Gatekeepers, Broadcasters, Bloggers

We've all been to conference sessions and sat around coffee tables talking about whether bloggers are journalists, and if so are they the new "gatekeepers" of journalism.

Asking whether bloggers are journalists is of course like asking whether writers are authors, or whether singers are divas. The act of creating something doesn't define the author, the intention does.

Can a journalist be a blogger, or blogger be a journalist? Yes, of course. That's not the question. Who decides who is a journalist? Perhaps that is what people mean when they ask whether journalists are bloggers.

Many bloggers behave more like publishers or broadcasters, than journalists. They gather interesting information from different sources and publish it. Just as a television station or a newspaper does.

So that answers the question "are bloggers gatekeepers?"

Of course the question is hardly relevant these days. The idea of a gatekeeper was that there was huge amount of information out there, and a huge number of users who wanted to consume it, but only a small number of organizations that could get the information to the users. They assigned themselves the role of gatekeepers; the organizations that controlled what bits of the huge heap of information made it through the gate to the consumer.

But now that anyone can publish anything by spending a couple minutes signing up here at Blogger or another of the many available free publishing systems, the idea of gates is somewhat out of date. There are big gates and little gates in the barrier between information and users, but anyone who sits by one is a gatekeeper. They are all gatekeepers for their audience however big or small that audience might be.

Does anyone apart from journalists care?