User:Johnareilly/Gatekeeping (communication)

Social Media Gatekeeping:
A rise in social media popularity has sparked reliance on media outlets to produce newsworthy content. As newspaper distribution rates drop, news outlets rely heavily on social media editors to promote news items. Kasper Welbers and Michaël Opgenhaffen take a deeper look at social media gatekeeping through an analysis of news outlets' influence on public social media. [1] As news outlets transition into the digital age, journalists and 'specialized social media experts' have adapted to fill holes in traditional news distribution. [1] What makes social media so formidable lies in the diffusion process of user engagement, primarily seen through likes, shares, comments, and reposts. Ease of access when sharing news links through social media plug-ins on websites and apps furthers the widespread availability of new distributions, causing an “increasingly complex relationships between news production and consumption" (pp. 4729). [1] Welbers and Opgenhaffen build off of gatekeeping theory by defining two new channels that correlate to the influence news outlets have over the media. The social media editor channel (Barzilai-Nahon, 2008; Shoemaker and Vos, 2009) refers to the origin of news information on social media, referring to its original publication by specialized social media news experts. Likewise, the alternative channel refers to all other ways news items enter public mainstream circulation. Measurement of these channels dictates how news items enter social media through either newspapers or news outlets. Lewin's (1947) first task to uncovering gatekeepers is finding out who the original gatekeepers are. In this case, social media editors can be coined as influential gatekeepers. [1] Origins of gatekeepers clash as either channel becomes blurred by intersections between social media editors and individual users, thus making it difficult to determine the definition of gatekeeping throughout social media. [1]

Gatewatching
The term "gatewatching", coined by Axel Bruns (2005), refers to "gatekeeping as a concept in the digital era” (Vos, 2015). Bruns argued that gatekeeping did not accurately describe the process in which news currently flows between participants and public circulation. Influencers and individuals who share news "do not keep gates of their own", but instead share news and media to their respected social followers.