From Gatekeepers to Gatekeeping Systems: Rethinking Journalism Theory in the Age of Algorithms and Generative AI

Abstract : Gatekeeping has remained one of the foundational theoretical approaches for explaining how information becomes news. From Kurt Lewin’s conceptualisation of gates and channels to David Manning White’s study of the newspaper wire editor, traditional gatekeeping theory located considerable power in human actors who selected, rejected and organised information before it reached audiences. The contemporary news environment, however, complicates this model. News selection is increasingly distributed across journalists, newsroom analytics, search engines, social media platforms, recommender systems and generative artificial intelligence. This paper re-examines gatekeeping theory through an interdisciplinary synthesis of journalism studies, platform studies, artificial intelligence research and communication theory. Drawing on a structured conceptual review of more than 29 major scholarly contributions, it argues that contemporary journalism is moving from identifiable gatekeepers towards interconnected gatekeeping systems. Within these systems, editorial judgement has not disappeared; rather, it interacts continuously with computational selection, platform infrastructures, audience behaviour and generative systems capable of producing, summarising and reorganising information. The paper proposes a five-layer model of contemporary gatekeeping comprising source, editorial, algorithmic, platform and generative gates. It further distinguishes between selection power, traditionally exercised by editors, and visibility power, increasingly exercised through technological infrastructures. The study concludes that gatekeeping theory remains valuable but requires conceptual expansion from the question of who controls the gate to the broader question of how interconnected human and computational systems determine what information becomes visible, credible and socially consequential.