Within this metaphor, the concept of contagion is used to describe the transfer of information or ideas between individuals (Lerman and Ghosh, 2010), which for news diffusion shares common ground with the concept of shareworthiness (Trilling et al., 2017). The second consideration is how the Facebook Graph API matches URLs when we look up the engagement. A defining characteristics of social media platforms is that the diffusion of content largely occurs through technologically enhanced social network processes (Klinger and Svensson, 2015). Figure 3. The notion of gatekeeping on social media requires a different conceptualization than the one used by White (1950) to describe the work of mr. Gates. Change ), You are commenting using your Facebook account. This case study extends this literature into social media. Agenda setting theory is the idea that the media sets the agenda by selecting the topics that it covers. Websites are often not sensitive to certain variations in how a URL is written (e.g. In this study, we proposed a new method to measure gatekeeping power in the context of a social network site, but our analysis has several limitations, of which some could be addressed in future research. Estimated percentage of engagement attributed to the publication on the newspaper’s own Facebook page. However, to our best knowledge, there are no studies that investigate how the diffusion of specific newspaper items on Facebook is influenced by publication of these items on the newspaper’s Facebook page. Context collapse and privacy management: Diversity in Facebook friends increases online news re... User-generated visibility: Secondary gatekeeping in a shared media space, Audiences’ acts of authentication in the age of fake news: A conceptual framework. ( Log Out / Gatekeepers exist in many jobs, andtheir choices hold the potential to color mental pictures that are subsequentlycreated in people understands of what is happening in the world around them.Media gatekeeping showed that decision making is based on principles of newsvalues, organizational routines, input structure and common sense. Facebook engagement for articles without, and before and after publication on Facebook page. Our results show that social media editors are indeed powerful gatekeepers according to this definition. Finally, there is the complicated scenario in which a website changes the actual URL and redirects the old URL to the new one. Since the actions of individual users are not visible on many platforms due to privacy consideration, we propose a method that leverages time series of aggregated scores for total user engagement, which are available for various platforms. In addition to the observed values, we present the fitted values for our model, as addressed shortly. The highest after FB percentages were found for De Standaard (64.2%) and Trouw (68.4%). Given this list, the Facebook page reader queries the Facebook Graph API to get all the posts from each page. Figure 2. We used RSS to monitor the publication of new website articles. These people are known as gate keepers. It is an estimate of the proportion for which the news passed through the channel of the newspaper’s Facebook page under the current conditions and as such serves to indicate the impact of the gatekeeping choices of the editors who operate this page. Given the difficult transition of newspapers into the digital age, that has seen revenues plummet and giants tumble (Hamilton, 2004; Ryfe, 2012), the question has been posed whether these social media endeavors could save newspapers (Ju et al., 2014). The main purpose of this study was to form a starting point for measuring and conceptualizing the gatekeeping influence of social media editors for professional news organizations. Accordingly, this engagement is not the result of the newspaper’s main Facebook page, but stems from individuals who shared the articles directly from the website or from other Facebook pages such as interest groups, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), or sub-organizational pages of the newspaper (only for The Sun, The Guardian, and De Telegraaf). In the traditional gatekeeping literature, the gatekeeper is someone who guards discrete gates that determine which news does and does not reach the audience. This piece will examine the ideas of agenda setting and gatekeeping theories, as well as how they affect modern media coverage. Furthermore, by monitoring these scores over time as time series data, we can get a good indication of the life cycle of news items on social media. often being shared or otherwise interacted with) of these items and also need to be able to control for other factors—in particular other gatekeepers—that could affect the diffusion. To control for this seasonality, we added random intercepts for the hour of the day. View or download all content the institution has subscribed to. If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Despite having these shared roots, the gatekeeping traditions in journalism research and network theory have evolved mostly as two separate branches. Still, given that only a small portion of the news items is published on Facebook, these numbers indicate that these items have substantially higher engagement scores. It was originally focused on the mass media with its few-to-many dynamic but … As this is measured consistently and includes all of Facebook, it is to our knowledge the best available indicator for news diffusion on Facebook. A prime example is the recent announcement by Facebook, on 12 January 2018, that it will change its algorithm to favor interactions between individual users by downplaying the visibility of posts from businesses, brands, and media. In the traditional gatekeeping literature, the gatekeeper is someone who guards discrete gates that determine which news does and does not reach the audience. the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies. We