The networked gatekeeping process for news in the 21st century

“Gatekeeping theory” is the conceptual framework that was developed during the 20th century within the journalism and mass communication research discipline to help us understand the complex, multivariate factors that collectively influence the content of the media. But gatekeeping theory in its extant form is limited in its descriptive value for today's media environment because it was developed primarily to describe the media system of the 20th century. In this paper, a combined consideration of our existing knowledge of gatekeeping theory and the principles of social network analysis offers a foundation for a conceptual shift towards the development of a networked gatekeeping theory for news for the media of the public sphere in the 21st century. Further, these conceptual considerations offer insights for approaching the empirical investigation of the gatekeeping process using social network analysis and other relevant methods facilitated by software packages such as NodeXL. I also identify in this paper some current gaps in social network analysis metrics for the study of important social network sites like Twitter. The gaps in knowledge currently limit our capacity to empirically understand the unique roles of journalists as trusted general interest intermediaries in the networked gatekeeping process.