Gatekeeping ecology
May 1, 2010
Further thoughts on the news ecology model — I just finished reading “Gatekeeping Theory” by Pam Shoemaker and Tim Vos, and they make a plea for models that push the five hierarchical levels of influence on media messages to include impact of history, or time. That’s just what I’m working on, so I was gratified to see these accomplished scholars see value in it.
If we envision a model that explains development of new news media forms, moving from variation to selection to retention, we can see that the six hierarchical levels of influence (individual media worker, work routines, organizations, social systems and culture/ideology) will be relevant to a greater or lesser degree, depending on where they fall along the evolutionary cycle (and it is a cycle, as new media entities form, persist and then become deaf to change, opening the door to new variations…).
So, early in the cycle when news media entities take more of an instrumental orientation (oriented toward marketing, strategizing within markets, monitoring and responding to reader desires and competitors’ behaviors), we’ll see that individal-level influences will be more salient and effective — managers strategizing, for example. Later on, as variants form stable populations that bond with external institutions and with audiences, through shared understandings about forms and practices, media routines become more relevant. Organizational inertia sets in as news entities develop complex but relatively stable relationships with source institutions, community leaders, advertisers, and even with loyal audiences. And social institutional influences are more important at these later stages too.
So, can we merge Shoemaker’s model with organizational ecology theory, while also making room for the possibility that orgs suffer from bounded rationality, may pursue public legitimacy more than economic worth, will buffer themselves from changing environments.
