传播学百科网 >>所属分类 >> 传播学理论   

Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback new challenge for journalism

标签: 暂无标签

顶[0] 发表评论(0) 编辑词条

Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism

Axel Bruns1

page1image1624page1image1784

1 PhD in Media and Cultural Studies from the University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. Associate Professor in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. a.bruns@qut.edu.au, http://snurb.info/, @snurb_dot_info.

Abstract

How bloggers and other independent online commentators criticise, correct, and otherwise challenge conventional journalism has been known for years, but has yet to be fully accepted by journalists; hostilities between the media establishment and the new generation of citizen journalists continue to flare up from time to time. The old gatekeeping monopoly of the mass media has been challenged by the new practice of gatewatching: by individual bloggers and by communities of commentators which may not report the news first-hand, but curate and evaluate the news and other information provided by official sources, and thus provide an important service. And this now takes place ever more rapidly, almost in real time: using the latest social networks, which disseminate, share, comment, question, and debunk news reports within minutes, and using additional platforms that enable fast and effective ad hoc collaboration between users. When hundreds of volunteers can prove within a few days that a German minister has been guilty of serious plagiarism, when the world first learns of earthquakes and tsunamis via Twitter – how does journalism manage to keep up?

Keywords

Journalism, citizen journalism, gatewatching, social media, produsage

Bio

Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (http://cci.edu.au/). He is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (2006; all released by Peter Lang, New York). Bruns is an expert on the impact of user-led content creation, or produsage, and his current work focusses especially on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, especially in the context of acute events. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info. See http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ for more details on his current social media research.

Introduction

June 2009: faced with an overwhelming wealth of documents detailing British MPs’ expenses claims, The Guardian resorts to extraordinary measures – it places its entire database of nearly half a million expenses documents online, and invites its readers to drive the investigative process. The project is a success: within the first 80 hours, a good third of all documents are reviewed at least superficially by Guardian readers, and more than 50 percent of all visitors to the site contribute actively to the reviewing process (ANDERSEN, 2009).

Projects such as this draw directly on the participative Web (VICKERY & WUNSCH-VINCENT, 2007) practices summarised under the ‘Web 2.0’ label, of course. The Guardian’s MPs’ Expenses platform invited its users to directly participate in an experience of crowdsourced investigative journalism that was at once playful and meaningful: it provided a sense of adventure and competition by offering its participants an insight into the hitherto obscure world of parliamentary expenses claims, by hinting at the chance of discovering new information from the ludicrous (thousands of pounds spent on a new bird bath) to the criminal (double billing and phantom expenses), by enabling users to focus on their local MPs or on those they especially suspected of dishonest practices, and by providing instant progress scores designed to encourage further participation. Speaking to the Nieman Journalism Lab, the developer of the platform highlighted especially these aspects of playfulness and instant gratification: “make it fun” and “launch immediately” (ANDERSEN, 2009).

A major initiative by a leading international news organisation, the MPs’ Expenses platform and other projects like it mark a new phase in the evolving relationship between journalists and their audiences. They herald the slow death of top-down models of journalistic news coverage and information dissemination, and even of the gatekeeping model itself, and highlight instead the shift towards a more equal, if at times wary, collaborative engagement between journalism professionals and news users. This is a shift which has been a long time in the making: models for harnessing the collaborative participation of news audiences have existed at least since the late 1990s, or can be said to date back even further if the more limited attempts at ‘public’ or ‘civic’ journalism of the late 80s and early 90s are also to be included in this trajectory (see e.g. BLACK, 1997; GANS, 2003). Today, finally, the transition has been further sped up by the widespread availability of near real-time social media platforms which accelerate the news cycle even beyond the already significant

pressures of 24-hour news channels. The result is the final breakdown of traditional journalistic gatekeeping models, and a corresponding shift towards gatewatching.

From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching

Gatekeeping in its classic form was a product of the frameworks for news production, distribution, and consumption as they existed during the heyday of the mass media age. Put simply, gatekeeping practices were simply a practical necessity: printed newspapers and the news bulletins of radio and television broadcasting could never offer more than a tightly edited selection of the day’s news; judgments of which stories were most important for audiences to learn about (that is, which stories could be squeezed into the available newshole – the total space for news content available in the publication or broadcast) had to be made. Such decisions were especially critical, in fact, at a time when the total number of news publications in a given regional or national mediasphere – the aggregate newshole available to the journalism industry – was also strictly limited: when only a handful of newspapers or broadcast news bulletins serviced the interested audience. Channel scarcity not only justifies gatekeeping practices themselves, but also demands particular scrutiny of these practices: the power and influence of editors over the news agenda is inversely proportional to the number of available news channels.

