Conversational Gatekeeping—Social Interactional Practices of Post-Publication Gatekeeping on Newspapers’ Facebook Pages

ABSTRACT

Digital platforms, such as social media networks, have become intertwined in the news ecosystem, leading news media to lose their role as the sole gatekeeper in the public space. This development has given an active voice to audiences and turned journalism more into conversations between journalists and their audiences. The starting observation for this article was that alongside journalists, platforms and audiences play a part in the gatekeeping process that takes place post-publication, and therefore we need to gain a better understanding of this triadic relationship. Furthermore, as conversations are one of the main functions of social media platforms, more understanding of the role of social interaction in post-publication gatekeeping is needed. After analysing posts (N = 180) and their comments on Finnish newspapers’ Facebook pages utilising content and digital conversation analysis, we extend the traditional gatekeeping theory to post-publication practices of gatekeeping and finally suggest the concept of conversational gatekeeping. The concept explains how through social interaction journalists and social media audiences are able to build mutual understanding and create norms as well as decide on the content and action that is appropriate or wanted in the public news space formed on the particular online platform.

KEYWORDS:

• Conversational gatekeeping
• digital conversation analysis
• Facebook
• gatekeeping
• newspapers
• post-publication gatekeeping
• social interaction
• social media

Acknowledgements

The first version of this paper was presented at the Future of Journalism conference 2019, Cardiff. People have been generous and donated their time to formulate this work ever since. We would like to thank the research group of Jyväskylä University’s LUOTSIVA project led by Epp Lauk. In addition, we are indebted to Tim Vos, Avery Holton, Minna Koivula, Lauri Haapanen, Anna Rantasila, Mikko Villi, Pasi Ikonen, and Ville Manninen for their insightful comments and help. Lastly, we would like to express our gratitude to the anonymous reviewers who helped us to make this paper better.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This article is a part of a dissertation project that has been funded by the C.V. Akerlund Media Foundation, the Ellen and Artturi Nyyssönen Foundation, the Media Industry Research Foundation of Finland, the Finnish Cultural Foundation, and the Department of Language and Communication Studies (Univeristy of Jyväskylä).