Gatewatching and News Curation

This chapter 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. More recently, gatewatching has received new impetus with the advent of contemporary social media platforms: 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 maximize the shareability of their stories via social media, and a number of new players (e.g. BuzzFeed) are fundamentally built around providing ‘viral’ content. This chapter also 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, not least also by involving them in collaborative news curation practices. Further, it also asks whether, as journalism is subsumed into social media, news outlets can remain distinctive enough to survive.