described the blogs as “the leading edge of our coverage,” a place to provide “the inside story on our state’s politicians,” and a way to get a jump on competitors (Singer, 2009, p. 835). All but one of the 32 respondents in 2008 said that the website either enabled users to contribute content, to personalize content provided by the newspaper, or both. Their goals for this capability included building engagement with journalistic content and giving users an outlet for expressing personal views. But

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only three cited the ability for user-generated content to strengthen interactions among citizens. Mostly, their focus was on strengthening the information product that they themselves provided, either by adding diverse perspectives or by creating a bigger pool of potential sources for journalists. In response to the free-form question about sources of pride, only two responses cited user contributions, down significantly from both 2004 (7 responses) and 2000 (14 responses), years when far fewer options for such contributions were available. The findings from 2008, then, suggested that editors valued user contributions well below their own offerings. Although users and journalists were increasingly likely to share space on newspaper websites, published items remained separate and unequal in the eyes of a large majority of editors. Despite (or perhaps because of ) expanded opportunities for the co-production of political content online, editors reacted by retreating from their tentative excitement over user participation in 2004, returning to their initial instinct to emphasize their own gatekeeping role. Their responses in 2008 suggested a reassertion of a deeply held self-perception (or at least hope) that journalists are indispensable to the proper functioning of democracy (Singer, 2009).

Coverage of the 2012 U.S. Presidential Campaign and Election The 2012 study, reported in greater detail here, sought to understand which was the longer-lasting trend: the one suggested in 2004, toward a loosening of control over political content, or the one evidenced in 2008, a renewed assertion of a more traditional gatekeeping role. As before, a link to the SurveyMonkey questionnaire was emailed after the November election to the top online editor at the circulation-leading newspaper in each state and to any additional U.S. papers with print circulations of over 250,000. A total of 73 newspapers met the criteria in 2012. Seventeen editors (24% of the initial sample) began the survey, but only 15 provided valid responses beyond the introductory page for a usable response rate of 21%; some questions were answered by only 14 editors. Though too few to allow extensive analysis or more than tentative insights into 2012 online coverage, their responses do indicate how the gatekeeping of election news has continued to evolve. Notably, all the 2012 respondents were well-seasoned professionals, averaging 25.5 years in journalism; only one editor had less than 10 years of professional experience.  They had held their current positions for an average of 6.5 years, with the longest-serving veteran indicating 30 years in the post—presumably including the supervision of pre-internet news production.

Newsroom-Controlled Content, 2012 Eleven of the 14 respondents answering the questions provided online features or applications in 2012 that were not available in 2008. Newsroom-controlled

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content initiatives included greater use of social and mobile media and more live blogging and other rapid updates. Respondents universally used both Facebook and Twitter to promote their campaign and election content.There also were indications of willingness to open up avenues for external contributions, as discussed further below. For example, one editor cited an app enabling users to see locally generated Twitter buzz about President Barack Obama and his opponent in the election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney; another said that local candidates could record their own short videos to accompany newsroom-generated profiles. At least one enterprising editor saw a way to make money from election coverage: photos from the campaign trail available for purchase. “Election coverage yielded good revenue in these resales, similar to coverage of local sports,” he wrote. As in previous years, editors were asked to identify the primary goal of their online campaign and election coverage. Every editor who answered the question indicated that informing the public—the traditional gatekeeping role in an inherently hierarchical conception of news delivery—was his or her top goal, as reflected in this representative response: “To inform our readers with the best election coverage available in our region. We did a lot of things to help readers make educated choices, but the primary goal is still to cover the news comprehensively.” Moreover, in an echo of “Web 1.0”–era responses from four elections past, editors commonly emphasized the speed of online information delivery, such as the respondent whose goal was to get a “swift and efficient report on who/what won” to readers as quickly as possible.  All 14 agreed that their goals had been met. “The depth and immediacy of our coverage was unmatched,” said one editor; “we had results faster than any news site in the state or the Secretary of State’s office,” another volunteered. Increased traffic and revenue also were cited as indicators of success. In the assessment of another editor: “We’ve got the drill down.” All the respondents said that they published online ahead of print, and all but one said that they always (10 editors) or usually (three editors) engaged in such “digital-first” publishing. In fact, all but one said that they published content online that was never available in print at all, and nine said that they did so “a lot.” Conversely, a majority (eight editors) said that the print newspaper contained no 2012 campaign or election content that was unavailable online; the rest said that the print paper published only a little that was never available on the affiliated website. In other words, while much of the website content was unique to that platform, little or none of the print content was unique to the legacy news product in 2012, reflecting a pronounced shift in emphasis over the years. Mobile delivery of campaign information also had become commonplace. All but one editor said that users could access campaign or election content through a mobile app.The nature of the available content dictated the delivery platform, at least for some editors. As one explained, “Results grids worked best on the web; a post containing continuous one-line updates worked best on mobile; and longer pieces worked best in print.” This sense that print was best suited to analytical pieces and long-form journalism was evident in several responses. Another editor summed up the “formula we always use” this way:

