The gatekeeper days of journalism were fun. But they’re over. And they weren’t as good as we remember them.
In a Facebook discussion today, Arkansas State journalism professor Jack Zibluk wrote, “By abandoning the gatekeeper role, I believe you are abandoning the profession.”
I replied: “Jack, no one abandoned the gatekeeper role. It became irrelevant when the fences blew away.”
Jack asked me to elaborate:
If journalism and journalists are no longer gatekeepers, then what ARE we? Nobody I know of has made a cohesive explanation of what our role is any more in society.
I initially begged off, saying I might blog about gatekeepers in a week or two. But another gatekeeper discussion on Jack’s Facebook wall and an exchange of private Facebook messages prompted me to blog now.
I used to be a gatekeeper, the person who decided which of the many potential stories my reporters at the Des Moines Register and Kansas City Star and Times could do would become news back in the 1980s and early 1990s. As editor of the Minot Daily News, I had the final say on every news story for our North Dakota town (and let’s be honest: beyond breaking news, a newspaper editor largely is the gatekeeper for local TV stations, too). Keeping the gate was a serious responsibility: We got to decide what was news and what wasn’t, what was front-page news, what was an inside brief and what wasn’t worth our readers’ time at all. We had to decide when a story was vetted and verified enough to make it through the gate. Those were great jobs and I think I was a responsible gatekeeper. I honor and value those days in journalism. But for better or worse, as the fences blew away, journalism has changed forever. We don’t compete with just another newspaper or two and a few local TV stations. People can get their news from a seemingly endless selection of blogs and social media accounts, some of them from independent journalists with the same standards we have, some from newsmakers trying to cover themselves (some to spin the news, some to provide legitimate journalism in areas we traditionally undercovered), some of them from the general public.
In a February address to the Canadian Journalism Foundation, John Paton, my boss, explained the realities that Digital First Media if facing:
We have accepted we are no longer the old-fashioned agenda-setters or gatekeepers of information for our communities.
Jack and his Facebook friends, including a number of journalism professors who messaged him privately, lament the change, and they expanded the discussion beyond gatekeeping to agenda-setting. They may be right that gate-keepers and agenda-setters were better than the cacophony we sometimes have today. But nostalgia is not going to lead us to a better future.
I will describe the value that I think journalists provide shortly, but first I want to address an example that shows how the fences have blown away (and how traditional journalists weren’t doing such a good job of minding the gate anyway):
One of the biggest news stories of this year, the death of Trayvon Martin, was initially ignored by the gatekeepers of traditional media, as Kelly McBride documented for Poynter. This was the sort of story journalists pride ourselves in: an apparent miscarriage of justice, a possible instance of racial prejudice by police and a vigilante, a misguided law being misused. As the gatekeeper role worked in our memories (though perhaps not always in reality), this is the kind of story that a watchdog press would call to the public’s attention, placing it on the front page, assigning investigative reporters to find out what went wrong and improving our community by shining a spotlight into a dark corner.
But the story rated only a brief initially in the Orlando Sentinel, the local newspaper. It was the Martin family and bloggers who drove this story into the local and national consciousness. The traditional media played catch-up. So let’s not romanticize or idealize our job of keeping the gate and setting the agenda.
You want more examples of lousy gatekeeping and agenda-setting? How about the New York Times (and all national media except for Knight-Ridder, which no longer exists) failing to shut the gate on bogus stories about weapons of mass destruction, and instead setting the agenda for a war based on lies? How about the failures of traditional media to sound the alarm (or set an agenda for reform) as we were headed to the savings and loan debacle of the 1980s, the Enron scandal of 2001 or the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008?
I recall an overt effort by the Des Moines Register to set the agenda for Iowa in the 1980s (I think it was in 1980, trying to set an agenda for the decade). It was called something like “An Agenda for Iowa.” I haven’t checked back (and I won’t, but if someone wants to check, I’ll publish their results), but I’m pretty sure all we did was fill newspaper space. Iowa elected conservative Republican Terry Branstad as governor in 1982 (and re-elected him three times, then returned him to office two years ago) and I’m pretty sure his agenda differed from that of the liberal Register. He didn’t accomplish all of his agenda (Iowa still doesn’t have capital punishment), but I bet Iowa followed his agenda more than it followed the Register’s.
I’m not dismissing the value of old-school journalism. My newsrooms did set agendas and improve our communities. And we upheld high standards, ensuring that stories were accurate and fair before they got through our gate. I think we were a responsible gatekeeper most of the time. If wishing could bring those days back, I might join you occasionally in wishing for them. But I’m too busy trying to shape the journalism that comes next.
