Review of Literature: Gatekeeping and Agenda Setting (cont'd)

Through this blurring of professional and non-professional journalists and writers, the decline of the traditional gatekeeper becomes clear. With the rise of new media, traditional gatekeepers now find themselves unable to keep up with the multitude of material that formats like blogs and wikis offer. Forced to increase the quantity of material themselves (Singer, 2003) traditional gatekeepers are now sacrificing quality in order to keep up with the fast-paced nature of Web 2.0, representing an “evolution in online journalists’ thinking" (Singer, 2006).

The gatekeepers of this generation are the public – the users that generate and share content for the web. While there was originally no competition to the gatekeepers of traditional media up until the 1990s, new media and the influx of user participation in online discourse changed this. Furthermore, new media also shifted the focus of gatekeeping and agenda setting research itself, with researchers now analyzing how new media’s intermedia influence not only impacts the operations of traditional media, but also the entire media environment itself (Messner and Garrison, 2009; Bucy, Gantz & Wang, 2007; McCombs, 2005).

This type of research is still new. With a lack of a distinct theory or theoretical base, Messner and Garrison believe that the proper way to predict the phenomena of online gatekeepers is to simply apply the theories of the past, and shape them to this new medium (2009). With regards to news aggregator Digg.com, the gatekeeping and agenda-setting processes of the site’s top users will be analyzed, with the goal of furthering online gatekeeping research and providing a look at how one of the internet’s top aggregators filters and disseminates material to its audiences.