ABSTRACT
As the internet has developed into a dominant news source for citizens of advanced democracies, and as 'user-generated content' has evolved alongside more traditional formats in a networked news environment, scholars have tracked challenges to a professional gatekeeping role. Normative journalistic behavior involves ethically exercising this gatekeeping control over news content on the public's behalf. For many journalists, sentiments seem to have changed relatively little with the advent of social media and its greatly expanded co-production options. Editors of websites affiliated with major US newspapers continued to emphasize their role as providers of credible information in the 2004 election campaign. After a small surge of excitement in 2004, as blogs were becoming prominent, online editors generally have retreated from an emphasis on political content from outside the newsroom. Instead, they continue to see the newsroom's output, in particular, technologically enhanced forms of traditional political information, as their most noteworthy contributions to the democratic process.