So I’ll address Jack’s question: If journalists aren’t gatekeepers, what are we? We are:
- Watchdogs. We still need to keep an eye on the powerful institutions and people of the community. But we’re not the only watchdogs. When we fall down on the job, blogs, interest groups and citizen advocates will bark where we should be barking.
- Storytellers. Stories still help people understand their world and their communities. Again, we’re not the only people telling stories. And text isn’t the only tool for telling stories. We can and should tell our stories with photos, videos, audio, animation, games, maps, databases, timelines, data visualization and interactive graphics (and probably some tools I forgot to mention.
- Fact-checkers. Our best way to stand out from
themall the sources of information available today is to be the most reliable source. We need to be diligent in verifying the facts in our own reporting, in statements by public officials and in verifying and amplifying truthful reports from other sources in the community. - Aggregators and curators. The Facebook discussions included shots at aggregation and curation as “buzzwords” of digital journalism that Jack and other journalism professors see as signs of decline. Maybe it would help them to understand if they just view the Associated Press as a longtime aggregator and think of curators as modern-day wire editors. By identifying the most valuable and reliable reports from blogs, social media and other professional media, we can still be a valuable source of news for our community. We don’t ignore that cacophony of voices. We listen and highlight the most reliable and meaningful voices.
- Investigative journalists. Jack was distracted by John Paton’s bluntness about the failure of newspaper executives to develop a successful business model. So he might have missed this important passage from John’s address in Toronto: “However, it is the re-establishment of an investigative reporting unit – a victim of cutbacks in local newsrooms a long time ago – which can add the greatest value.” By the way, John was speaking of the New Haven Register newsroom, whose investigative story about the scrap metal business spurred Sunday’s discussion on Facebook. Newsrooms have endured severe cutbacks and we need to reorganize and re-prioritize. But investigation should remain an important distinction of journalists and newsrooms.
I’m sure that’s just a starter list. The transformation of journalism is a work in progress, and I presume it will be for the rest of my career and longer. I believe professional journalists will continue to provide value. But we will do that looking forward, not backward.
You forgot to mention “content generators” on your list. After looking at miles of technology and new technology at the Natl. Assn of Broadcasters convention a couple of weeks ago, I was reminded of that. Now, more than ever, it is about the content.
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I think “storytellers” covered that, especially in noting the range of content types we should use in telling stories. Actually, “watchdogs,” “fact-checkers and “investigative journalists” are all content-generation roles. And curation can certainly include generation of new content. We agree about the importance of generating content, but I think I covered it pretty thoroughly without making it a separate point.
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Great and thoughtful job, steve!
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Thanks, Jack! And thanks for starting the discussion.
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Many thanks for the thought-provoking post. Probably doesn’t qualify as a separate entry, but I would put in a vote for explicitly stating that being upholders of traditional ethical standards is a key element of what journalists are. After all, what makes journalists trustworthy is playing straight with readers. In developing a set of newsroom competencies in the NYT regional media group (now Halifax Media), we were strongly influenced along the fenceless lines you identify. A primary conclusion that drove our thinking was that content increasingly is accessed outside the boundaries of our own “product.” We recognized the marketplace’s expectation of two-way communication, and peer to peer, beyond our historic one-way publishing model.
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Thanks, Allen. I do see a role for upholding ethical standards. But I’ll quibble with the “traditional” part. I think we need to move beyond the he-said-she-said faux balance that has become too traditional to finding the actual truth. I think we should be more transparent than is traditional. I think we should be tougher on use on unnamed sources than is traditional.
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I never bought that ‘gatekeeper’ analogy. We remain an agenda-setter, but just one of many. The reader is king. Journalists who see themselves in some ivory tower above the rabble have always been wrong. One thing that has changed is how easy it is to stay in touch with the reader. Tweets and comments have replaced (or sometimes have validated) journalists’ gut feelings.
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Haha, when Jack posted this same query on the AEJMC newspaper division email list serv, I responded similarly, Steve, including a link to the same Poynter piece on Trayvon Martin. I never cease to be amazed at how many of my colleagues in academia seem to think we are living in about 1995. 🙂 Though I do think that there is space for an evolved conception of gatekeeping given the ongoing importance of filtering/curation but regardless looks very different of that of old.
