Lecture 2 in the course From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching: News and Journalism in the Digital Age. This lecture series addresses the continuing transformation of the production and consumption of journalism in the contemporary media environment. It provides a brief history of the impact of participatory online news production and engagement practices – from the first wave of citizen journalism to the social media platforms of today – on how news content is disseminated and experienced; examines reactive and proactive responses to these changes by news organisations and journalists; and explores the longer-term impact of these developments on the public sphere, touching on the power of social media platforms and their role in shaping their users’ information diets. Readings are largely drawn from Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Bruns, 2018), with additional readings recommended for selected lectures. Reading for this lecture: Bruns, A. (2018). From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching: The First Wave of Citizen Media. Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 2. Peter Lang.

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From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching:
The First Wave of Citizen Media
Prof. Axel Bruns
Guest Professor, IKMZ, University of Zürich
a.bruns@qut.edu.au — a.bruns@ikmz.uzh.ch

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Ancient History

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Ancient History:
The 2000s

4. https://crosscut.com/2020/06/apocalypse-now-what-seattle-has-never-been-normal

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests

6. Disrupting the News: Seattle, 1999

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The Indymedia Ethos
The resistance is global ... The web dramatically alters the balance between
multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding and some cheap
equipment, we can set up a live automated website that rivals the corporates’.
Prepare to be swamped by the tide of activist media makers on the ground in
Seattle and around the world, telling the real story behind the World Trade
Agreement. (Maffew & Manse)

8. Everyone is a witness. Everyone is a journalist. Everyone edits.

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Citizen Journalism
• Emergence of key citizen journalism sites:
• Slashdot
• Indymedia
• Kuro5hin
• Plastic
• OhmyNews (South Korea, later also International and Japan)
• Wikipedia and Wikinews (but problems with the latter)
• individual and group news blogs

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Key Characteristics
• Citizen journalism processes:
• most story content generated by ‘average’ users, not professional journalists and editors
• limited editorial oversight:
• very basic checking of stories (e.g. Slashdot), or
• immediate posting for commentary, rating, and voting by wider community
• continuous update of stories after publication – through comments or story revision
• collaborative content creation model, harnessing community knowledge
• strong focus on discussion, debate, deliberation
• coverage becomes multiperspectival

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Open Source Journalism
• Strong similarities between citizen journalism and open source:
• opening out production process to all participants
• belief that cream will rise to the top – through ‘power of eyeballs’
• reconceptualisation and acceptance of products as always unfinished, constantly updated
• application of alternative licencing schemes to enable flexible update and distribution of
products
• But need for effective systems and methodologies:
• Indymedia problem: lack of open editing tools to enable collaborative quality control; radical
openness also means potential for abuse by extremists on both sides of politics
• Wikinews problem: wiki format unsuitable for news coverage – fails to offer space for debate
and deliberation to facilitate the development and update of stories

13. Screenshot taken 12 Sep. 2022
(Queen Elizabeth II died on 8 Sep. 2022 🧐)

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User-Led Disruptions to the News
‘random acts of journalism’ — JD Lasica
‘a leap to authorship’ — Douglas Rushkoff
‘the people formerly known as the audience’ — Jay Rosen
from ‘filter, then publish’ to ‘publish, then filter’ — Clay Shirky
‘my readers know more than I do’ — Dan Gillmor
 news blogs, citizen journalism sites
 Drudge Report breaks Clinton/Lewinsky
 Salam Pax live-blogs bombing raids on Baghdad

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The Rise of Citizen Journalism
(in the Google n-gram viewer)

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Why Citizen
Journalism?

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A Tactical Response against the Mainstream Media
• At first, media in opposition:
• tactical vs. strategic
• activists vs. mainstream
• citizen journalists vs. industry journalists
• online vs. print and broadcast
• Especially against the backdrop of
post-9/11 US media
https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-rewind-war-iraq-11-years-later-232584

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Two Tiers of Media
• Herbert Gans, 1980:
Central (or first-tier) media would be complemented by a second tier of pre-existing and new
national media, each reporting on news to specific, fairly homogeneous audiences. … They
would devote themselves primarily to reanalysing and reinterpreting news gathered by the
central media – and the wire services – for their audiences, adding their own commentary
and backing these up with as much original reporting, particularly to support bottom-up,
representative, and service news, as would be financially feasible.
(Deciding What’s News, p. 318)

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Gatewatching, Not Gatekeeping
• Traditional news process:
(from Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, 2005)

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Against Gatekeeping
• Gatekeeping is outdated:
• media scarcity no longer exists
• too many gates to keep
• journalists’ judgment can fail
• ‘all the news that’s fit to print’ is patronising
• Fordist production model
• users (citizens) want to be active and involved
https://journalismresearchnews.org/article-journalists-remain-critical-gatekeepers-during-crisis/

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Towards Gatewatching
• New form of collaborative news reporting and discussion:
• observing what news passes through the gates of news and other organisations
• highlighting those news items which are of relevance to the community
• repurposing, recombining, recontextualising, reinterpreting mainstream news content
• publicising rather than publishing the news
• adding commentary, analysis, and discussion to the news
• post-Fordist production model, involving users as produsers (Bruns, 2008)
• acting as a corrective to the mainstream

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Produsing the News
• Gatewatcher news process:
(adapted from Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, 2005)
• Variations on the process are possible

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Citizen Journalism
Arrives

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https://eu.usatoday.com/story/theoval/2014/07/27/barack-obama-2004-democratic-convention-john-
kerry-john-edwards/13236077/

25. https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Unbound-by-tradition-Boston-bloggers-exercise-2704665.php

