Gatekeeping
It is the process of deciding which among millions of events will become news and which will go to the trash.
Countless events take place in the world every day, but a very small portion of these finds a place in a publication. Gatekeepers; as editors, editors-in-chief, and algorithms, filter the flow of information. This filtering process takes place in line with the priorities, political stance, and economic interests of the publication.
Example: An editor’s decision to headline a short statement by a local politician instead of news of a disaster in a distant continent.
Go deeper
In traditional media, gatekeeping was an institutional filter made by human hands. With digitalization, this role largely passed to platform algorithms. However, this does not mean filtering is over; only the identity of the gatekeepers has changed. While news sites use click potential as a threshold criterion, algorithms prioritize the probability of interaction. An event having news value is now measured by how much attention it can attract rather than how important it is. For this reason, the reader must keep in mind that the news falling before them is a very narrow selection that has passed through a wide filter.