Gatewatching and News Curation
Axel Bruns · 2017
The Origins of GatewatchingThe term gatewatching describes the monitoring of the output gates of conventional news organizations -their Websites, broadcasts, print editions, and other publication channels -for news reporting, as well as the referencing, citation, evaluation, critique, and other use of such source materials in another outlet's own publication output (Bruns 2005;2018).Such secondary use of original content from other news publishers places the gatewatcher in a "second tier" of the news environment, as envisaged by journalism scholar Herbert Gans well before the advent of modern online publishing technologies (1980, p. 318): focusing by necessity on commentary, discussion, and opinion writing, gatewatchers are rarely able to break entirely new stories, but by continuing to track existing news events and issues even after the mainstream media's attention has moved on, and by juxtaposing multiple accounts of the same issue from different outlets, they often contribute critical new perspectives to the public debate.In doing so, make the news environment more multiperspectival (Gans 1980, p. 313).