excluded these cases from the analysis. Posted by sloth_admin. This power correlates with the ability to mass communicate, but the leading role of diffusion mechanics adds new, network-level factors, such as the structure of a network and the algorithms that govern its communication flows. To account for differences between URLs, we added random intercepts and slopes for all three independent variables. First is to explore whether there are other important gatekeepers on Facebook, which can be analyzed by including publications on other public pages in the model. In a strict following of this definition, it can be argued that there will not be any gatekeepers in the digital age because the redundancy of channels “undermines the idea that there are discrete gates through which political information passes: if there are no gates, there can be no gatekeepers” (Williams and Carpini, 2000: 61). This means gatekeeping must be put into a role of surveillance, monitoring the data points that are created every day to sort out the relevant items that someone will want to have. In the fourth scenario, minor boost, we see that this is not always the case. An initial conceptualization of gatekeeping was journalism‐based and focused on … Table 3. In some cases some news items are rejected by the editor due the organizations policy or the news items which are not suitable for publishing, this is also considered part of the gatekeeping function.. Because of this, gatekeeping also sets a specific standard for information value. We thus conclude that analyzing time series of aggregate engagement scores can be a fruitful approach to study gatekeeping and news diffusion on social media. We can now use the model to estimate how engagement would have developed without the Facebook publication. As it applies to media, gatekeeping refers to the method in which information is filtered for distribution, this can be done through the internet, print or broadcasting. Although the use of aggregate engagement scores is only a proxy for news diffusion, it is arguably the closest we can get to measuring it without violating the privacy of individual users. The engagement scores for articles that the newspaper did publish on Facebook are split into two columns: the the engagement score before (before FB) and after (after FB) the Facebook publication. For each newspaper, we monitored all news item publications on the website in real-time via the RSS feed. The social media editors who manage the social media accounts of these newspapers, who can be traditional journalists and also more specialized social media experts, thereby fulfill an important role in the competition between news outlets. Building on Lewin’s field theory, Shoemaker and Vos (2009) demonstrated how gatekeeping is still a valuable lens for understanding how news is created and circulated today, both as a theory and as a metaphor. Thus, instead of comparing the engagement scores between articles—which is likely to be strongly affected by the content of articles—we analyze changes in engagement scores over time for each article. like and the alternatives for like), comments, and shares. Third, there are cases where the news item was posted on Facebook with some delay, after it received almost no engagement, in which case it could still initiate a wave of engagement. ( Log Out / engagement) from people in the user’s social circle. (, Welbers, K, Van Atteveldt, W, Kleinnijenhuis, J. The first condition is website only, which refers to the news articles that the newspaper did not publish on their Facebook page. Second is to investigate whether the effect of publication on the newspaper’s own Facebook page is affected by content characteristics of news items. Someone, possibly a news organization itself, can post a news item or a link to a news item on a platform such as Facebook. For the six newspapers that remained, we collected the Facebook posts from their public page, using the Facebook Graph API as described above. Pingback: From streets to screens: Is online activism the future of social movements? Please check you selected the correct society from the list and entered the user name and password you use to log in to your society website. Note that in the website-only scenarios the counterfactual is identical to the observed sum score, which indicates (correctly) that there was no effect of a Facebook publication. This is where gatekeeping is needed most: To screen for narcissists who are willing to throw out the culture’s most fundamental building blocks to make the fandom a little bit more comfortable for themselves. Based on our analysis, we also address how the role of social media editors in the gatekeeping process intersects with the role of individual users and what this means for the definition of gatekeeping on social network sites. It looks at how editors at The Asian Magazine (TAM) select stories for its … With the rising popularity of social media as a popular platform for news distribution, complex networks of interdependent gatekeepers are emerging (Goode, 2009). For this, we need to have some way to measure the success of the diffusion (i.e. This is unlikely to bias our findings because problems in the RSS monitor or RSS feed are not likely to be correlated to sharing rates on Facebook. Each of these articles has a time series with engagement scores for 30-minute intervals over a period of 3 days. In this second monitor, the Facebook Graph API is used to get the engagement scores for a URL with 30-minute intervals, with the first time being 30 minutes after publication (the engagement score at the time of publication can only be zero). Kurt Lewin (1947), who coined gatekeeping, argued that gatekeepers operate in a complex field, in which the gatekeeper and its environment “have to be considered as one constellation of interdependent factors” (p. 338).