Göteborg: "Gatekeeping has become a dirty word, but it's still our job"

At the fourth session of the 15th World Editors Forum the question of how online editors view user participation in making news was partly answered thanks to a study. Two persons working on this study, called "Guarding open gates:How online editors view user participation in making news", were Steve Paulussen, Senior Researcher at Gent University, Belgium, and Jane B. Singer, Professor at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

The study was based on analyzing five different news and publishing stages; the first stage being access and observation; second being selection or filtering; third being processing and editing; fourth being distribution and finally the fifth and last stage is that of interpretation.

For the study, editors of 15 newspaper online versions were interviewed. Perhaps the most obvious finding was that user participation tends to take place at the fifth and last stage, interpretation. The newsstory is already written, produced and published before the reader has a say, which usually happens through commenting and giving feedback below the article in a special comment field. The editors of all 15 online newspapers felt this was something necessary and positive.

What is worth pointing out about this kind of participation is that most comments posted did not revolve around hyper-local news but rather "big" news like the war in Iraq, the American election, the Israel-Palestine conflict etc.

As for the first stage, access and observation, editors believe users can contribute as a source, but not actually much more than before. They also thought that most of the news sent by users were "small news", stories from the margins.

The second stage, selection and filtering is the most controversial and journalistically territorial in a sense. From an editor and journalist's view, gatekeeping is still extremely important. It's definitely not the job of the user. Mr Paulussen quoted one of the editors as having said "Gatekeeping has become a dirty word, but it's still our job".

There was mixed answers about the third stage, processing and editing. Some websites like Le Figaro and El País have let users participate in this stage quite alot. El País lets readers publish their blogs and photos on their website and Le Figaro created a special site during the French municipality election where readers could discuss and rate their mayors.
Other websites have not embraced this to the same extent .

Users participating in distribution was quite common and not deemed as negative. Readers can use recommendation tools to rate or tag articles. This could be shown internally on the news site or externally on sites as digg.com.