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The Web is for a speedy and basic report, with the ability to search through all the past content. Mobile is for delivering fast information. Print is for a more polished and refined report, with more analysis, more intensive and customized design.

User-Controlled Content, 2012 Of particular interest in 2012 was the extent to which editors were sharing their gatekeeping role by facilitating user contributions to campaign and election content, given the explosion in the variety and popularity of social media since the 2008 election cycle. News outlets had steadily increased their own social media use during this time, albeit primarily for promotional and sourcing purposes rather than for truly collaborative journalistic efforts. In 2012, editors were asked a series of questions about their use of features designed to enable users to contribute their own content, to personalize content that the news outlet provided, or to share the news outlet’s content. Fifteen editors answered these questions, and all 15 said that they provided opportunities for at least two of the option categories as part of their campaign and election coverage; seven answered “yes” to all three. Options for user contributions included: •

Comments on stories, columns, and blogs (enabled by all 15 editors answering the question) • User Twitter feeds (nine editors) • Polls or other online surveys; Q&As with political journalists (eight editors for one or both options) • Forums or discussion boards (seven editors) • Announcements of campaign events; Q&As with political candidates; user photos or videos related to the campaign (five editors for one or more of these options) • Crowd-sourced political coverage; hyper-local political coverage; Q&As with political experts from outside the newsroom; reports from users related to campaign events; reports from users on election night (four editors for one or more of these options) • Commissioned political content from users; user blogs (two editors for one or both options) • “Have Your Say” sections; video chats (one editor each) Again, the response rate was low, making the findings tentative. But at least among these respondents, a wide range of options for user contributions was available, including options that gave users control over some online political content.  To summarize: More than a quarter of the editors used crowd-sourced political coverage or other user reports on campaign events; a third ran user-generated visual content; and two thirds incorporated users’ Twitter feeds. Commenting capabilities were universal. However, only a couple of the websites hosted user blogs, and podcasts were not used at all.

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In a separate section of the questionnaire devoted to election night coverage, these editors overwhelmingly reported that they obtained their information from traditional sources, such as the Associated Press or other wire services (14 of 15 editors); local, state, or national election officials (12 editors); and their own news staffs (12 editors). Six obtained at least some results from TV or radio, and three consulted other websites. Only one editor reported obtaining results through social media, and none relied on users for election results. However, six editors did use “blogs and/or social media from users” for supplemental election night information, and three made user text and photos available on their websites.That said, journalists were the dominant sources for this information as well: All 15 editors answering the question used text and photos from newsroom staffers, 11 used blogs and/or social media from their journalists, and 10 used audio and/or video provided by journalists. A third also used newsroom-produced interactive graphics. Thirteen of the 15 respondents said that user contributions met their expectations for both quantity and quality, but only two said that they got more contributions than expected—and none felt that the quality exceeded expectations. Moreover, most of the editors admitted that user contributions played no role in their own campaign coverage; only two said that it had any influence. “We chased several stories based on audience recommendations,” one of these two editors wrote; the other said that participation solicited through photo galleries, polls, and blogs produced information that affected decisions about where to assign newsroom resources. Editors also were asked whether any of the political material contributed by users was “reverse published” in their legacy newspaper—in other words, how closely they continued to guard the gate around the printed product. A majority (eight of the 15) said that no user content related to the campaign or election appeared in print. Five said that “a little” did, and just two said that their newspapers used “a lot” of user contributions in print. However, open-ended responses describing this content suggested that “users” did not necessarily mean your average Joe Citizen. Of the five editors who provided explanatory context, three specified that their responses related to content provided by candidates or political experts. Only two respondents indicated that material from regular users made it into print. One took “mostly wrap-up stories from the end of the [election night] evening.” T   he other mentioned that a “great many tips” received online were followed up on—by journalists—but also said that political events submitted online went into a central database and became part of a printed political calendar. He said that they “may have also used some photos and letters submitted online.” In short, journalists’ incorporation of user-provided material about the 2012 campaign and election into their own news decisions appears to have been minimal at best. Most paid little to no attention to user contributions, and even those who said that they did generally used these contributions in perfunctory ways.

