Photojournalism and Citizen Journalism

Co-operation, Collaboration and Connectivity

Stuart Allan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415792462
• eBook ISBN: 9781351813440
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Photography

If everyone with a smartphone can be a citizen photojournalist, who needs professional photojournalism? This rather flippant question cuts to the heart of a set of pressing issues, where an array of impassioned voices may be heard in vigorous debate. While some of these voices are confidently predicting photojournalism's impending demise as the latest casualty of internet-driven convergence, others are heralding its dramatic rebirth, pointing to the democratisation of what was once the exclusive domain of the professional.

Regardless of where one is situated in relation to these stark polarities, however, it is readily apparent that photojournalism is being decisively transformed across shifting, uneven conditions for civic participation in ways that raise important questions for journalism's forms and practices in a digital era. This book's contributors identify and critique a range of factors currently recasting photojournalism's professional ethos, devoting particular attention to the challenges posed by the rise of citizen journalism. This book was originally published as two special issues, in Digital Journalism and Journalism Practice.

GATECHECKERS AT THE VISUAL NEWS STREAM

A new model for classic gatekeeping theory

Carol B. Schwalbe, B. William Silcock, and Elizabeth Candello

Over the past 65 years, scholars have reframed the original model of gatekeeping to reflect the changing dynamics of news creation, distribution, and curation. In recent years, communication technologies have opened digital news gates to a proliferation of images captured by professionals and amateurs alike. Anyone with a camera or cell phone can shoot and distribute photographs and videos on the internet. Social media facilitates audience-to-audience sharing through tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat. This stream of visuals, along with the ease with which citizen journalists, bloggers, and tweeters can create and publish content, has changed the gatekeeping process. Few scholars, however, have addressed the impact that visuals have on the gatekeeping model, which was developed using text and broadcast stories. To address the changing role of the visual journalist and the audience, the authors conducted two studies. First, qualitative elite interviews with key visual decision-makers in Europe and the US provided questions for further exploration in the second study—an online cross-sectional survey of visual journalists who belong to three leading US organizations. The questions in this quantitative survey were also influenced by Shoemaker and Reese’s hierarchy of influences and Bennett’s multigated model. Findings indicate changes in the way visual journalists conceptualize their role and that of the audience. Based on these changes, this article proposes a new model of visual gatekeeping—the twenty-first-century visual news stream where “gatecheckers” select, verify, and curate visuals but no longer solely control their distribution the way traditional gatekeepers did.

Introduction

For 65 years, gatekeeping theory has helped scholars and journalists alike understand the key decisions involved in selecting, shaping, and presenting words and images inside the newsroom. In recent years, the ease with which citizen journalists, bloggers, and tweeters can create and publish content has limited the power of traditional gatekeepers (Levinson 1999). Content is increasingly visual across news platforms, from ISIS beheadings to Ferguson riot tweets to selfies of former presidents and ordinary people enduring the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. As Roberts (2005, 2) observed, “the Internet has turned solid ‘gates’ into little more than screen doors.” This article proposes a new gatekeeping model for the twenty-first-century world of news now, with its 24/7 cycle, live global events, social networking, and active audience members who can be their own gatekeepers. As Hermida (2010, 300) observed, “Social media technologies like Twitter are part of a range of Internet technologies enabling the disintermediation of news and undermining [the] gatekeeping function of journalists.” This article begins by highlighting key studies and then focuses on a little-studied area—visual gatekeeping.

Literature Review

Opening the Gate

Research on gatekeepers spans more than six decades, from pioneering sociological studies of 1950s newspaper wire editors to 1990s research on television news producers and more recent work about digital news producers. Social psychologist Kurt Lewin (1947) coined the word “gatekeeper.” O’Sullivan et al. (1994, 126) defined “gatekeepers” as “those personnel, such as editors, who occupy strategic decision-making positions within news media organizations.” Selecting, shaping, and presenting news content is a systematic process “by which billions of messages that are available in the world get cut down and transformed into the hundreds of messages that reach a given person on a given day” (Shoemaker 1991, 1).