For what it’s worth, this was my comment to the list serv:
There has certainly been some change and expansion in the number and kinds of gatekeepers we have – which now have to include things like Google’s algorithms, influential sources who are able to “go direct” to audiences without the media middleman, social media and more. The Trayvon Martin case is a good example, as this Poynter piece describes: http://www.poynter.org/latest-news/making-sense-of-news/167660/trayvon-martin-story-a-study-in-the-new-tools-of-media-power-justice/ Newsrooms today are also increasingly guided by web data and analytics, which certainly changes the texture of editorial decision making and doesn’t look very similar to the original “Mr. Gates” study, e.g. news meetings in which the number of page views is discussed and trending topics on Google are used as one source of story assignments (as found in recent study I did with Jonathan Groves). Recent research by Alfred Hermida and others looking at NPR’s Andy Carvin’s use of Twitter to curate news of the Arab spring also finds interesting new patterns in which activists have a higher source profile than institutional elites, which also adds some new nuance to our understanding of modern gatekeeping.
Personally, I have always liked the framework laid out by Elements of Journalism by Kovach and Rosenstiel that proposes thinking of journalists less as gatekeepers than as sensemakers. We may be standing at the gates, but today, the cattle are running all over the field, and part of the role of the journalist is not just to decide “publish or not publish” but rather to help the public understand, to verify and contextualize information that may already be “out there” through a variety of other means.
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Yes. Everyone with Web access can be their own nation/world editor. But the news has to come from somewhere. Original reporting and solid writing can be our contribution, even as more news sources proliferate.
The Des Moines Register attempt at agenda setting showed a bit of hubris. But that’s what happens when you’re the dominant news source in your area.
Back about 1980, while attending a seminar for journalists at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, I read an academic paper that asserted that the LaFollette-style Progressive strain in American politics persisted in the values of what’s now called the mainstream media — meaning at the time major newspapers. That is, the view that the levers of government can work well when honest folk are in charge. That view informs investigative reporting of the best kind.
But it can also be out of step with most of our readership, as the Branstad example demonstrates.
We can maintain that journalistic tradition, proudly, and pull in the Pulittzers and other recognition. But it’s not the only journalism model out there.
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Steve is correct that the news media did not do a bang-up job on the significant missed stories noted above–WMD, Enron, the subprime mortgage scandal, and you might add the Orange County default some years back. One post on Jack’s thread did note that many other national, international and local stories continue to be uncovered and extensively reported by news organizations doing what they have done for decades–deciding on their own that a story is important and needs to be told. I hope the Journal register’s investigative initiative adds to that record. It is not at all clear, though, that “When we fall down on the job, blogs, interest groups and citizen advocates will bark where we should be barking.” Sometimes they do; many times they do not. I don’t recall a lot of barking about Enron, Orange County or the subprime scandal. There might have been a few scattered yips. I’d also like to know how news organizations can maintain a commitment to accuracy (point 3 above) when they take actions to eliminate quality control — the copy editors–because they can’t afford it.
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“I’d also like to know how news organizations can maintain a commitment to accuracy (point 3 above) when they take actions to eliminate quality control — the copy editors–because they can’t afford it.”
I second that concern. We’re are spreading quality control throughout the newsroom as our copy desk is depleted. Nothing wrong with that, but we lose more valuable sets of eyes on the copy before it moves. Here, blessedly, we have copy editors checking staffers’ copy after Web posting. But the print product is losing some eyes.
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Good points, John. The failure of the news business to address the changing marketplace and develop a business model for the future has resulted in severe job cuts. Copy editors unquestionably add value and increase accuracy. But the first newspaper where I worked — the Evening Sentinel in Shenandoah, Iowa — didn’t have copy editors. So this isn’t simply an issue of old vs. new, but of building a new organization for the future based on today’s value structure. Without question, that new structure will have fewer levels of editing than the larger organizations we developed under the new model. This will clearly increase the responsibility for content creators and the remaining editors to ensure accuracy and quality.
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It would be nice if the cost-cutting and removal of copy editors led to an increased willingness to listen to reader corrections. Unfortunately, I see extremely limited response from my hometown paper (Philly.com), even as conscientious readers repeatedly point out errors of fact in neighborhood descriptions, street names, chronology/timeline, and numerical data. I assume the newsroom is too pressed for time to circle back and read their comments, but as a reader I wish they’d publish fewer items and do a better job on accuracy.
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A lot of very small papers, weeklies and small dailies, never had copy editors as such, but larger ones certainly did. Now larger ones are thinking of copy editors as expendable. It’s one thing to say the responsibility for accuracy and quality will have to be assumed by the content creators. It’s another thing to make it work, especially at a time when content creators have more to do. There was a move a number of years back to “blow up the copy desk” and shift a lot of those responsibilities back to reporting teams. It didn’t work, and that was in a time of plenty (at least relative to today). How is it going to work with many fewer staff members and more responsibilities? The simple fact is you don’t do more with less; you do less with less.