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A First Wave of Citizen Media
gatewatching as a foundational information-gathering practice
collaborative news evaluation by distributed networks of participants
transformation of news from finished product to unfinished process

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A Network of Citizen Journalists?
Adamic, L. A., & Glance, N. (2005). The Political
Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election: Divided
They Blog. In J. Adibi, M. Grobelnik, D. Mladenic,
& P. Pantel (Eds.), Proceedings of the 3rd
International Workshop on Link Discovery
(LinkKDD ’05) (pp. 36–43). ACM.
https://doi.org/10.1145/1134271.1134277

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Consequences

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Industrial Journalism
• Common themes:
• comprehensive coverage
• industry structure supports long-term investigative journalism projects
• but: decline in funding and staffing, increased reliance on newswires
• professional ethics
• objectivity and impartiality as key ideals of journalism
• but: no more than ideals, due to commercial and political pressures
• journalists as dedicated experts
• quality sources, quality research, quality writing
• but: routine worldviews, limited insight into complex topics
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelposner/2020/04/10/saving-journalism-is-a-business-problem/

30. Image by Yea I Knit

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Citizen Journalism
• Common themes:
• deliberative journalism
• greater role for commenting and discussion
• but: fragmented, inconclusive, easily distracted
• hyperlocal coverage
• covering themes and places ignored by the mainstream
• but: interest horizon limits comprehensive coverage
• “Estate 4.5” (Jane Singer)
• a watchdog for the watchdogs – gatewatching, not gatekeeping
• but: limited in its effects, despite well-known successes
https://en.ejo.ch/specialist-journalism/citizen-journalists-or-citizen-witnesses

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Conflict
Will forms of participatory journalism and traditional journalism
complement each other, or collide head on? (J.D. Lasica)

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Experts and Amateurs
• Case study: Possums Pollytics blog during the 2007 Australian election
• blogger specialising in psephology (analysis of public opinion polls)
• rose to wider recognition in public stoushes with The Australian’s election analysts (esp.
Dennis Shanahan)
• “sheltered academics and failed journalists who would not get a job on a real newspaper”
• “we understand Newspoll because we own it” (12 July 2007)
• “statistical bloggers forever complain … and essentially want polls to be banished from
newspapers and public debate except during an election” (21 Feb. 2008)
 Journalistic boundary work to protect the profession from newcomers and critics

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Experts and Amateurs
• Who’s the expert here?
• cf. Dan Gillmor: “my readers know more than I do”
• or Herbert Gans: “the news may be too important to leave to the journalists alone”
• professional journalists vs. amateur journalists, but also
• professional psephologists vs. (very) amateur psephologists
 Scientific expertise (in psephology) trumps expert craftsmanship (in journalism)

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High Hopes
The people formerly known as the audience are those who were on the receiving
end of a media system that ran one way, in a broadcasting pattern, with high entry
fees and a few firms competing to speak very loudly while the rest of the
population listened in isolation from one another—and who today are not in a
situation like that at all. (Jay Rosen)

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Dashed Hopes?
The history of alternative media is predominantly one of failure: failure to reach
any but the most specialist of audiences and a consequent failure to effect the
political and social transformations that represent the ambition of so many of its
projects. (Chris Atton)

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Yes, But… (as viewed from 2006)
• What happens next?
• two tiers now well established
• notable (but limited) effect of tactical media on the political process in some cases
• increasing interest in tactical media voices on mainstream media side:
• bloggers’ views as alternative to vox-pops
• move of key pundits from tactical to mainstream media
• mainstream attempts to systematically embrace tactical media (BBC blogs and UGC
Hub, Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace, …)

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Political Implications (as viewed from 2007)
• Towards post-Fordist politics?
• growing effect of citizen news on political process
• towards more dialogue and deliberation,
• or more argument and conflict?
• rear-guard battles by governments and news organisations against citizen journalists – but
not only in authoritarian regimes
• conflict between alternative and mainstream media coverage (e.g. Howard Dean campaign)
• digital divide opening between traditional audiences and new produser-citizens?
How much of this has come true in the meantime?

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• Blogs are no longer special – but
they’re everywhere
• especially liveblogs – we’ll get
back to those in a later week…
Normalisation
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/live/2022/sep/12/queen-elizabeth-edinburgh-
coffin-lie-in-state-funeral-king-charles-westminster-hall-palace-holyroodhouse-live-news

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Normalisation: From Parasites to Colleagues
‘journalists [have not] been eager to let the public in on how the
sausage is made’ — Jane Singer
but doing ‘proper’ journalism is resource-intensive: gatewatching, not gatekeeping
‘the balance of power between journalism and its publics is shifting’
— Jo Bardoel & Mark Deuze
‘the democratization of opinion on the net’ — Clay Shirky
‘the Internet, at its ugliest, is just an open sewer’ — Thomas L. Friedman
‘without the daily work of print journalists, one wonders if … blogs would
contain any real news’ — Paul Andrews
‘blogs … are being “normalized” by journalists’ — Jane Singer
‘we cannot expect citizen-journalism projects to provide serious
competition to established, corporate media’ — Chris Atton

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And then…

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Next Time

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Readings
2. 30.9.: From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching: The First Wave of Citizen Media
Bruns, A. (2018). From Gatekeeping to Gatewatching: The First Wave of Citizen Media.
Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 2. Peter
Lang.
3. 7.10.: #BREAKING: Social News Curation during Acute Events
Bruns, A. (2018). #BREAKING: Social News Curation during Acute Events. Gatewatching and
News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. Ch. 3. Peter Lang.

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Lecture
• NOTE:
• Week 3 lecture will in person in BIN-0-K.02.