Gatekeeping, Indexing, and Live-Event News: Is Technology Altering the Construction of News?

Abstract

We are interested in event-driven news, defined as coverage of activities that are, at least at their initial occurrence, spontaneous and unmanaged by officials within institutional settings. Most news most of the time has its origins in official proceedings and pronouncements. That may be changing. We want to know if event-driven news stories, facilitated by technological advancements such as the videophone, are becoming more numerous, and if they are changing the reliance of journalists on officials in selecting and cueing their political content. In particular, we are interested in coverage of international events as an interesting test of whether technological changes are liberating journalists to report far flung world developments with more emphasis on live feeds and less emphasis on officials in highly managed institutional settings providing the framing. An alternative hypothesis suggests that even if live event coverage is on the rise, journalists may quickly bring officials into the news frame, continuing the familiar gatekeeping practice of "officiating" (news management and cueing) those live events. We find that event-driven news stories are indeed more common, but that officials seem to be as much a part of the news as ever. When an unpredicted, nonscripted, spontaneous event is covered in the news, the one predictable component of coverage remains official sources.