Invited presentation at the virtual conference Periodismo Ciudadano en la Esfera Digital, Colombia, 22 June 2022.

1. CRICOS No.00213J
News Media and Audiences in the Digital Sphere:
Gatewatching and News Curation
Prof. Axel Bruns
Australian Laureate Fellow
Digital Media Research Centre
a.bruns@qut.edu.au – @snurb_dot_info

2. CRICOS No.00213J
Axel Bruns. Gatewatching and News
Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and
the Public Sphere. New York: Peter Lang,
2018.
Axel Bruns. Are Filter Bubbles Real?
London: Polity, 2019
Gatewatching and News Curation

3. CRICOS No.00213J
News Media,
Disrupted (Again)

4. CRICOS No.00213J
Journalists
Editors
Masthead Sites
News Bloggers
Citizen Journalists
Independent Sites
Hosting Services
gatewatching
Web 2.0

5. CRICOS No.00213J
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jackdorsey/182613360

6. CRICOS No.00213J
Journalists Experts
Editors Scholars
Politicians Everyday Users
Pundits Bots
Social Media Platforms
social
media

7. CRICOS No.00213J
(Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: Digital News Report 2016)
gatewatching
newssharing

8. CRICOS No.00213J
Social Media as Citizen Media
‘a vital source for real-time citizen news’ during crises — Stuart Allan
‘the witnesses are taking over the news’ — Jeff Jarvis
‘there is journalism before Twitter and journalism after Twitter’ — Emily Bell
‘a new seismograph for current and surprising events’ — Christoph Neuberger
‘a common medium for professional journalism and citizen journalism’ — Gilad Lotan et al.
‘social awareness streams … outside the formal structures of journalism’ — Alfred Hermida
‘crowdsourc[ing] prevalent actors and their tweets to prominence’
— Sharon Meraz & Zizi Papacharissi

9. CRICOS No.00213J
A Generational Shift
(Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism: Digital News Report 2017)

10. CRICOS No.00213J
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

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

12. CRICOS No.00213J
Where to from Here?

13. CRICOS No.00213J
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 professional 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

14. CRICOS No.00213J
Echo Chambers? Filter Bubbles?
Adamic & Glance (2005)
Williams et al. (2015)
Bruns et al. (2017)
Pew Center (2016)

15. CRICOS No.00213J
US progressives
US conservatives
France /
Germany
Italy
Brazil
India
alternative
health
conspiracies
UK
alternative
finance
Space-Domain Network
Nodes: public pages, groups, verified profiles / domains in posts
Size: weighted in-degree
Colour: weighted in-degree
FakeNIX domain posts, 1 Jan. 2016 to 31 Mar. 2021
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CMDqD2YMbw&t=2s&ab_channel=DigitalMediaResearchCentre)

16. CRICOS No.00213J
Journalism and
Its Platforms

17. CRICOS No.00213J
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?
 who should even be defined as a journalist these days?
 if journalists and their content are free on Twitter, who pays the bills?

18. (https://medium.com/@chrismoranuk/dreams-of-digital-journalism-don-t-have-to-be-dreams-saying-goodbye-to-ophan-s-dad-facefb660696)

19. CRICOS No.00213J
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

20. CRICOS No.00213J
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

21. CRICOS No.00213J
Facebook News Ban: 18 Feb. 2021 ~7:00 to 26 Feb. 2021 ~5:00
(Data provided courtesy of CrowdTangle.)

22. 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/

23. CRICOS No.00213J
… and the
Public Sphere?

24. CRICOS No.00213J
• Publics
• Triggered by issues and events
• Fast-moving and short-lived
• Limited in focus and scope
• ‘Wild flows of messages’ (Habermas, 2006)
• Public Spherules
• Defined by topics and themes
• More persistent and stable
• Broader scope but unified by common theme
(Cunningham, 2001; Gitlin, 1998)
• Public Spheres?
• Domain-, identity-, platform-specific
• E.g. political, Indigenous, Twittersphere
• Persistent and highly visible
• Encompassing relevant publics and spherules
• ‘The’ Public Sphere?
• Traditionally, an arena for public debate amongst
elites in front of mass media audiences
• Now, the sum total of smaller publics, spherules,
and spheres?
(Bruns, 2019)
News, Audiences, and ‘the’ Public Sphere

25. CRICOS No.00213J
‘The’ Public Sphere as a Network of Publics
(Bruns, 2008)
overlapping
issue publics
wild flows
of messages
mainstream
media
social and
niche media
the long tail
of attention

26. CRICOS No.00213J
TL;DR Summary
no evidence for filter bubbles, but therefore plenty of opportunity for spread of mis- and disinformation
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
a further transformation of ‘the’ public sphere to a network of publics
social media as a tertiary space which does not inherently privilege journalists and outlets

27. CRICOS No.00213J
@socialmediaQUT – http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au/
@qutdmrc – https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/
This research was supported by the Australian Laureate
Fellowship project “Dynamics of Partisanship and
Polarisation in Online Public Debate”, the ARC Future
Fellowship project “Understanding Intermedia Information
Flows in the Australian Online Public Sphere”, the ARC
Discovery projects “Journalism beyond the Crisis:
Emerging Forms, Practices, and Uses” and “Uses and
Evaluating the Challenge of 'Fake News' and Other
Malinformation”, and the ARC LIEF project “TrISMA:
Tracking Infrastructure for Social Media Analysis.”
Thank you!