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The move today is not to blow up the copy desk, John, but to blow up the old operation that was built on the gatekeeper model and its revenue streams. In building anew, we are way beyond the “do more with less” or “do less with less” argument (but more on that shortly). That argument applies to adjustments and tinkering, not to building anew. Jobs of content creators and other editors are changing dramatically (and sometimes going away). It would be absurd to exempt copy editors or any group in such a transformation. I aspire to help create a new organization that values and ensures accuracy, but I don’t aspire to do that with the old structure and the old job descriptions.
As for doing more with less, I have been calling out managers on that line for years. In this blog post, I encouraged an editor to identify what to stop doing: http://wp.me/poqp6-24K I addressed the point in this blog post as well, directed to top newsroom leaders: http://wp.me/poqp6-1Ov
But I’ll add this: It’s not as simple as saying “you do less with less.” Technology has helped us do more with less in the past (data analysis and pagination are two excellent examples). We may find some ways through curation and crowdsourcing to engage the community and do more with less. But we also need to decide what to stop doing. And that’s not an easy or popular decision.
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As long as you’re deciding what goes on the front page, “above the scroll” or not, on a separate “local” or “business” page, in the Twitter feed, or in the wastebasket, you are “gatekeeping” — and today, we all are.
I think the serious question for professionals is “How well do you or your news organization inform readers of the skills, criteria and care you use in making those gatekeeping decisions?” or “Are you establishing ‘trust’ through delivering quality, or through branding and marketing?”
Do you TELL the readers how big the staff is, what beats your reporters cover, how many public meetings they attend in person, what training they have, what roots staff members have in your community, what your policy is about handling press releases, or how much you pay the “stringers” or “citizen journalists” who fill in the gaps?
Do you publish staff ethics guidelines concerning gifts, moonlighting and what constitues business or political conflicts of interest?
Do you tell readers how many professional eyes see a story before it is published, and whether you use wire services and press releases as “sources” or just pump their stuff onto your pages? Has your publication become a big “retweet” for community publicity agents? Do you link on-site or off-site to documents and data resources, or to your own corrections?
Twentieth-century newspapers were built on a century of structuring and refining the process behind the press — reporter, rewrite desk, news beats, assignment desks, copy desks, typesetters, proof-readers, various levels of editors, various levels of “walls” separating news and business concerns, etc.
Whether readers were aware of what went into the “daily miracle,” there was a lot of back-stopping going on to save the reporter from deadline disasters in the interest of quality. As monopolies grew and competition waned, there was probably a drop in breadth of coverage and a spike in hubris about being “THE” source for your community, as hinted in Steve’s opening.
Now competition is back, at least if you’re lucky enough to be in a community where readers care to “compete” with watch-the-watchdogs blogs and online discussions.
Here’s an idea: Be transparent about your own agenda, organization and process. Be a public servant, but a modest and careful one. See if quality leads to respect and if respect leads to a business model.
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Good questions, Bob. I’d ask them about traditional organizations, too. Transparency is much more a part of the digital journalism culture than the traditional newsrooms I have worked in and dealt with.
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I’m enjoying the conversation, though I’ll stop after this point. Pagination was not a clear example of doing more with less from a journalist’s perspective. It shifted the back shop workload onto copy editors, many times with no added staff. Pagination saved news organizations money, which was not plowed back into coverage, but it many ways, it increased the workload and limited the time editors had to devote to editing, fact-checking, headline-writing, etc. I wrote my dissertation about the impacts, both good and bad. Others found the same thing.
The idea that you can stop doing something you’ve done for years and somehow that doesn’t equate to “doing less” is what I was responding to. I don’t think that’s your point exactly, but it often has been the first line of defense when staff cuts are announced: “We’ll still produce a quality product.” What is left unsaid is, “It’s just that we’re changing the definition of what constitutes quality. And we’re not asking you whether that’s OK.”
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The problem arises, in part, when the managers’ revised definition of “quality” is not made clear, or accepted by those on the front lines of what they see as quality control.
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Pagination certainly let us do more with less, though, as you note, that’s from the organizational standpoint, not strictly from the journalist’s standpoint. In the context I was addressing, the point of stopping doing what you have been doing is not about doing less, but doing something different. You take on something new, such as video, data or social media, and sometimes you have to stop doing something you used to do. But the net is not less. Sometimes (as in the case of liveblogging), it’s substantially more.
Thanks for these thoughtful responses, John. I also am enjoying the discussion.
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This is what Steve wrote: Fact-checkers. Our best way to stand out from them all the sources of information available today is to be the most reliable source.”
Could you have included: someone to check your bad grammar too Steve?
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No one edits my blog. I am always grateful for readers who point out errors, even those perfect people who take glee in pointing them out. I have fixed it. Thank you.
