Contextual gatekeeping in a platformized news ecology

Gatekeeping in contemporary journalism unfolds within platformized environments where audience signals, technological affordances, and organizational histories intersect. This study examines how engagement within topical beats relates to subsequent editorial volume across platforms and outlet types. Using two and a half years of data from 39 English language outlets in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland during 2017 to 2019, the analysis models whether prior month engagement predicts changes in story counts by platform and organizational lineage. While prior research offers mixed evidence on whether audience metrics translate into editorial change, this study shows that responsiveness to engagement is systematically conditional, varying across platforms and between legacy and digitally born outlets. Results indicate that engagement predicts increased coverage overall, with the strongest effects on Facebook pages of digitally born outlets, weaker effects on Facebook pages of legacy outlets, and the smallest effects on legacy websites, while websites of digitally born outlets fall in between. The pattern supports a contextual account of gatekeeping in which platform logics, embedded to different degrees in newsroom workflows, shape responsiveness to audience signals, whereas editorial autonomy remains more salient on websites and in legacy organizations. The period is positioned as a historical baseline of heightened social media dependence and a benchmark for assessing later shifts toward subscriber-oriented strategies, informing theory and policy on platform power and editorial independence.