The return of Mr. Gates

curation, aggregation, community management & branded content


Jeff Jarvis wrote in 2006 that: “now that we are entering the age of the amateur — when no one can hold a monopoly on the tools of information — I hope we will witness the death of the gatekeeper”.

The gatekeeper has given journalism a bad name. It pictures the journalist as someone who keeps stuff out: who controls the access to the outside world — a guy with a gun, a watchman to protect vested interest.

The gatekeeper — Mr. Gates — is an invention from the late forties, a ghost from more than 60 years ago, but he has haunted journalism since then. No wonder scholars and journalists celebrate his death. But could this zombie rise again?

I think he can…

But first of all: he never was a perfect role model, or a very popular one. When David Manning White pictured Mr. Gates, he based him on a wire-service editor who did nothing but pick some stories and rejected a lot of others. One man. One man who did not write, did not edit, did not produce one single original article when he was studied.

He did not resemble a ‘real’ journalist at all. But for some mysterious reason Mr. Gates entered the media arena as a powerful role model of journalism. He never was, and he never should be. Journalists are expected to reveal things, to find stuff that others try to hide, to uncover secrets, to explain and to criticize. Picking ready-made articles from a machine could be done by monkeys as well.

But Mr. Gates has returned — in disguise.

In June last year I studied all jobs advertised on the Dutch Villamedia (Journalists’ Union) website, all jobs found on media websites (“working for…”) and all internships on the mediastages.nl website. In total around 100 job descriptions were studied.

In almost every description, media asked for traditional skills and attitudes: writing skills, a feeling for language, interviewing and research experience, creativity… But what was really asked for was something else:

  1. technical skills: webwork, video, audio, newsletters, html, ccs, design, social media…
  2. social skills: managing the social media accounts, finding and asking for UGC, moderation…
  3. curation-skills: “assess content for quality”, “gather content” and “track, value and implement trending topics to convert them into successful stories”…
  4. commercial skills: “making commercial partners happy”, “commercial thinking” and “brand-thinking”…

There is a new sort of journalists asked for — the production of orginal content is no longer the only task. Working with content from partners, contributors, freelancers, social media, wire services, and other media is at least as important as writing or producing a story yourself. This is not just negative:

We do not argue that traditional journalism has disappeared; it is very possible that traditional journalism is combined with tasks derived from the new journalistic roles. Neither do we think that these new roles are a sign of an overall downgrading of journalism. Some tasks, like harvesting information from other sources, do seem to have this “promise” in it; but others, like data journalism, social media publishing or moderating discussions could also be considered as upgrading journalism.

But it does mean that the ghost of Mr. Gates returned: we also need journalists that can find, ask, curate, gather, harvest, translate, edit, and moderate… and having the technical skills of Superman.

There are 50 free copies available at the website of Journalism Studies where the article is published. If they are gone — a mail to pietbakker (at) gmail (dot) com might do the trick.