ECREA 2018

Gatewatching Revisited: Habitualisation, Demoticisation, Normalisation

Axel Bruns

• 1 Nov. 2018 – European Communication Conference (ECREA) 2018, Lugano

Abstract

This paper revisits the concept of gatewatching (Bruns 2005) in the current communicative context. Gatewatching described the observation, selection, re-sharing, and discussion of material from a range of sources, including mainstream news, by citizen journalists, news bloggers, and others on their own sites; the first wave of citizen journalism, emerging in the late 1990s, was built to a significant extent around such gatewatching. As citizen journalists and news bloggers lacked the resources to engage in sustained first-hand reporting, they instead mainly observed the outputs of conventional news outlets, curating and contesting mainstream news coverage.

Such early citizen journalism activities soon declined, partly also because some aspects of gatewatching – such as curating and commenting on the news coverage of other sources – were to some extent normalised into mainstream journalism in the form of journalists’ own blogs (Singer 2005) or liveblogs tracking unfolding developments (Thurman & Schapals 2016). More recently, however, gatewatching itself has received new impetus with the advent of contemporary social media platforms: the sharing of news and related information through social media represents an act of gatewatching. Social media are now rapidly becoming the primary news source especially for younger generations of news users, and a majority of social media users already engage in such sharing on a regular basis (Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2016).

This paper argues, therefore, that gatewatching is no longer the domain only of a small class of political junkies (Coleman 2003), as it was when it occurred primarily through the medium of blogging, but has instead become habitual for the majority of social media users, even if following the news is not their primary motivation for using social media. It represents a demotic practice, though this should not be misunderstood as resulting in a diverse and democratic multitude of voices. Further, within the connective spaces of major social media networks, such activity enable practices of collective gatewatching, in which groups of participants – including ordinary users, experts, commentators, as well as journalists – form networked publics around specific issues and events.

Finally, thus, to the extent that such habitual, demotic, collective gatewatching takes place first in social media and also involves journalists and other newsworkers, it might represent the normalisation of journalism into social media environments.

References

Bruns, A. (2005). Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. New York: Peter Lang.

Coleman, S. (2003). A Tale of Two Houses: The House of Commons, the Big Brother House and the People at Home. Parliamentary Affairs, 56, 733–758.

Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2016. (2016). Oxford: Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Singer, J.B. (2005). The Political J-Blogger: ‘Normalizing’ a New Media Form to Fit Old Norms and Practices. Journalism, 6(2), 173–198.

Thurman, N., & Schapals, A. K. (2016). Live Blogs, Sources, and Objectivity: The Contradictions of Real-Time Online Reporting. In B. Franklin & S. Eldridge II (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies (pp. 283–292). London: Routledge.