Such gatekeeping processes can be distinguished at three different stages of the journalistic process: input, output, and response (BRUNS, 2005). At the input stage, journalists themselves pre-select those news stories which they believe to be worthy of investigation and coverage – that is, which they assume have a reasonable chance of being selected for publication once the articles are written or the TV reports produced. At the output stage, editors select from the total amount of material generated by journalists and reporters only those stories which they deem to be of greatest importance to their audiences, which suit the available space within papers and bulletins, and which fit the general news areas expected to be covered by the publication (politics, economy, sports, human interest, ...). At the response stage, finally, a small selection of audience responses are chosen for inclusion in the following day’s paper or for on-air broadcast – if a space for such audience responses is provided at all. Overall, then, the newshole is almost entirely closed to direct audience participation and contribution, and journalists and editors maintain total control: interests and reactions of news audiences are implied and assumed by journalists and editors who believe they have a ‘feel’ for what their readers, listeners, and viewers want, but rarely actively

sought or tested by the journalism industry, beyond mere token gestures (readers’ polls, vox- pop statements) or commercial market research.

Indeed, even attempts at ‘public’ or ‘civic’ journalism as they were popular in the 1980s and 1990s hardly change the situation: here, news organisations may pursue audience engagement initiatives aimed at “developing a means of letting those who make up that market finally see how the sausage is made – how we do our work and what informs our decisions”, as Kovach & Rosenstiel have described it (2001, 192), but this fails to significantly alter the power relations between journalists as news producers and audiences as news consumers (or indeed, a mere ‘market’): notably, the choices of gatekeeping remain ‘our work’ and ‘our decisions’, even in this description, and audiences are only afforded a somewhat more detailed glimpse at how those processes take place. Such ‘public’ journalism amounts not to a conversation with the public, but merely to a show-and-tell exercise for the public: an ultimately somewhat patronising attempt to show the public how journalism works.

Fundamentally, such ‘public’ journalism does nothing to change core journalistic practices, as Gans notes: it “is unlikely to go beyond the ideological margins of conventional journalism. In contrast, I see participatory journalism as more citizen oriented, taking a political, and when necessary, adversarial, view of the citizen-official relationship” (2003: 98-9). Indeed, for the most part such truly participatory (rather than merely ‘public’) journalism has arrived over the past decade and more not from within the conventional journalism industry, but from outside it. This shift has been driven by two aspects which have combined to replace gatekeeping with gatewatching practices: the continuing multiplication of available channels for news publication and dissemination, especially since the emergence of the World Wide Web as a popular medium, and the development of collaborative models for user participation and content creation which are now often summarised under the ‘Web 2.0’ label.

First, as gatekeeping is a practice that is fundamentally born out of an environment of scarcity (of news channels, and of newshole space within those channels), any growth in the overall newshole must necessarily challenge its role. To begin with, if more print news publications and more broadcast channels covering the news become available, why must all of them adhere to nearly identical conventions of what is and is not newsworthy, for example? And further, especially as news publications establish themselves in online environments, where available page counts or broadcast lengths no longer inherently limit the depth, breadth, and length of journalistic coverage, why should a strict regime of gatekeeping

still be necessary at all? A need for editorial intervention to direct potential news audiences to what are deemed to be the most important stories still remains, perhaps, but this need can now be addressed not by excluding all those news stories which fall below a certain threshold of importance set by the editor, as is practiced through gatekeeping, but simply by especially highlighting from the now massively enlarged newshole those stories which are seen to be most important. Indeed, this shift from excluding the less important to highlighting the more important is not just a possibility, but a necessity, as Bardoel and Deuze have pointed out: “with the explosive increase of information on a worldwide scale, the necessity of offering information about information has become a crucial addition to journalism’s skills and tasks ... . This redefines the journalist’s role as an annotational or orientational one, a shift from the watchdog to the ‘guidedog’” (2001: 94).

Second, online media in particular have made it possible for audiences – or more precisely, users – to skip past news publications to directly connect with the organisations, institutions, and individuals in which they are interested – to follow first-hand the press releases and public statements of governments, politicians, companies, NGOs, and other figures of public life. Additionally, such active users are now also able to share with others what they observe as they do so, through a wide range of platforms ranging from collaborative bookmarking tools through personal and group blogs to social media sites, and thereby to find and connect with other users interested in similar topics. Such practices may not amount to journalism in an orthodox sense; they are, if anything, an example of the “random acts of journalism” which JD Lasica described as early as 2003 (LASICA, 2003a/b). But they provide a model for what may be better described as collaborative news curation by user communities: users find, share, and (often) comment on newsworthy information and events; they publicise rather than publish news stories. Performed at scale – by a sufficiently large and diverse community of dedicated participants, such collective efforts can result in forms of news coverage that are as comprehensive as those achieved by the journalism industry. The logic of such distributed, collaborative efforts is no longer one of news production, but of produsage as it also takes place in projects as diverse as Wikipedia and open source development: “the assumption within the produsage community is that the more participants are able to examine, evaluate, and add to the contributions of their predecessors, the more likely an outcome of strong and increasing quality will be (an extension of open source’s motto ‘given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’)” (BRUNS, 2008a, 24).

