86 Zombie Media
chapter, the Internet and digital media has almost completely disrupted
the gatekeeping consensus that dominated late twentieth-century monopolies. It is not so much that it is necessarily cheaper to produce
the news – to actually produce anything remotely resembling quality
journalism still requires teams of reporters and fact checkers, an unfortunate truth in the cost-cutting environment in which an increasing
number of newspapers are forced to operate. Rather, the distribution
of information has radically changed, whereby social media and search
engine algorithms become the new gatekeepers for the dissemination
of stories.
Shoemaker and Vos offer perhaps the most coherent theoretical approach to gatekeeping to have appeared in recent years, although their
book was published at the beginning of the period of social media
disruption that has changed so much of the way that we consume the
news in less than a decade. In many respects, it is the relationship
between algorithms and fake news that greatly concerns this chapter
and, as such, this is largely neglected by Shoemaker and Vos: after
all, media organisations that straightforwardly lie (rather than simply
offering a biased view of events) tend not to survive long in contemporary open societies due either to regulation or being challenged in the
courts. With regard to journalistic production, and where an emphasis is on producing verifiable news, the gatekeeping models proposed
by Shoemaker and Vos have been disrupted but by no means entirely
demolished. It remains very much the case that it tends to be people –
journalists – who decide on the newsworthiness of events (a factor that
will be returned to in the next chapter when considering automated
journalism), responding in particular to “vivid” as opposed to “pallid”
recollections of events, and giving those recollections traction insofar
as they can be converted into narratives.
29
In addition, while digital
technologies have greatly disrupted news production and distribution,
the idea that was fashionable for a brief period of time in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, that the Internet would free up individuals to radically transform media via such things as personal websites and blogs,
is simply untrue: in the vast majority of cases, the major sources of
information – whether as news or entertainment – tend to be produced
by organisations and, as such, Shoemaker and Vos’s matrix of the levels of analysis for gatekeeping remains valid. After individual decisions
about the newsworthiness of a story, it remains the case that information has then to be converted into a narrative or genre that is recognisable by an audience to gain traction (what Shoemaker and Vos refer
to as the “communications routine level of analysis”) as well then as
conforming to organisational levels (is this story consonant with our
business or organisational mission?), social institutional levels (such
as whether it will be profitable in a market-oriented publication), and
social system levels (the wider social and cultural values that shape our
chapter, the Internet and digital media has almost completely disrupted
the gatekeeping consensus that dominated late twentieth-century monopolies. It is not so much that it is necessarily cheaper to produce
the news – to actually produce anything remotely resembling quality
journalism still requires teams of reporters and fact checkers, an unfortunate truth in the cost-cutting environment in which an increasing
number of newspapers are forced to operate. Rather, the distribution
of information has radically changed, whereby social media and search
engine algorithms become the new gatekeepers for the dissemination
of stories.
Shoemaker and Vos offer perhaps the most coherent theoretical approach to gatekeeping to have appeared in recent years, although their
book was published at the beginning of the period of social media
disruption that has changed so much of the way that we consume the
news in less than a decade. In many respects, it is the relationship
between algorithms and fake news that greatly concerns this chapter
and, as such, this is largely neglected by Shoemaker and Vos: after
all, media organisations that straightforwardly lie (rather than simply
offering a biased view of events) tend not to survive long in contemporary open societies due either to regulation or being challenged in the
courts. With regard to journalistic production, and where an emphasis is on producing verifiable news, the gatekeeping models proposed
by Shoemaker and Vos have been disrupted but by no means entirely
demolished. It remains very much the case that it tends to be people –
journalists – who decide on the newsworthiness of events (a factor that
will be returned to in the next chapter when considering automated
journalism), responding in particular to “vivid” as opposed to “pallid”
recollections of events, and giving those recollections traction insofar
as they can be converted into narratives.
29
In addition, while digital
technologies have greatly disrupted news production and distribution,
the idea that was fashionable for a brief period of time in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, that the Internet would free up individuals to radically transform media via such things as personal websites and blogs,
is simply untrue: in the vast majority of cases, the major sources of
information – whether as news or entertainment – tend to be produced
by organisations and, as such, Shoemaker and Vos’s matrix of the levels of analysis for gatekeeping remains valid. After individual decisions
about the newsworthiness of a story, it remains the case that information has then to be converted into a narrative or genre that is recognisable by an audience to gain traction (what Shoemaker and Vos refer
to as the “communications routine level of analysis”) as well then as
conforming to organisational levels (is this story consonant with our
business or organisational mission?), social institutional levels (such
as whether it will be profitable in a market-oriented publication), and
social system levels (the wider social and cultural values that shape our