ABSTRACT
David Manning White’s “Mr. Gates” (1950) and Warren Breed’s (1955) analysis of social control in the newsroom were two of the earliest and most enduring contributions to the study of journalism (Reese & Ballinger, 2001). They became landmark studies because they defined an important analytical question and answered it with new primary data that captured the imagination and crystallized a process in a way that had not been done before. In retrospect, one of the most puzzling aspects of the decades following World War II was the neglect of how news was produced. This changed decisively from the late 1960s, as several studies exemplified a new approach, which can broadly be called the news-making paradigm as a result of which, paradoxically, gatekeeping became somewhat neglected. The first aim of this chapter is to articulate the continuing role gatekeeping approaches can play once the key lessons of news making have been absorbed.