In newspaper newsrooms, gatekeepers control the flow of words and images (White 1950), although their degree of autonomy varies (Demers 1993; Matthews 1996). Multiple gatekeepers open and close the news gate at different points in the process (McNelly 1959). Images, for example, can be halted at several points as they pass from the first gatekeeper—the photojournalist—to a picture editor and then to top editors. Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996) hierarchy of influences describes five levels of cultural factors that shape the production of news content: individual, media routines, organizational, extramedia, and ideological. In 2013, Shoemaker and Reese updated their model for the digital age by reversing the order from macro to micro and emphasizing the forces beyond the individual’s control. Several scholars (e.g., Frosh and Pinchevski 2009; Mortensen 2011) have examined individual control and expression through the use of journalism-like techniques known as citizen journalism. Most citizen journalists do not aspire to be professionals but want to contribute to news coverage (Yaschur 2012). Photography, for example, gives citizens a way to communicate another perspective (Ananny and Strohecker 2002) that might be more truthful and objective than that of professional photojournalists (Lai 2011). In addition, disseminating eyewitness images of a crisis on a photo-sharing website can serve as a community forum (Liu et al. 2009). This revived interest in participatory journalism may be the result of both external developments in society and internal changes in journalism (Paulussen et al. 2007).

First Level of Influence: Individual

White’s (1950) classic case study of “Mr. Gates” first applied gatekeeping to the news flow. White recognized that the decisions of a newspaper gatekeeper were “highly subjective” and “reliant upon value-judgments based on the ‘gatekeeper’s’ own set of experiences, attitudes and expectations regarding the communication of ‘news’” (388). Later analyses deemed White’s research too simplistic. MacGregor (1997, 49) showed how the gatekeeper’s filtering process “also evoked certain technical professional issues, his audience’s interest and his paper’s editorial line.” Breed (1955) advanced the concept that gatekeepers worked not to serve an unseen audience but for peer satisfaction. The reporters Breed studied considered themselves part of a professional fraternity.

Television news scholars updated these classic investigations of newspaper newsrooms. Gans (1980) and Gitlin (1980) advanced the idea that since gatekeepers lacked direct audience contact, feedback—a gatekeeper’s verification of accurate communication—came from peers. Broadcast news producers based their selection on how easy a story was to explain, the potential for big audiences, and visual impact (Berkowitz 1990). Other influences included the gatekeeper’s instincts, expert judgment, and motivation (Berkowitz 1997), political ideology (Chang and Lee 1992), education and other experiences (Peterson 1979), attitudes and values (Beard and Olsen 1999), expectations about news content (Snider 1967; White 1950), and class position and career pressures (Gans 1980).

Second Level of Influence: Routine Practices

Individual gatekeepers interact with peers in work routines that correspond to the second level of Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996, 2013) hierarchical model of news influences. Turow (1992, 156) defined routines as “the most powerful engines for supporting institutional approaches in mass media” and, after Tuchman (1972), showed how journalists toss up a “news net” to capture all the various types of stories under deadline pressure. Later, Tuchman (1978) categorized the “routines of news work” by those who labor in an environment that Bantz, McCorkle, and Baade (1980) compared to a “news factory.” News work divides “tasks into chunks at different stages along the assembly line” (Shoemaker and Reese 1996, 86). Shoemaker and Reese’s model, however, does not account for the lack of established routines in digital newsrooms (Keith 2011).

Other Influences: Media Organizations, Social Institutions, and Social Systems

External influences also play an important role in determining which stories pass through the news gates and how they are presented to the public. At the organizational level, “The well-trained editor or news director makes judgments reflecting prevailing journalistic practices and the specific needs of the audience as perceived by upper management” (Dennis and Merrill 1984, 137). Several scholars (Gans 1980; Gitlin 1980; Schudson 1991), however, asserted that the media company’s ownership might not be crucial. Arguing against a political-economic theory of the media, Eliasoph (1988, 315) described how “literary conventions, organizational pressures, and the journalist’s own ideologies” create news. Advertising pressures and other economic constraints also shape story selection (Berkowitz 1990; Donohue, Olien, and Tichenor 1989). On the ideological level, Shoemaker and Reese (2013) identified free markets and the capitalist system as benchmarks that affect journalistic culture.

Within complex global information markets, the interplay between traditional news producers/editors and the active audience (citizens sharing, bloggers posting) in the swirl of real-time feedback via social media prompted Bruns (2008a, 2011) to argue that we live in the era of “gatewatching.” Bruns (2008a, 5) wrote that bloggers, citizen journalists, and commentators filter the news flow, forming “gatewatchers” who “keep a constant watch at the gates, and point out those gates to their readers which are most likely to open onto useful sources.” From a global perspective, political and economic factors can complicate the interplay between traditional news functions and audiences (Hanitzsch and Mellado 2011). Wu (1998) observed that news editors tend to neglect or belittle the audience’s interests in international news. Conversely, Brueggemann (2011) found that journalism is a transnational profession based on a set of transnational practices. In other words, patterns that occur in different countries and different kinds of news outlets are consistent. Previous research has shown that international gatekeepers use various criteria, including proximity and conflict, to determine the newsworthiness of certain stories (Roberts and Bantimaroudis 1997). Bakker (2014) observed that journalists in the Netherlands perform more gatekeeping duties today than during Mr. Gates’ era. These journalists have new titles, such as “harvesters,” “curators,” and “community managers,” and additional responsibilities, such as sifting through social media and selecting user-generated content. No matter what their title, their role includes the additional technical skills of “programming and visualization” (597).

