Investigating the Gatekeeping Role of Social Media Editors of Newspapers Using Computational Text Analysis

• In Event: Computational Methods in Journalism Research

Abstract

Due to the rising popularity of social media as news sources, social media editors of newspapers are becoming important gatekeepers. This begets the question to what extent and how the content published by social media editors differs from the content of the newspaper. In this paper we contribute to this investigation by comparing one year of news coverage of five national newspapers from the Netherlands and Flanders to the news items that they published on Facebook. In addition, we make a methodological contribution. Building on the conceptualization of gatekeeping as a function that transforms an information distribution (i.e. input into output) we propose a computational text analysis approach where information distributions are directly extracted from texts. We demonstrate that this method can be a powerful tool to study gatekeeping on social media, and the code that we develop is published open-source as a package for the R statistical software.

Authors

• Kasper Welbers, U of Leuven

• Michael Opgenhaffen, Leuven U - Institute for Media Studies