At the core of both these shifts away from gatekeeping is a practice which can be usefully described as gatewatching. News users engaged in organising and curating the flood

of available news stories and newsworthy information which is now available from a multitude of channels have no ability to keep – to control – the gates of any of these channels, of course; however, what they are able to do is to participate in a distributed and loosely organised effort to watch – to keep track of – what information passes through these channels: what press statements are made by public actors, what reports are published by academic researchers or industry organisations, what interventions are made by lobbyists and politicians. Such gatewatching activities are far from new – journalists themselves employ similar practices when they pick newsworthy stories from the feeds of national and international news agencies, for example –, but by transitioning from a select few journalists with privileged access to key sources to a widespread crowdsourcing effort involving a multitude of users with diverse interests, a much broader range of topics can be addressed, and a much larger number of potentially newsworthy stories can be highlighted. While focussed only on the material contained in the MPs’ expenses claims, The Guardian’s own experiment at crowdsourcing journalistic investigation similarly draws on the ability of a large userbase to collectively process a large body of information more quickly and effectively than a small staff of journalists, however well trained, would be able to; its journalists and editors, in turn, are engaged in a form of internal gatewatching which tracks the outcomes of this crowdsourced process of investigation to identify any particularly relevant, interesting, or outrageous findings to be explored further through more conventional journalistic activities.

The user-led, crowdsourced practices of news coverage and news curation which employ gatewatching approaches have often been described, somewhat incorrectly, as ‘citizen journalism’; this is a problematic label as it appears to imply both that what participants practice here is comparable and equivalent to mainstream industrial journalism in its conventional forms, and that the professional journalists working in the industry are not also citizens (that is, invested in the future political and societal course of their country). At the same time, the mainstream journalism / citizen journalism dichotomy does neatly encapsulate a deep-set adversarial relationship between the two sides of the divide, which has dominated the ‘citizen journalism’ discussion for the past decade and is only now gradually being replaced by more productive attempts to explore points of connection and cooperation between ‘professional’ and ‘citizen’ journalists.

The antipathy which has dominated this relationship has historical reasons. Arguably, the breakthrough moment for citizen journalism arrived in the shape of the 1999 protests around the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle: anticipating a simplistic mainstream

media focus on demonstrations and public unrest during the event, and a portrayal of protesters as anarchists and vandals, protest organisers set up the first Independent Media Center, or Indymedia, Website, in order to provide a platform for unedited, alternative, first- hand coverage of the protests by the protesters themselves (MEIKLE, 2002). Further Indymedia Websites in locations around the world – numbering several hundred at the height of the movement – soon followed. Indymedia pursued a model which was inherently antithetical to the closed gatekeeping approach of mainstream journalism: where in that model, gatekeeping is practiced at each stage of the news publication process, here gatekeeping was entirely absent – any user could contribute their own stories at the input stage; all stories were immediately progressed to the output stage; and the platform provided ample opportunity for unedited user commentary at the response stage.

While such total openness came with its own problems (several Indymedia Websites have suffered from persistent spamming and other contributions of inappropriate or undesirable material, which were duly automatically published along with more legitimate submissions), subsequent citizen journalism initiatives pursued similar models, but strengthened the collaborative curatorial aspects of their news production processes – for example by enabling their user communities to rate or vote on the quality of user-submitted content, in order to determine which submissions were ready for publication, or even by instituting collaborative ‘open editing’ models which enabled community members to become involved in fine-tuning story submissions from other users. Yet other sites maintained a limited degree of staff gatekeeping at the output stage – instituting a group of dedicated (but often volunteer) editors to exclude at least the most inappropriate submissions (see BRUNS, 2005, for a detailed discussion of these various models).

Common to almost all such models is also that – in keeping with the gatewatching approach, which largely focusses on the republishing, publicising, contextualisation and curation of existing material rather than the development of substantial new journalistic content – the previously atrophied response stage of the conventional news publication process became significantly more important in these alternative news sites. On many ‘citizen journalism’ sites, news stories themselves focus mainly on collecting, collating, curating, and contextualising a selection of news information and source materials found elsewhere on the Web – where the conventional journalistic article aims to be full-formed summary of an event or issue, the stories published on these alternative news Websites serve to open rather than close the discussion. Through the discussion process which follows (usually in discussion threads attached immediately to the story itself), further information is added, claims are

evaluated, and broader context is provided – in contrast to the letters to the editor of a newspaper, for example (which are spatially and temporally removed from the original story, and often provide little more than basic endorsement or disagreement), the responses to a story on these sites form an integral part of the news coverage, and are perhaps even more important than the story itself.

