Book review: Tim P Vos and Francois Heinderyckx (eds) Gatekeeping in transition

With elegance, Tim Vos outlines the rationale behind the importance of this book. And I believe he is right – this is an important book for today’s media landscape.

Compared to the very first time that David Manning White introduced the idea of gatekeeping in 1950, the news media landscape has changed dramatically. While traditional gatekeepers (e.g. journalists and editors) still play an important role in the news-making process, new gatekeepers are emerging – such as the rise of online tracking services that allows newsmakers novel ways to understand audience desires, the proliferation of social media sites that enables news stories to go viral and sway public discourses, and the emergence of citizen and participatory journalism that challenges traditional ideas of what it means to be news producers. The definitions of news and gatekeepers have evolved dramatically since the 1950s. It is time, as Vos argues, for scholars to revisit the question, ‘How does news turn out the way it does?’ (p. 5).

With an impressive list of contributors, this book explores different ways in which gatekeeping remains a relevant theoretical concept in the field of mass communication and journalism. Together, the contributors offer convincing arguments for why gatekeeping remains important today.

In Chapter 2, Kjerstin Thorson and Chris Wells propose a new framework that seeks to account for new ways in which information is curated and exposed to the audience: individual media consumers themselves, social others embedded in online and offline networks, strategic communicators, and algorithms. This framework offers a helpful way to rethink how information reaches a user through different gates (or curators). This chapter offers a useful guide to understand the organization of the rest of the edited volume – with attention to all the levels in the revised Hierarchy of Influence Model (Shoemaker and Reese, 2014).

To revisit and advance gatekeeping theory, this edited volume does an impressive job cumulating empirical studies around the world using a variety of methodological lenses. Below is a brief summary of the research methods used in each chapter:

Francois Heinderyckx argues at the end of the book for the field to reconceptualize gatekeeping as not merely a theory but ‘a field of its own, a heuristic hub, a rallying cry for communication scholars engaged in researching the intricate mechanisms of news selection and news production’ (p. 267). It is a convincing and important closing remark particularly given the breadth and depth of theoretical advancement and empirical evidence this book provides.