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Editors continued to maintain control over the news product online and, to an even greater extent, in print. Taking advantage of opportunities to turn users into content promoters, on the other hand, was a far more appealing prospect. All the respondents said that they offered at least some options for users to personalize and/or share campaign and election content created by the newspaper, and all characterized these options as either wholly (four) or partially (11) successful. Options here included: •

Social media applications—for instance, through Facebook or Twitter (offered by nine editors) • Ballot builders; RSS feeds or other topical delivery options (seven editors for one or both of these options) • A local election information locator (six editors) • Interactive graphics, such as electoral maps, for user manipulation; recommendation widgets, such as digg.com (five editors for one or both of these options) • Personal political profiles (three editors) • Quizzes (two editors) • Candidate “match” feature (one editor) Asked to describe their primary goal in offering these user personalization and content-sharing options, editors cited synergistic desires to “build engagement and increase page views,” as one editor wrote, or “shared knowledge, SEO value” in the words of another, referring to the ability to boost website traffic by making content easier for sites such as Google to find, called “search engine optimization.” Similarly, success tended to be measured in traffic data. “That’s what the metrics tell me,” an editor wrote in explaining why he felt these efforts to be wholly successful.  “All-time record traffic despite advent of a strict paywall.”

Editors’ Sources of Pride, 2012 As in previous years, editors were asked to indicate up to three things about their 2012 campaign and election coverage that made them especially proud. As there were so few responses, it is possible to show these in detail in Table 5.1 using the same umbrella categories as in previous years plus two new ones—multi-platform options and social media—reflecting recent changes in the media landscape. Clearly, online editors in 2012 took the greatest pride in political content that fulfilled their traditional role as providers of thorough and timely information. Voter guides to candidates and issues—long a staple of election coverage online and in print, though several editors mentioned personalization features incorporated in the online versions—gained eight specific mentions from a total of 13 editors answering the question. (Some cited more than one thing in a

98  Jane B. Singer TABLE 5.1.  Sources of Editors’ Pride in the 2012 Campaign and Election Information on

Leading U.S. Newspaper Websites Source of pride

Listed first

Listed second

Listed third

Depth/detail of information

•  Convention special •  Home page •  Voting guide (three separate mentions) •  Web-only daily stories •  Website sections

•  Comprehensive voter guide •  Home page •  Live-streamed interviews with all major candidates •  Voting guide (four separate mentions)

•  “Meet the candidates” •  Sample ballot voting guide •  Debate coverage

Updated information

•  Live election results •  Election results and data map •  Live updates •  Our presentation and completeness of results •  Election results/ coverage page

—

Journalist blogs

•  Election day blog

—

—

Multimedia/ animation

—

—

•  Local expertise on video •  Photo galleries

User personalization — options

•  Find your polling — place •  Interactive graphics

User contributions

—

•  Voting blog

•  Local expertise on blog •  Voting story collection areas

Multi-platform content

•  Convention iPad app

—

—

Social mediaa

•  Using Twitter to get local feedback on debates

•  Local Twitter reactions map •  Social media curation •  Social media

•  Social media, Tweetups, Google hangouts •  Social media distribution

Responses may indicate social media use by journalists, users, or both.

a

single response.) Four were proudest of their ability to provide election night results quickly. Although several cited use of social media, particularly Twitter, other options enabling user input merited little recognition. Even though all the respondents offered extensive opportunities to share content control with users in various ways, they remained proudest of digital manifestations of their own long-standing self-perception as creators of an informed electorate.