New Directions for the Journalism Industry

It is the centrality of this debate and discussion process which both contributed to the rise of these new forms of user-led news curation and commentary, and cemented their adversarial relationship with mainstream journalism. Again, the historical context is important here: a substantial growth in alternative Websites for the coverage and discussion of news events followed especially the events of 11 September 2001, both in the United States and in other countries. For fear of being branded unpatriotic, U.S.-based mainstream media, in particular, engaged in a considerable amount of self-censorship as they reported on the attacks and their aftermath, as well as on the belligerent response of the Bush jr. administration during the following years, leaving little space in mainstream news coverage for alternative, critical voices (SCHUDSON, 2008). Such voices were forced to pursue alternative venues, leading to the establishment of a significant number of independent Websites for the coverage and discussion of news, as well as to the emergence of other fringe forms of news coverage and discussion, such as news satire television including The Daily Show and The Colbert Report (JONES, forthcoming 2012).

These new platforms for news commentary were often as critical of the mainstream news media as they were of the government of the day, in turn also leading to a substantial degree of retaliation from the mainstream news industry. Branding their new critics as ‘armchair journalists’ and political ideologues, industrial journalists have long tended to dismiss the voices representing alternative news sites outright, rather than engage with their criticism more openly and introspectively (see e.g. BRUNS, 2008b); as a result of such overly defensive responses, journalistic traditions and conventions appeared to become ever more entrenched across much of the mainstream industry. For the most part, therefore, it can be argued that the 2000s represent a lost decade for journalism innovation: not prepared to accept the validity of some of the criticism levelled at it by its new challengers, with few exceptions the industry staunchly continued on a path of business as usual that turned out to be ever more unsustainable.

Change and innovation was urgently necessary, however, not simply because of the criticisms of citizen journalists, but for far more fundamental, practical reasons: technological and demographic changes mean that newspaper publication, in particular, is rapidly losing its economic basis in most developed nations, as existing audiences move to online platforms and new generations grow up entirely without the experience of subscribing to, paying for, or even reading printed newspapers. Online, news business models require new approaches as well, as mainstream news Websites now compete with each other (as well as with alternative news sites, and with the news feeds of primary information sources) on a global basis, as audiences have come to expect to access their news for free and with minimal disruptions by advertising, and as paywall and subscription models (for example through iPhone and iPad apps) are proving to generate substantially less recurring revenue than may have been expected (see e.g. LEE, 2011).

Where immediate managerial responses to these challenges have tended to include the rationalisation of industrial news production processes and reductions in overall staff numbers, this only contributes to making affected commercial news organisations less competitive. By contrast, news organisations which are able to operate at least to some degree outside of the market – public service media, to the extent that they exist as significant news organisations in specific countries, but also independently funded commercial news organisations such as The Guardian – are able to maintain their standards somewhat more successfully, but public service media, in particular, are also facing increasing criticism and lobbying from their commercial competitors for ‘distorting the market’, resulting in some countries in increasingly stifling limitations and substantial funding cuts that affect their operations.

There are no indications that the crisis now experienced by the established journalism industries in many nations will abate substantially at any point in the near or medium term. Most importantly, it appears unlikely that news users who have grown accustomed to free online news would suddenly either discover a desire for print newspapers, or develop a willingness to subscribe to electronic news sources (except for a handful of specialist news outlets, such as financial newspapers). If – outside of publicly or independently funded news organisations – the resources available to finance quality journalism are irredeemably diminished, then, this only serves to further heighten the need for innovation and reform in the news industry, in order to do more (or at least as much as before) with less. It is only in the context of these pressures, it seems, and in the wake of obvious success stories such as The Guardian’s MPs’ Expenses crowdsourcing initiative, that more news organisations are

finally, cautiously, beginning to consider the opportunities inherent in developing closer forms of cooperation and collaboration with their users.

However, such experiments cannot end with the simple exploitation of participants as free volunteer labour to process significant stores of information, as in the MPs’ Expenses project; beyond the cheap thrill of chasing up politicians’ dirty money trails, news users will demand an opportunity to engage more meaningfully with the processes of journalistic coverage and public discussion. This will require the boundaries between journalists and news users to be broken down and blurred even further: as Gillmor put it, almost a decade ago, “if contemporary American journalism is a lecture, what it is evolving into is something that incorporates a conversation and seminar. This is about decentralisation” (2003: 79) – that is, it is about the development of flatter, less hierarchical, networked structures of communication between journalists and their audiences. In short, the conversation must take place between equals, not – as in the past – between the privileged producers and the dutiful consumers of news.

