The study “Gatekeeping in a Digital Media Habitat: The Role of Secondary Gatekeepers” by Mirjana Pantic and Paul Ziek from Pace University investigated the gatekeeping practices of news users in the United States.

Gatekeeping has been traditionally understood as a process where the journalists and news organization decide what news deserves citizens’ attention (Bruns 2011, Ekman & Widholm 2015). However, as news users have gained unprecedented access to post comments and disseminate information, their sharing of news has transformed them into “secondary gatekeepers” (Singer 2014).

The research was a two-stage, mixed methods study. In the first stage, the researchers collected and analyzed mission statements and guiding principles from 11 prominent US organizations’ websites. In the second stage, survey data was collected from students at a university on the East Coast of the United States and through the crowdsourcing marketplace Amazon Mechanical Turk. 

Several variables were analyzed in the survey. News consumers’ expectations of news media in a contemporary news environment was looked at, as was the participants’ likelihood to engage in gatekeeping, and their perceptions of gatekeeping practices. 

When analyzing the mission statements, the researchers found out that news media embedded in their goals well-rooted journalism tenets, such as truth, neutrality (and independence). There were a total of 30 references to principles of journalism. The authors also looked for references to the audience there, and the organizations did show a commitment to the public. 

As to gatekeeping practices by the readers, they were most likely to engage in sending a link to a news story to a friend or family member and least likely to create content and send it to a news website for potential publication. 

And finally, when asked about what gatekeeping practices were employed by news organizations, the respondents felt that the news organizations invited them to comment and share news stories, but did not feel that news media encouraged them to send them news tips or contribute news material like text or photographs. 

In conclusíon, the citizens’ likelihood to participate in news production was low, but they were likely to impact the organizations’ gatekeeping by providing them feedback on how popular news stories were by sharing them and commenting on them.

The article “Gatekeeping in a Digital Media Habitat: The Role of Secondary Gatekeepers” by Mirjana Pantic and Paul Ziek is in Electronic News. (Free abstract).

Picture: Untitled by Arno Senoner.

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