Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

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 or the citizen journalism site OhmyNews, 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 of news and opinions.

Gatewatching and related concepts were first introduced in my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. Many articles and presentations about gatewatching and citizen journalism are available here, and with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders I also publish the group blog Gatewatching.org.

Technorati : citizen journalism, gatewatching, journalism, news, online news
Del.icio.us : citizen journalism, gatewatching, journalism, news, online news