In the process, the roles of both industrial journalists and news users will continue to connect and blend. Journalists – and news editors in particular – already serve in important ways of news curators, as do their counterparts in citizen journalism; while their working practices may differ, further cooperation in these curatorial practices is easily possible, and increasingly likely. Similarly, partly also as a result of commercial pressures in favour of cheaply produced content, the net amount of news commentary in mainstream news publications has increased over the past decade; here, too, no inherent and necessary difference in quality between journalistic and non-journalistic contributions should be assumed, and a greater incorporation of user contributions may well be pursued. (In Australia, for example, all three major news organisations – the Murdoch-owned News Ltd., the Fairfax group, and the publicly funded ABC – have recently introduced their own major platforms for public commentary, drawing content from both professional journalists and public contributions.) Such increased load-sharing between industrial journalists and contributing users would leave the former more space to concentrate on the core business of professional journalism: on their investigative work and original story development, which are least feasible for unpaid, non-journalist contributors.

In essence, these proposals for more cooperative, pro-am partnerships between professional journalists and non-professional news enthusiasts (on the pro-am idea also see LEADBEATER & MILLER, 2004; BRUNS, 2010) suggest a redistribution of practical journalistic or parajournalistic efforts towards those areas which each group of participants is

best qualified and best able to address. If financial resources (and thus, staff numbers) in the journalism industry are destined to continue their decline, then best if they are directed to decline in such a way that the most crucial aspects of professional journalism – that is, those skills and practices which are least replaceable by the volunteer work of citizen journalists – remain most strongly insulated from funding and personnel cuts. Conversely, if cuts are unavoidable, best to let them be made where the work of citizen journalists outside of the industry itself is able to balance out at least a good part of these losses. If the journalism industry must shrink, in other words, let it shrink back to its core practices of investigative journalism and quality coverage; if citizen journalism expands correspondingly to fill the gap, let it expand in areas which it already does well: in news commentary and news curation.

The Challenge of Real-Time Feedback

This prospective reorganisation of the cooperation efforts between professional and citizen journalists is unlikely to be pursued through strategic, well-planned innovation efforts, however – rather, it is already taking place in the context of further substantial disruptions to traditional practices in the news industry. These disruptions stem especially from the impact of new, real-time, social media technologies on news reporting, dissemination, and discussion. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter serve to further accelerate the speed with which news stories are shared, debated, and sometimes debunked; they make it ever more difficult for any one news organisation to claim ownership of a story or maintain a news agenda; they act as a channel for more or less public, immediate conversations between participating journalists, news users, and other public actors associated with a story; and in doing so they provide a vital and visible new space for public exchanges about the news, outside of the control of any traditional news organisation.

Practically every major breaking news story of 2010 and 2011 has been propelled in significant ways by its coverage in social media spaces – from storms, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and similar natural disasters to protests, riots, uprisings, and other forms of popular unrest, from political scandals to celebrity misfortune. Preliminary research on the processes of breaking news coverage in social media spaces (BRUNS & HIGHFIELD, forthcoming 2012) has found that such ad hoc collaborative sense-making processes tend to operate remarkably similarly, regardless of the specific nature of the acute event: on Twitter, for example, discussions about these events are characterised by a substantial number of messages containing URLs (that is, highlighting new information about the breaking event),

as well as messages retweeting the posts of others (that is, disseminating existing information more widely across the network) – these practices, of course, are precisely what has been described as gatewatching above. Twitter users’ coverage of such breaking news events – events where gatewatching and collaborative news curation are especially important to make sense of the unfolding, unforeseen story – behaves remarkably and consistently differently from how they treat known and already widely covered events (from elections through sporting matches to celebrity weddings), where information sourcing and sharing is less inherently necessary: in that class of events, a far smaller percentage of URLs and retweets can be observed.

Such research points to the use of social media especially for the collaborative development of a collective understanding of unfolding events, then: users ranging from interested followers through professional journalists to public authorities and other official organisations contribute to this process by sharing the first-hand information available to them, as well as highlighting, commenting on, and evaluating whatever other relevant material they have come across both through the social media platform itself as well as in other online and offline environments. What emerges from this process of ad hoc collaborative news curation is in the first place a steady stream of updates and background information that evolves as the shared understanding of the event itself develops; this now takes place at such a speed that even 24-hour broadcast news channels – previously the gold standard for up-to-date news reporting – are now regularly referring to the information they have been able to glean from Twitter feeds and similar social media sources.

In this context, social media such as Facebook and Twitter are examples of what Hermida (2010) and Burns (2010) have both described as “ambient journalism”: while most of the day-to-day activities of social media users may not be newsworthy or news-related, when stories break, a substantial amount of these activities is replaced by a concerted effort to ‘work the story’, as journalists might call it – to engage in quasi-journalistic research, reporting, story development, and commentary. As ambient, always-on media, such widely used social media platforms benefit both from their demographic and their geographic spread in this process: their diverse userbases mean that knowledgeable participants (well beyond the group of professional journalists and other ‘official’ sources which may also be present) can be found for almost any news topic, while their nearly world-wide reach also means that the likelihood of potential eyewitnesses and other first-hand reporters contributing to the coverage is similarly high. While even dedicated 24-hour news networks must still scramble to get their crews and reporters to the scene of a news event, the almost global networks of

leading social media platforms mean that (potential) correspondents are nearly always already in place.

