My colleague Graham Meikle from Macquarie University, author of the fabulous Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, has just let me know that his review of my book [weblink:28] will be published in the next issue of Media International Australia. He's kindly allowed me to republish his review here - many thanks, Graham!
Bruns, Axel, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. Peter Lang, New York, 2005. ISBN 0-8204-7432-0. 330pp.
Axel Bruns's Gatewatching is the best book to date on the emerging participatory culture of online news. It maps a range of important online projects - Slashdot, Indymedia, Wikipedia, The Media Channel - identifying and evaluating much that is distinctive about a networked, collaborative environment characterised by new opportunities to automate, to personalise and to participate. A notable plus is Bruns's use of original interviews with central figures in the development of these projects, which add extra an extra layer of authority and readability to his analysis.
The basis of Bruns's argument is a refinement of the concept of 'gatekeeping'. I say 'concept' here, rather than 'model', as Bruns does not explicitly engage with existing models of gatekeeping (such as that advanced in Pamela Shoemaker's 1991 monograph). On the one hand, this is a pity, as even a brief discussion of how gatekeeping has been understood elsewhere would have been useful in tracing not just the transformations but also the continuities of the online news environment. On the other hand, on the way to his major argument, Bruns distinguishes between three different dimensions of gatekeeping, in what is itself a useful contribution to the literature (pp. 11-12). Bruns points to gatekeeping at the input stage (in what media organisations decide to cover), at the output stage (in what they decide to publish), and at the response stage (in the possibilities offered - or withheld - for audiences to add their voices).
Each of these moments of gatekeeping is about ruling things out - gatewatching, in contrast, is about ruling things in. Gatewatching projects monitor the outputs of other media organisations and point their users towards the particularly noteworthy. As its major currency is the hyperlink, it's a practice distinctive to the Net. Many of the most popular blogs (such as Boing Boing) practice gatewatching in that they keep track of what's being published elsewhere, and link to what they think is worthwhile. Gatewatching is not just about publishing, but also about publicising (p. 19).
One major strength of the book is that Bruns builds his case using clear analytical distinctions. He offers a useful and coherent set of criteria to use in uncovering the commonalities and differences in collaborative online projects, and the degrees to which these are 'open' or 'closed'. These criteria include the extent to which users are able to participate at the input, output and response stages; the amount of original content hosted on a site; the degree to which participants' roles are fixed or have scope for development; and the degree of centralisation of the project. Mapped against these criteria, for example, CNN.com is a 'closed' site, allowing for little or no user input and setting clear limits on the roles of both producers and audiences (pp. 124-5). The various models used by individual sites within the global Indymedia network, in contrast, allow for far greater participation from users, blurring or dissolving the lines between audience and producers in a mutable, decentralised network (pp.81-104.).
This book engages with developments which are still very new, and which are of increasing importance in a news environment in which established news organisations are experimenting with the kinds of approach analysed here (as in UK newspaper The Guardian's re-working of its online op-ed page as a blog). Gatewatching deserves to be widely taken up as a text on courses engaged with news, journalism, and/or new media. It's rigorous, accessible, and informative - a model of Internet scholarship.
Reviewed by Graham Meikle, Department of Media, Macquarie University.
