Furthermore, there is seasonality in the time series due to the time of the day, especially because there is much less engagement during the night (these are the u shapes in the decay tails in Figure 3). To model this, we used a multilevel generalized linear model with a Poisson link function. At first it was widely used in the field of psychology and social psychology and later moved to the field of communication as mass communication because a speciic area of study (largely due to the advent of mass publication technology). At face value, the graphs in Figure 3 convincingly demonstrate that there are cases where the newspaper’s Facebook publication had a causal effect on article engagement. Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window), Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window), Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window), Click to share on Tumblr (Opens in new window), Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window), From streets to screens: Is online activism the future of social movements? It is interesting to note that this gatekeeping tradition can also be traced back to Kurt Lewin (1947), in particular through the work on network centrality by Bavelas (1948), who was also a student of Lewin (Scott, 2011). Since newspapers would want to carry over engagement scores, they tend to follow these guidelines, and the newspapers in our study do provide the required open graph meta information tags. First, a portion of Facebook URLs could not be matched to the website URLs, which indicates that the RSS monitor missed some articles or that some articles were not published in the RSS feeds.2 We deleted four newspapers from the analysis (The Mirror, The Telegraph, Het Laatste Nieuws, and Nieuwsblad) for which the RSS feed coverage was poorest (<80% coverage). casing, duplicate forward slashes). Gatekeeping is the process through which information is filtered for dissemination, whether for publication, broadcasting, the Internet, or some other mode of communication. The dependent variable is the increase in the engagement score during a 30-minute cycle, which is a count variable that resembles a Poisson distribution. If social media editors are indeed influential gatekeepers, this warrants investigation into their norms and routines regarding the selection and presentation of news items. These scores are also directly relevant for news diffusion on Facebook because they affect how likely people are to be exposed to these articles. The engagement for each news item URL was monitored every 30 minutes for 3 days after publication. In this study, we investigate how much of an impact these social media editors really have, focusing on the impact of newspapers’ public pages on Facebook. Gatekeeping is the process of selecting, and then filtering, items of media that can be consumed within the time or space that an individual happens to have. Estimated percentage of engagement attributed to the publication on the newspaper’s own Facebook page. – local dispatch, C3 Reporting and Editing for Print: Journalism – Vartika Nanda, Fake News 101: The Media’s Two Favorite Tricks for Twisting the Truth – The Drunk Republican – Additional survival tricks, Being a Member of Collective Intelligence – Bonnie Stonestreet, Citizen Journalism Is The Future – Utter Omnishambles, Open the G A T E S – Daily Dash of Danielle. The first condition is website only, which refers to the news articles that the newspaper did not publish on their Facebook page. Lean Library can solve it. The first scenario is the immediate Facebook publication, in which the article was published on Facebook shortly after the website publication. friends or followers on Facebook, followers on Twitter). By continuing to browse A notable observation in the data was that there are strong differences between the countries regarding the time between the original publication on the website and the publication on the Facebook page. It is hard to trust the media and their perceived truths because of a theory named ‘gatekeeping.’ This gives us much more variance to model and allows us to measure the effect of the publication of a news item on the newspaper’s Facebook page on engagement within articles. To weed out people whose interest in the fandom only extends as far as how they can use it to directly benefit them. Posted by sloth_admin. This means gatekeeping falls into a role of surveillance and monitoring data. The results are presented in Table 3. By measuring how influential these competing channels are, we address what Lewin (1947) stated to be the first diagnostic task of gatekeeping research: finding out who the gatekeepers are. Gatekeeping: Communication concepts 3. To control for these factors insofar as possible, we used time series of the engagement scores for news items over time. This indicates that popular news outlets could be less dependent on their own social media editing activities for their success on social media. The next step is to try to formalize this with a statistical model and apply it to all cases to get a quantitative estimate of this causal effect. The best resource for Gatekeeping theory info is Gatekeeping Theory by Shoemaker + Vos (amazon link). Time in hours (x-axis) between website and Facebook publication. Very few studies, however, look at gatekeeping in new areas of technology. Gatekeeping can be a creative force and trimming a news story can add potency. Figure 1. The initial selection of newspapers consisted of four UK, four Flemish, and four Dutch national newspapers. Gatekeeping may also hold influence on policies and procedures, playing the role of a watchdog within society or simply playing into the audience’s confirmation bias. It looks at how editors at The Asian Magazine (TAM) select stories for its … engagement) from people in the user’s social circle. 