What is perhaps most remarkable about social media as a space for collaborative news coverage and curation, however, is their nature as neutral, intermediary spaces operated by third parties outside the journalism industry. Even citizen journalism platforms, while building on gatewatching practices and thereby drawing on existing, published materials, were able through the gatewatching, commentary, and curation activities of their specific group of self-selecting contributors to set and pursue a particular news agenda, much as mainstream news organisations have always done: citizen journalism sites usually tend to have a fairly distinct ideological flavour. Dissenting voices are common, and usually present at least in the form of gatewatched oppositional content being discussed and critiqued, but the overall community of authors and commenters contributing to any one site tends to lean towards specific shared points of view; in other words, news stories, wherever they originate, are embedded into a site-specific context of politically (in the broadest sense) partisan news coverage and curation. The overall space of citizen journalism in any one national public sphere consists of hundreds or even thousands of sites for gatewatching and news curation, each with its own distinct ideological stance and political preferences, networked together more or less loosely through practices of discussion and exchanges of links. These sites, rather than the overall space itself, are the destination of interested users and participants, who thereby seek out representations of current news stories as curated by a specific collective of citizen journalists, from its particular political perspective. (The same, of course, is also true for the audiences of mainstream news, who also tend to read a particular newspaper, or watch a particular news broadcast, in full knowledge and appreciation of the specific political perspectives it represents.)

News curation through social media operates differently. Here, shared stories, disseminated mostly through the links (especially on Twitter) and brief snippets (on Facebook) included in individual messages, are disembedded through the act of sharing: they are disconnected from their original contexts of publication, and set adrift in a continuing stream of updates flowing through the social media space. While it is possible that the social media users contributing to ‘working’ a particular story by sharing news updates and curating the available information might share similar ideological or political leanings, there is no automatism for why this should be so: there is no indication that the overall userbase of Facebook or Twitter has a common preference for one political view or another, for example. As a result, the information curated through collaborative action on such social media

platforms should be expected (and this still requires further empirical testing through large- scale research) to be drawn from a diverse, multiperspectival (GANS, 1980) range of sources: while individual participants may pursue a specific news agenda, Facebook or Twitter as platforms do not. By contrast with citizen as well as mainstream journalism, the destination for users of social media is the space itself: it is how the Twitter or Facebook collective covers a breaking story that matters, far more than what contributions any individual users (with their personal ideologies and agendas) make to this process. Individuals can still have an impact, of course – especially if their messages are read and reshared by many of their peers –, but they cannot easily establish themselves as distinct from the rest of the social network.

More so than virtually any other new media technology before them, then, social media disaggregate the news process and atomise its participants. On Twitter, for example, participants ranging from private users to official news organisations are all simply represented by their accounts, equally forced by the platform’s 140-character limit for updates to share only brief messages and URLs, and unable to command inherently more communicative space than anybody else. There are no branded spaces for specific organisations here, and no means for controlling how, by whom, and in what contexts one’s messages are read, responded to, or passed along. Participating journalists, in particular, may find themselves approached, challenged, criticised, or supported by their colleagues from other news organisations, by the public actors who are the subjects of their stories, or by members of the overall user community. They choose to respond to or ignore such feedback at their own peril; in this neutral space, the mastheads of their publications offer little protection. Journalists performing well on social media may be able to make a name for themselves, well beyond the publications for which they work – or they may reveal their own failings and biases, in the process also tainting their news organisation.

But social media also provide substantial opportunities for journalism. Well beyond the dedicated projects – such as the MPs’ Expenses platform – set up to address certain issues, social media spaces can be utilised as a ready-made, always-on means of crowdsourcing information: of gauging instant reactions to emerging stories, of sourcing additional material by drawing on the collaborative news curation practices taking place there, and even of identifying relevant voices of intelligent commentary on specific topics. To do so requires a certain degree of dedication, as journalists must first work to develop a deep familiarity with the available social media platforms in order to be able to ‘work them’ in this way, but this investment of time and effort may yield considerable benefits.

Additional, more elaborate approaches to the utilisation of social media platforms for journalistic gain draw on more technological solutions – for example, the automatic tracking of key terms and themes in order to identify early ‘weak signals’ for emerging stories, or the automated extraction and analysis (as well as visualisation) of social media streams on specific stories in order to develop new forms of up-to-date coverage. Such data journalism is important not least also in the context of natural disasters and public unrest, where mapping tools such as Ushahidi Maps have been deployed to provide geographical overviews of the current situation in the trouble zone by drawing on updates from official and social media sources. Here, again, journalists come to play a special role in news curation, building on the collaborative curation efforts already taking place within the social media community itself and adding to these processes their own professional expertise and industrial resources.

