Gatewatching, Not Gatekeeping: Collaborative Online News Prediction 52:

In the future, everyone will be a news reporter. For a long time, gatekeeping has provided a dominant paradigm for journalistic news gathering and news publishing in the mass media, both for journalists' own conceptualisation of their work and for academic studies of this mediation process. In media such as print, radio, and TV, with their inherent strictures of available column space, air time, or transmission frequencies, it is necessary to have established mechanisms which police these gates and select events to be reported according to specific criteria of newsworthiness, such as Galtung & Ruge's news values (1965). Following Lewin and White, McQuail defines gatekeeping as 'the process by which selections are made in media work, especially decisions whether or not to admit a particular news story to pass through the " gates " of a news medium into the news channels' (1994: 213). Lately, however, the effectiveness of gatekeeping has been questioned from a number of perspectives: on the one hand, increasingly 'the practice of journalism is being contaminated from outside. The " fourth estate " is in danger of being overwhelmed by the " fifth estate " , the growing number of " PR merchants and spin doctors " influencing the news agenda' (Turner et al. 2000: 29, following