Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers 2018

Gatewatching and News Curation: Industry Responses to Habitual Newssharing by Audiences

Axel Bruns

• 18 Feb. 2018 – Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers, Haifa

Abstract

Social media users now engage almost instinctively in collective and collaborative gatewatching processes as they respond to major breaking news stories, as well as in their day-to-day sharing of interesting articles with their social media contacts. Meanwhile, existing media outlets are increasingly seeking to maximise the shareability of their stories via social media, and a number of new players (such as Buzzfeed) are fundamentally built around providing ‘viral’ content; in essence, they are attempting to optimise their offerings in anticipation of audiences’ evaluation and selection of content through gatewatching. As a result, the new channels of news diffusion via social media which are emerging in the process may in fact require us to fundamentally change how we conceptualise the structure of the public sphere.

This keynote outlines the processes that have led to this demoticisation of newssharing, and shows how this impacts on news industry practices and approaches. It reviews the practices of everyday users as they engage with the news, and highlights how enterprising journalists have come to connect and engage with such users. Overall, it traces the conflicted responses of journalists and news outlets from their early dismissals to gradual engagement with social media, and asks whether – far from a normalisation of social media as part of journalistic practice – we are seeing a normalisation of journalism into social media practices instead. If so, how can news outlets remain distinctive enough to survive?