Such activities are by no means only the domain of professional journalists and mainstream media organisations any more, however – other organisations, and even groups of volunteers without official connections, are similarly able to operate in this space. During the January 2011 floods in southeast Queensland, for example, groups of independent developers set up a range of tools for tracking the flood crisis and provide relevant and up-to- date information at a time when the Webservers of major civic authorities were overloaded and frequently unavailable; in doing so, they provided source materials for news organisations, emergency services, and the general public alike (BRUNS, 2011). In Germany, at a time when major news organisations remained relatively uninterested in rumours that Defence Minister Karl-Theodor Freiherr zu Guttenberg’s PhD dissertation had been largely plagiarised from various sources, including documents compiled by the parliamentary information service, enterprising Internet users set up the GuttenPlag wiki to identify and document any instances of provable plagiarism, eventually identifying plagiarised material on nearly 95 percent of all pages and leading to the minister’s resignation (GUTTENPLAG, 2011).

Conclusion

There is no inherent reason why journalists and journalistic organisations should not be able to play an important role as drivers of such initiatives, too. Professionally trained in the evaluation of stories and the curation of information, journalists have the ability to make a significant contribution to the collaborative efforts at ‘working the story’ that now regularly take place through social media, or even to drive these efforts both in social media spaces and

through their own, dedicated platforms. To realise these possibilities, however, it is also necessary to accept what is irretrievably lost from journalism’s grasp: the role of journalists as gatekeepers of information, and the positioning of news media outlets (whether in print, broadcast, or online) as the central spaces for the coverage of and engagement with the news.

Today, journalists are part of a broadening range of societal groups and actors engaging with the news; audiences, or more appropriately, news users, are increasingly able even to bypass them altogether to access first-hand information from a range of other organisations and sources. As a result, journalists must work harder to demonstrate the added value which they provide to news users through their professional investigation, curation, and commentary efforts. Additionally, in a mediasphere that is abundant in both information and channels, the mainstream media no longer provide the only, or even the most important, space for the public discussion of news and current events; far from the society-wide public sphere envisaged at the height of the mass media age, the current media environment is characterised by a succession of overlapping ad hoc publics (BRUNS & BURGESS, 2011) which form and dissolve in response to specific themes, topics, and stories. These publics exist not in any one media space or on any one media platform, but transcend and spread across these spaces, interweaving with one another as they do. News organisations may continue to control the news agenda in their own publications, but they are unlikely ever again to drive public debate throughout this complex, multifaceted media environment.

Under these circumstances, then, what remains of journalism as we knew it? Perhaps most under threat are universalist news operations other than the international market leaders: in an online environment where the news from international providers is as easy to access as that from local publishers, minor operators are unlikely to be able to compete with major companies in the depth and breadth of their coverage. Specialist news organisations – whether with a geographically local focus, or a narrow topical specialisation – may fare better in these areas, and should continue to find news users interested in their material. At an even greater level of particularity, even individual journalists with unique expertise and recognised voices may be able to position themselves as one-person news organisations.

But key to all of their operations, in the end, will be the development of a balance between the generation of original, valuable news content, injected into what is now a shared, distributed, decentralised newshole that exists across multiple online and social media spaces and platforms, and the curation of available materials from internal as well as external sources in ways that are unique and add enough value to attract news users. Further, none of this work takes place in isolation any more – rather, it must be done in plain sight of and

preferably in cooperation and even in collaboration with news users, avoiding the aloof and sometimes patronising stance towards their audiences that journalists have so often adopted in the past. Journalism has become a mass participation activity.

References

ANDERSEN, Michael. Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian’s (spectacular) expenses-scandal experiment. Nieman Journalism Lab, Boston, 23 June 2009. Available at: <http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/06/four-crowdsourcing-lessons-from- the-guardians-spectacular-expenses-scandal-experiment/>. Accessed on: 29 Sep. 2011.

BARDOEL, Jo; DEUZE, Mark. ‘Network journalism’: Converging competencies of old and new media professionals. Australian Journalism Review, v. 23, n. 3, pp. 91-103, Dec. 2001.

BLACK, Jay (ed.). Mixed news: The public/civic/communitarian journalism debate. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997.

BRUNS, Axel. Gatewatching: Collaborative online news production. New York: Peter Lang, 2005.

———. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and beyond: From production to produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008a.

———. The active audience: Transforming journalism from gatekeeping to gatewatching. In: PATERSON, Chris; DOMINGO, David (eds.). Making online news: The ethnography of new media production. New York: Peter Lang, 2008b.

