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Key Publications:
- Book: Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production [1] (New York: Peter Lang, 2005)
- Website: Gatewatching.org [2]
Research Projects:
- Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement
- Youdecide2007.org
- Mapping the Australian Political Blogosphere
Related Topics:
- Blogs and Blogging [3]
- Produsers and Produsage [4]
Related Blog Posts:
- Journalism [5]
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- Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism [6]
- Industrial Journalism [7]
The concept of gatewatching describes the process of identifying and posting about interesting stories which is a core practice in citizen journalism, news blogging, and other related fields; it's the 'open news' alternative to the 'closed news' practice of gatekeeping as it has been a mainstay of conventional, professional, industrial journalism for the past century and more.
Many gatewatching communities, like the technology news site Slashdot [8] or the citizen journalism site OhmyNews [9], now offer a more comprehensive, intelligent, and multiperspectival coverage of the goings-on in their field of interest than their mainstream counterparts at any time of the day; others act less as a replacement and more as a complement to the journalism industry, offering a diverse and often very different view on events in the news. Almost all of them distinguish themselves by providing not simply 'the news' as a finished product, but by covering newsworthy events as an ongoing process and offering a space for the continuing discussion, debate, and deliberation of further developments and their implications - a shift from the industrial production to the communal, collaborative produsage [10] of news and opinions.
Gatewatching and related concepts were first introduced in my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production [10]. Many articles [11] and presentations [12] about gatewatching and citizen journalism are available here, and with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders I also publish the group blog Gatewatching.org [13].
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