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). In response, newspapers have become active on social media to reach out to these people and to attract them to their websites by distributing links to their own news items (Bastos, 2015; Hille and Bakker, 2013). While the above definitions are correct, media theorists have a way of expanding this basic term to further our understanding of the information we receive through the mass media. For each newspaper, we monitored all news item publications on the website in real-time via the RSS feed. This means gatekeeping falls into a role of surveillance and monitoring data. Originally, the job of the media gatekeeper was mainly focused on the mass media, but it has transitioned toward face-to-face communication as well. The big tick marks on the x-axis indicate the time at which the newspaper published the article on Facebook. For three out of six newspapers in our study, The Guardian, The Sun, and De Telegraaf, the percentage was only 41.6% or lower. On the one hand, they are indeed in a key position to influence news diffusion: their endeavors benefit the total diffusion of news items, and their specific selection of news items is more successful. Bruns (2005) conceptualizes this practice as “gatewatching” and argues that it is slowly replacing the traditional role for journalists. These results signify that newspapers are far from being the only gatekeepers on Facebook regarding the diffusion of their own news articles. In contemporary gatekeeping literature, a broader interpretation of gatekeeping is often used, which is more in line with the original use of the term by Lewin (1947). Based on our analysis, we estimate that for different newspapers, between 33.9% and 58% of engagement could be attributed to the publications on the newspaper’s Facebook pages. ( Log Out /  The email address and/or password entered does not match our records, please check and try again. For example, if you live in Northern Canada and the informational gatekeeper pushes through content that talks about suntan lotion, the individual may filter the content and discard it because it is not relevant to them at that time. The resulting time series per news item are then analyzed with multilevel pooled time series analysis. [3] Here, the gatekeeper are the decision makers who letting the whole social system. too many calls to the API per time period). Third, for two newspapers, De Volkskrant and NRC Handelsblad, the publication time on the RSS feed often did not include the exact publication time, due to which they could not be used for the analyses. We therefore also use this score for this study. By subtracting the counterfactual from the predicted value, we can now get an estimate of the engagement that was caused by the Facebook publication. The cycles are independent, and parallelization was used to ensure that URLs with coinciding cycles are still monitored within only a few seconds of the intended monitoring time. This is related to secondary gatekeeping (Singer, 2014) and gatewatching (Bruns, 2005), but network theory contributes a more general framework for how diffusion through the interaction of many individuals works. full gatekeeping influence), these are not relevant hypotheses. This form of influence exerted by Facebook could be conceptualized as gatekeeping on a meta level, where instead of controlling communication flows by operating gates, the power of gates is reconfigured by controlling the rules of the communication channels. (. 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. Based on personal or social influences they let the information to the group. A thorough comparison of these countries is out of the scope of this study, but we expect that these differences can have a strong impact on the dynamics of engagement on Facebook, and therefore included them for a preliminary investigation. We can now use the model to estimate how engagement would have developed without the Facebook publication. These gatekeeping decisions are made every day to sort out the relevant items that audiences will see. 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 academic theory of gatekeeping is founded in multiple fields of study, including communication studies, journalism, political science, and sociology. Still, as addressed below, we encountered rare cases with suspicious changes or starting values in engagement, which are likely related to incorrect designation of canonical URLs, which we had to delete from the analysis. In particular, we see that in the Netherlands the vast majority of times that a news item was published on Facebook, this occurred shortly after the website publication—more than 50% within 1 hour. It is more accurate to say that the closer someone is to someone else in the network, the more likely he or she is to be exposed to other’s posts. Table 2. Given the limitation that data on individual user engagement with news items are generally not available due to privacy considerations, we leveraged the use of aggregated engagement statistics. Facebook indexes all URLs that are posted and keeps a single count for URLs that point toward the same content. The newspapers in both countries publish in Dutch and focus on a relatively small national market, with the Netherlands being a larger market than Flanders. However, the engagement score for a URL can only be obtained for the current moment in time, meaning that to measure engagement over time the data have to be collected in real-time. Finally, note that the estimates presented here should not be interpreted as the percentage of engagement that would be lost if the newspaper decides to take down its Facebook page. Sign in here to access free tools such as favourites and alerts, or to access personal subscriptions, If you have access to journal content via a university, library or employer, sign in here, Research off-campus without worrying about access issues. Gatekeeping involves a human or technological process used to control information flow. Due to the rising importance of social media platforms for news diffusion, newspapers are relying on social media editors to promote the distribution of their news items on these platforms. Other studies investigated how news media use Facebook (Hille and Bakker, 2013), and at least one study also addressed a question similar to ours: whether newspapers’ distribution of news items via Facebook (and Twitter) is an effective way to reach the audience (Ju et al., 2014). By consuming content that is most relevant to us each day, we can ignore the billions of additional data points that are calling for our attention.