Gatekeeping

A classic piece of research published more than a half century ago contributed the concept of “gate-keeping” to the understanding of decision making in journalism. For news communication, a gatekeeper is anyone who makes editorial decisions on what news should be published or broadcast to the public. There are usually multiple gatekeepers in all but the smallest news organizations. Gatekeeping decisions help determine the news agenda and thus play a role in agenda setting for news consumers.

The term gatekeeping appears to have first been used by social psychologist Kurt Lewin in 1947 research that determined that wives or mothers were the usual decision makers (or gatekeepers) on what made up their families' meals. Three years later, David Manning White published a seminal paper in 1950 applying the concept to journalism. Based on his observation of a newspaper wire service editor (whom he dubbed “Mr. Gates”), White saw that the role entailed constant decision making about what stories to distribute versus the many more that for one reason or another were not used. White's pioneering study, and the many replications in the decades that followed, helped identify the many subjective factors that help define an editor in his gatekeeping function Several issues are central to the gatekeeper concept, chief among them who the gatekeepers are, how they came by that role, what training and biases they bring to the role, how much decision-making freedom they have, and the breadth of their potential impact—do their gatekeeping decisions affect only one local daily, or The New York Times where any news story decision will contribute to the news agenda for other media?

The factors that have impact on gatekeeper decision making must also be considered. What is it that makes one news story sufficiently interesting or important that it passes through an editorial “gate” to the next step (gate) in the process—perhaps eventually to reach the pages of the newspaper, and thus its readers? The relevant decision factors could be similar across different editors at different papers—or broadcast news departments, for that matter—or they could vary widely in application. Through the 1950s and 1960s, further research began to answer some of these questions while often posing others.

The gatekeeping process begins with the professional norms in defining news and the gatekeeper's personal knowledge and biases (whether recognized or not). Next comes the menu of choices presented to any editor/gatekeeper at a given time or day. Gatekeepers at a news agency (the Associated Press, for example) have already made choices on what news to place on the wire for local subscribers to choose among. That creates part of the menu of choices for local editors—the rest are locally reported stories. The latter nearly always take priority: the paper or station has expended effort and money to obtain that local story (and has already made a decision that the story is important enough to cover) whereas a news agency story, though it costs little to use, is almost surely of less local relevance.

Local relevance is almost always a vital gate-keeping factor in deciding which news stories will appear in a newspaper or on the air. And any way that a story from outside the local area (even one from overseas) can be “made” local—perhaps by highlighting a role played by a local resident—will increase that story's chances of being used. National stories that have general impact on readers and viewers—such as those about the state of the housing market, rising gasoline prices, or concern about business failures across the country—are more likely to be used, but other factors are important as well in gatekeeping decisions. These include the timeliness of an event (how recently it occurred), its impact (how many people—particularly local people—are affected), how much controversy or conflict is involved, the simplicity or complexity of a story, how prominent the newsmakers involved are, the public's perceived interest in the story, how visual the story is (especially for television), and what other stories are happening that day that are competing for attention.

...