———. Exploring the pro-am interface between production and produsage. In: The Internet Turning 40: The Never-Ending Novelty of New Media Research? conference, 17-19 June 2010, Hong Kong. Available at: <http://snurb.info/files/2010/Exploring%20the%20Pro- Am%20Interface%20between%20Production%20and%20Produsage.pdf>. Accessed on: 29 Sep. 2011.

———. Towards distributed citizen participation: Lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland floods. In: PARYCEK, Peter; KRIPP, Manuel J.; EDELMANN, Noella (eds.). CeDEM11: Proceedings of the International Conference for E-Democracy and Open Government, 5-6 May 2011 Krems, Austria. Krems: Edition Donau- Universität Krems, 2011, pp. 35-52. Available at:

<http://snurb.info/files/2011/Towards%20Distributed%20Citizen%20Participation.pdf>

. Accessed on: 29 Sep. 2011.
———; BURGESS, Jean. The use of
Twitter hashtags in the formation of ad hoc publics. In:

European Consortium for Political Communication conference, 25-27 Aug. 2011, Reykjavík. Available at: <http://snurb.info/files/2011/The%20Use%20of%20Twitter%20Hashtags%20in%20the %20Formation%20of%20Ad%20Hoc%20Publics%20(final).pdf>. Accessed on: 29 Sep. 2011.

———; HIGHFIELD, Tim. Blogs, Twitter, and breaking news: The produsage of citizen journalism. In: LIND, Rebecca Ann (ed.). Producing theory: The intersection of audiences and production in a digital world. New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming 2012.

BURNS, Alex. Oblique strategies for ambient journalism. M/C journal v. 13, n. 2, May 2010. Available at: <http://journal.media- culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/230>. Accessed on: 1 Aug. 2011.

GANS, Herbert J. Deciding what’s news: A study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time. New York: Vintage, 1980.

———. Democracy and the news. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.
GILLMOR, Dan. Moving toward participatory journalism.
Nieman reports, Fall 2003, pp.

79-80.
GUTTENPLAG. 2011. Available at:

<http://de.guttenplag.wikia.com/wiki/GuttenPlag_Wiki>. Accessed on: 29 Sep. 2011. HERMIDA, Alfred. From TV to Twitter: How ambient news became ambient journalism.

M/C journal v. 13, n. 2, May 2010. Available at: <http://journal.media-

culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/220>. Accessed on: 1 Aug. 2011. JONES, Jeffrey P. Parody, performativity, and play: The reinvigoration of citizenship

through political satire. In HARTLEY, John; BURGESS, Jean; BRUNS, Axel (eds.). Blackwell companion to new media dynamics. London: Blackwell, forthcoming 2012.

KOVACH, Bill; ROSENSTIEL, Tom. The elements of journalism: What newspeople should know and the public should expect. New York: Crown, 2001.

LASICA, J.D. Random acts of journalism: Beyond ‘is it or isn’t it journalism?’: How blogs and journalism need each other. JD’s blog: New media musings, 12 March 2003a.

Available at: <http://www.jdlasica.com/blog/archives/2003_03_12.html>. Accessed on:

27 Sep. 2004.
———. Blogs and journalism need each other.
Nieman reports, Fall 2003b, pp. 70-4.

Available at: <http://www.nieman.harvard.edu/reports/03-3NRfall/V57N3.pdf>.

Accessed on: 4 June 2004.
LEADBEATER, Charles; MILLER, Paul. The pro-am revolution: How enthusiasts are

changing our economy and society. Demos, 2004. Available at:

<http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/proameconomy/>. Accessed on: 25 Jan 2007. LEE, Edmund. News Corp.’s ‘Daily’ trails Murdoch reader goal. Bloomberg, 29 Sep. 2011.

Available at: <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-28/news-corp-s-daily-with-

120-000-readers-trails-murdoch-goal-for-profits.html>. Accessed on: 29 Sep. 2011. MEIKLE, Graham. Future active: Media activism and the Internet. New York: Routledge,

2002.
SCHUDSON, Michael.
Why democracies need an unlovable press. Cambridge: Polity,

2008.
VICKERY, Graham; WUNSCH-VINCENT, Sacha.
Participative Web and user-created

content: Web 2.0, wikis and social networking. Paris: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, 2007. Available at: <http://www.sourceoecd.org/scienceIT/9789264037465>. Accessed on: 9 Apr. 2010. 

附件列表


→如果您认为本词条还有待完善,请 编辑词条

下一篇梅西百货的数字化转型

词条内容仅供参考,如果您需要解决具体问题
(尤其在法律、医学等领域),建议您咨询相关领域专业人士。
0

收藏到:  

词条信息

idzhang
idzhang
超级管理员
词条创建者 发短消息   

相关词条