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[…] Comments « Gatekeepers need to find new value when the fences have blown away […]
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As you’re saying “the fences are blown away”, information nowadays are coming in from all corners–social media, blogs, SMS, etc. However journalism remains at the helm of the most trusted source of information. We journalists must capitalize that because it gives us distinction between information flowing in the news feed and the ones coming from our end.
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It’s really about things requiring skill and experience which journalists do to build and sustain trust. My own, overlapping version of Steve’s list:
http://georgebrock.net/when-anyone-can-be-one-what-are-journalists-for-exactly/
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It’s about what journalists can do to build and sustain trust in their material, things which can be done better with skill and experience. My own, overlapping list:
http://georgebrock.net/when-anyone-can-be-one-what-are-journalists-for-exactly/
George Brock
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[…] que os jornalistas já não são gatekeepers, são o quê? Steve Buttry responde: Watchdogs, storytellers, fact-checkers, aggregators and curators, investigative […]
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[…] que os jornalistas já não são gatekeepers, são o quê? Steve Buttry responde: Watchdogs, storytellers, fact-checkers, aggregators and curators, investigative […]
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4 years ago I thought about the new roles for journalists, and it’s funny how technology was the starting point for my analysis back then, because social networking wasn’t as big as it is nowadays. What I see in your list is a shift in the relationship journalists must take regarding sources and audience, which is can be a rather esoteric subject for many professionals, as I discussed this shift with them. Here are some of those roles, and it’s good to see I got close on a few https://olago.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/10-changes-in-journalists-role-and-5-things-that-remain-the-same/
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Interesting points Steve, but I wonder how continued cuts in staffing (and they are continuing, you know) will affect this new vision. I worry that if management continues along with the same old bean-counting strategies, our new roles in the digital world will just as blown away as that old gate we were supposed to watch over.
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That’s a valid concern, Robin. But I’m pleased that in our company we’re not following the same old bean-counting strategies. We have a strategy to grow digital revenue that is working in JRC and that I’m confident will work in MNG as well. And the cuts are really shifts, moving positions to the Thunderdome operation so we can work more efficiently and put more of our resources into local content. I think we’re making the right moves, but I also know we operate in a volatile marketplace and will have to continue adapting.
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[…] methods will surely evolve in the near future, and our roles are changing as this text goes live — not published in print, but accessible on your smartphone and tablet […]
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[…] traditional outlets have to think hard about what value they are adding (McGuire also recommends advice on what former gatekeepers should be thinking about now from Digital First Media’s Steve […]
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[…] La información y la publicidad han sido mercantilizadas. Los gatekeepers son innecesarios en un mundo donde la información fluye libremente. Las empresas inteligentes abandonarán toda pretensión de hacer de gatekeeper y empezarán a facilitar, guiar y dirigir a los consumidores a través de la masa abrumadora de información. Steve Buttry describe bellamente esa nueva tarea. […]
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Thankyou, your insightful thoughts have really helped me get my head around a Journalism assignment I have been working on for days now, which has been proving to be very difficult!
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[…] on its way to extinction, and there will be no comeback. There is no money to be made anymore as a gatekeeper of information or as an agenda setter. No one is willing to pay for something that is inferior to […]
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[…] enter journalists. Our new medium is infinite, so there is no longer a need to reduce. What is the role of a gatekeeper without a gate to […]
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[…] The gatekeeper days of journalism were fun. But they’re over. And they weren’t as good as we remember them. In a Facebook discussion today, Arkansas State journalism professor Jack Zibl… […]
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[…] on stevebuttry.wordpress.com […]
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[…] Buttry, Digital Transformation Editor for Digital First Media, has a particularly interesting personal blog post on this […]
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[…] topped 1,000 views: copy editing (a top-10 post that drew a response from John McIntyre), gatekeeping, linking and beatblogging. In the same vein, Tim McGuire’s post about what he believes about […]
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[…] an event in their community were abusing their gatekeeper power. But, as I noted last year, the fences have blown away, so the gatekeeper role is far less relevant today. That’s not just because of technology but because we abused that […]
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[…] https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/gatekeepers-need-to-find-new-value-when-the-fences-have-… […]
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[…] the time or resources to search out the truth accept misinformation. This is exacerbated by the demise of the journalistic gatekeeping model (Bruns 2009, p.105), with unverified speculation spiralling, […]
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[…] Buttry, S (2014) ‘Gatekeepers need to find new value when when the fences have blown away’ WordPress [blog] available at:https://stevebuttry.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/gatekeepers-need-to-find-new-value-when-the-fences-have… […]
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