On a Role  99

Asked to briefly explain their responses, editors tended to emphasize the utility of the information they provided. “Seriously, there can’t be enough said about immediate coverage and instant results,” wrote an editor whose top source of pride was live updates. “We often think that readers want these complex stories when in reality, they want to know what’s happening at their polling place and who won, especially the night of.” Another editor was proud that “we killed it. Other media had to cite us and our calls/results that night. Traffic was huge because we’ve built that expectation that we’d have the goods.” An editor who listed a voting guide first said that it “cuts to the chase in terms of letting users see their voting choices, the candidates’ responses, and their personal, marked-up ballot.” Several editors mentioned that the guides included candidate responses to issue-related questions, creating “a thorough profile” and “a useful public service [that] sometimes produces news, as candidates respond to questions about their backgrounds and their positions.” The provision of useful information that, not incidentally, helped drive traffic to the site was central to the discussion of other online features as well. An editor who highlighted online-only daily stories said that they “gave readers reasons to come back to the web during the day and helped fill a healthy appetite for what was happening at the polls.” Another described the elections home page as “a heavily traveled place for readers to get all their election news in one place,” adding that it “became a mainstay in our ‘Top 10’ pageview lists in the days surrounding the election. I’m proud of it because readers used it.” Discussion of user engagement was connected primarily to newer capabilities—and to options that involved either visual or very brief content formats. For example, one editor explained that “interactive graphics give readers something they love—the ability to control and decipher information.” Not surprisingly, social media were explicitly identified as well suited to user participation. The only editor to list social media implementation as his chief source of pride described a partnership with the state university’s journalism program in using Twitter to obtain feedback about a locally staged debate in order “to gauge whether we could build engagement through heavy promotion of a hashtag.” Another editor proud of his social media use cited its ability to serve dual roles: “Our Twitter feeds were not only effective in informing the public but [became] a popular form of engagement with our readers.” A third, proud of using Twitter to publicize local reactions, said that “it wasn’t scientific, but it was engaging and a lot of fun.” Overall, though, editors were proudest of their own abilities as gatekeepers in what they viewed as the public interest, providing “thorough information on all our races and candidates, what people can expect when they hit the polls and where they can vote,” as one wrote. Indeed, these findings suggest that the trend in election coverage over time has been a steadfast emphasis on traditional journalistic roles involving the provision of depth, detail, and timeliness. Together, these accounted for nearly 60% of the sources of pride over the four election cycles. Newer options—blogs, multimedia or animation, personalization

100  Jane B. Singer TABLE 5.2.  Editors’ Sources of Pride Over Time

Numbers indicate how many times each type of feature was mentioned first, second, or third as a source of pride. Percentages relate to the total number of features mentioned in each year and overall (last column). There were 13 individual respondents to this question in 2012, 31 in 2008, 37 in 2004, and 44 in 2000. 2012

2008

Depth/detail 17 (45.9%) 28 (32.9%) Updated 5 (13.5) 12 (14.1%) information Journalist blogs 1 (2.7%) 18 (21.2%) Multimedia/ 2 (5.4%) 15 (17.6%) animation User 2 (5.4%) 10 (11.8%) personalization User contributions 3 (8.1%) 2 (2.4%) Social media (2012 6 (16.2%) only) Multi-platform 1 (2.7%) (iPad app, 2012 only) Total number of 37 85 features listed as sources of pride per year

2004

2000

Times cited 2000–2012

34 (39.1%) 12 (13.8%)

38 (40%) 29 (30.5%)

117 (38.5%) 58 (19.1%)

16 (18.4%) Not offered 7 (8%) 10 (10.5%)

35 (11.5%) 34 (11.2%)

11 (12.6%)

4 (4.2%)a

27 (8.9%)

7 (8%)b 14 (14.7%)b

26 (8.6%) 6 (2%) 1 (