Gatewatching, Not Gatekeeping: Collaborative Online News

Abstract

This article introduces a new form of collaborative web-based editing which has become increasingly popular in recent years. It involves web users as reporters and co-producers for specialist news sites by allowing them to submit their own news reports and pointers to relevant articles elsewhere on the web, and sometimes even hands over editorial control to the online community altogether. Websites of this type move on from traditional journalistic gatekeeping approaches, where editors publish only what they regard as ‘fit to print’, to what is here termed gatewatching, where almost all incoming material is publicised, but with varying degrees of emphasis. Gatewatching sites frequently become major repositories of specialist information, turning into resource centre sites for their interest community, and are particularly common on the fringes of the open source software development movement. Some of these sites can be seen to directly apply open source ideals (direct involvement of the community, open access to all aspects of the development process) to the reporting of news, in effect making news itself an open source.