The end of the traditional gatekeeper

Abstract

This study identifies salient issues of news outlets and conducts rank order correlations between the agenda of traditional media offline and the agenda of the ‘most popular’ articles (MPAs) from news outlets online from January 29 to February 19, 2010. Findings indicate that the agenda is mostly homogenous across news outlets off and online. Given the way of measuring articles’ popularity, however, the rank order of salient issues differs from the ‘most emailed’ articles to the ‘most read’ ones in news outlets online. Indeed, entertaining news, dealing with sports, arts, culture or entertainment, was more clicked and, thus, salient in the ‘most read’ articles than the ‘most emailed’ ones. On the contrary, informative news including health, technology, or living information was more frequently emailed than entertainment news was. Where salient issues in MPAs are analyzed more in detail, there is also a tendency toward issues unrelated to public affairs when compared to traditional media. The result of this study provides some insights into the potential role of MPAs feature in news and information flows. Although online audiences are likely to be exposed to the media agenda shaped by traditional gatekeepers in general, a unique news feature online—MPAs—has the potential to lessen the power of the gatekeepers in intermedia agenda-setting and facilitate the distinctive pattern of news selections based on the popularity among the audiences.