Digital Gates

Recently, scholars have been rethinking whether the digital world, where users can be their own gatekeepers, threatens the hegemony of media gatekeepers (Bruns 2011). In Bennett’s (2004) multigated model, news content is shaped by interactions among the four main news gates: (1) the reporter’s news judgment values, (2) organizational news-gathering routines, (3) economic constraints, and (4) information and communication technologies. Thus, the digital audience can have a greater effect on news selection because of increased interaction between users and journalists (Boczkowski 2004; Weaver et al. 2006). Journalists have adopted participatory forms of media, such as blogs (Singer 2005), social media (Lasorsa, Lewis, and Holton 2012), and open-source programming (Lewis and Usher 2013).

Researchers differ on how much influence traditional media and news agencies have on the creation of news (Fahmy, Kelly, and Kim 2007). Williams and Delli Carpini (2000) pronounced the collapse of the gatekeeping role by the mainstream press, arguing that the internet’s endless sources undermine the idea that information has to pass through distinct gates. Digital technology has enabled the government, politicians, public relations firms, terrorist groups, and sports and entertainment organizations to distribute visuals and other material directly to the public as well as to media outlets (Bennett 2004).

Visual Gatekeeping

Although Western culture values words more than visual representations, the “remarkable ability to absorb and interpret visual information” is becoming more important in the information age than it was in the industrial age (Mirzoeff 1999, 5). Kress (2003, 1) referred to this transition as “the broad move from the new centuries-long dominance of writing to the new dominance of the image.” The ubiquity of digital cameras embedded in mobile devices, the spread of television across cultures, YouTube, and the instant distribution of images across social networks via Instagram, Vine, Twitter, Snapchat, and other apps attest to an increasingly visual culture in which the average citizen in developed nations sees tens of thousands of images daily (Rosen 2005).

Nonetheless, only a few gatekeeping studies focus on images. At newspapers, factors shaping photo selection include market size, perceived audience needs, tradition, the changing roles of copy editors and designers (Keith 2015), and national trends (Wanta and Roark 1994). Decisions about images can reflect political bias (Perlmutter 1998), strengthen the white male status quo (Bissell 2000a, 2000b), reinforce gender stereotypes (Wanta and Leggett 1989), and rely mainly on Western news agencies rather than alternative sources (Fahmy 2005a). National Geographic photo editors responded to popular tastes and in turn shaped readers’ perceptions of developing cultures (Lutz and Collins 1993). Gatekeepers are aware of the effect that visuals have on their audiences (Fahmy 2005b), as viewers’ perceptions can change based on “an image’s position, primacy, or size, even though its information per se does not change” (Zelizer 2008, 91).

Some scholarship on visual decision making focuses on the reluctance of the media to disseminate graphic images (Silcock, Schwalbe, and Keith 2008). Many factors—from audience sensitivities and good taste to privacy and newsworthiness—guide editors through these ethical quagmires (Kratzer and Kratzer 2003; O’Brien 1993). Traumatic personal experiences and repeated exposure to tragic images play a role in the intricate process of choosing graphic images (Peterson and Spratt 2005). Indeed, photographers and photo editors might feel they are creating a specific visual syntax through their editorial choices (Rodriguez and Dimitrova 2011).

However, little research illustrates what visuals mean in determining what makes news. Fahmy, Kelly, and Kim (2007) suggested that future studies investigate the extent to which photo editors’ professional values, traditions, and practices shape their news judgment about the use of photographic material. Just as White’s (1950) original study did, Bruns (2008b, 3) called for scholars to use mixed methods, “which provide clear quantitative as well as qualitative insight” into citizen journalism, news, and the blogosphere. Shoemaker and Reese’s (1996, 2013) hierarchy of influences and Bennett’s (2004) multigated model of news gatekeeping provided a framework for examining this changing, visually d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Photojournalism and citizen journalism
• PART 1
• PART 2
• Index