This document summarizes key points from Axel Bruns' book "Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere". It discusses how social media has changed journalism and news sharing by allowing widespread citizen participation. Journalists and news organizations have had to adapt by embracing social media and curating news on platforms. However, platforms now dominate online advertising revenue while the funding model for journalism remains precarious. There are also concerns about echo chambers, groupthink and the "metrification" of news promoting populism.

1. @qutdmrc
CAIS, Bochum, 17 Apr. 2019
Axel Bruns | @snurb_dot_info
Gatewatching and News Curation
Journalism and Social Media

2. Earlybird registration ends 1 Aug. 2019 – see http://aoir.org/ for details.

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Gatewatching and News Curation
Axel Bruns. Gatewatching and
News Curation: Journalism, Social
Media, and the Public Sphere.
New York: Peter Lang, 2018.

4. Ancient History (The 2000s)Ancient History (The 2000s)

5. http://autonomousuniversity.org/content/urban-scenes
Citizen Journalism

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From Parasites to Colleagues
‘journalists [have not] been eager to let the public in on how the
sausage is made’ — Jane Singer
but doing ‘proper’ journalism is resource-intensive: gatewatching, not gatekeeping
‘the balance of power between journalism and its publics is shifting’
— Jo Bardoel & Mark Deuze
‘the democratization of opinion on the net’ — Clay Shirky
‘the Internet, at its ugliest, is just an open sewer’ — Thomas L. Friedman
‘without the daily work of print journalists, one wonders if … blogs would
contain any real news’ — Paul Andrews
‘blogs … are being “normalized” by journalists’ — Jane Singer
‘we cannot expect citizen-journalism projects to provide serious
competition to established, corporate media’ — Chris Atton

7. A Second Wave of Disruption

8. https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360

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Journalism and / on Social Media
‘hybrid system’ of ‘“older” and “newer” media’ — Andrew Chadwick et al.
‘with social media, journalism and audiences meet on uncommon ground’
— Wiebke Loosen and Jan Schmidt
‘spontaneously emerging encounter publics’ — Christoph Neuberger et al.
‘networks for the wild flows of messages’ — Jürgen Habermas
 from random acts of journalism to habitual acts of gatewatching and newssharing
 not democratic (equal voices), but demotic (widespread participation)
 collective news curation by social media users, including journalists

10. (Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: Digital News Report 2016)

11. (https://www.theverge.com/2013/1/23/3890674/tweeting-the-news-andy-carvin-test-pilots-twitter-

12. Where to from Here?

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Reshaping Networks
‘when reporters rely solely on social media, negotiation-through-conversation
is bypassed’ — Marcel Broersma and Todd Graham
‘reinforced the groupthink and echo chamber that is Washington political coverage’
— journalist interviewed by John H. Parmelee
‘you design your own filter bubble’ — Paul Bradshaw
‘Twitter has taken the conversations political reporters would have at the
press table … and pushed them into the public’ — Parmelee’s journalist
 more groupthink and concerns about echo chambers and filter bubbles,
 but also greater exposure of groupthink and insider talk to public scrutiny
 removing journalists as an inherently necessary part of the news process

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Normalisation in Precarious Times
‘a more involved presence on Twitter … resulted in significant oomph in
correspondents’ popularity’ — Raluca Cozma and Kuan-Ju Chen
‘you go into survival mode, which for me means becoming a walking, talking,
texting, tweeting, whatever billboard for myself’ — journalist interviewed by Logan
Molyneux and Avery Holton
‘does journalism now include not only the content but also the journalist
herself?’ — Ulrika Hedman
 normalisation of social media into journalism,
 or normalisation of journalism into social media?
 if journalists and their content are free on Twitter, who pays the bills?

15. Journalism and Its Platforms

16. (http://www.digitalnewsreport.org/publications/2016/editorial-analytics-2016/)

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Quantifying Journalism
‘systematic analysis of quantitative data on various aspects of audience
behavior’ ― Federica Cherubini and Rasmus Kleis Nielsen
‘basically, contemporary forms of analytics are very good at understanding the
main ways in which people used digital media in 2010’ ― Cherubini and Nielsen
‘“It’s like crack,” he said, grinning. “You can sit here and watch it, popping
all night.”’ ― newsroom manager interviewed by Edson Tandoc Jr.
 a feedback loop between newsroom gatekeeping and audience gatewatching
‘if the company’s not making money then I might get laid off’
― Tandoc Jr.’s interviewee
‘the natural inclination, if one metric is seen as the important, true metric
… is to game it’ ― Jonah Peretti
‘Buzzfeed has been built around the proposition that distribution of
journalism will happen primarily through social networks’ ― Jonah Peretti

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Platform Power
‘journalists … are a pretty useful source of marketing for Twitter’ ― Ali Nobil Ahmad
‘transforming newspaper websites into appendages of Americanized
corporate information capitalism’ ― Ali Nobil Ahmad
‘65% of the digital ad revenue pie is swallowed up by just five tech
companies’ ― Pew Research Center
‘a trade-off between control of your own journalism, versus reaching large
audiences’ ― Emily Bell
‘we are definitely not a media company, but we do recognise that we play
an important role and that means we have responsibilities’
― Facebook VP John Hegeman
 need to re-route some revenue streams from platforms to content producers
 ‘fake news’ panic may provide an opportunity for wider regulatory intervention

19. The Irish Sun: “What did Mark Zuckerberg tell Congress and did the Facebook CEO address the Cambridge Analytica data leak in his testimony?”
https://www.thesun.ie/news/2426061/what-did-mark-zuckerberg-tell-congress-and-did-the-facebook-ceo-address-the-cambridge-analytica-data-leak-in-his-testimony/

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TL;DR Summary
social media as a tertiary space which does not inherently privilege journalists and outlets
metrification of engagement may promote populism and invite gaming
gatewatching and newssharing is now habitual for news users
new opportunities for journalists as news curators and personal brands
normalisation of social media, or normalisation of journalism into social media
major generational shift towards social media as primary news source
platforms siphoning off most of the advertising revenue
funding for journalism remains precarious
need to enforce platforms’ corporate social responsibility?

21. Ceterum Censeo

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Against the API Lockout
Furthermore, we demand that social media platforms
provide data access to critical, independent, public-interest research.

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CAIS, Bochum, 17 Apr. 2019
Axel Bruns | @snurb_dot_info
@snurb_dot_info – http://snurb.info/
@socialmediaQUT – http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au/
@qutdmrc – https://www.qut.edu.au/research/dmrc
This research is supported by the ARC Future Fellowship project
“Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian
Online Public Sphere”, the ARC Discovery project “Journalism
beyond the Crisis”, and the ARC LIEF project “TrISMA: Tracking
Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis.”