Comments on: Gatekeeping on a Flat Earth

By: Pick of the Orchard 3.13.06 | Dallas Public Relations Idea Grove

Pick of the Orchard 3.13.06 | Dallas Public Relations Idea Grove — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:26 +0000

[...] Gatekeeping on a Flat Earth (Newsome.Org) [...]

By: Seth Finkelstein

Seth Finkelstein — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 03:43:00 +0000

Bleh. Marketing and PR abuse of language strikes again.Blogs are distributed in terms of a tiny few having tremendous power to direct audience attention, relative to everyone else.This simple mathematical fact is so disturbing to the evangelist salespitch that PR and marketing hypesters devote an intense amount of effort to trying to direct people away from it. “PAY NO ATTENTION TO THAT A-LIST BEHIND THE CURTAIN!”The semantics is intended to work very hard to obscure the way the blog world is very much like other media worlds, with e.g. the same game-playing from corporate flacks. That’s very easy to grasp as a concept, which is why all the articles showing it get such a hornet’s-nest of reaction.

By: Kathy Hale

Kathy Hale — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 23:57:00 +0000

Kent,I’ve watched you and newsome.org move into a major role in “The Conversation” in the past few months, so you’ve demonstrated that those flattening forces are at work. (At least, I’m buying it…)I’m most interested in the “gatekeeping” function as it is practiced by consumers of media. I’d like to add to your point about “readers not being able to get what they want and not knowing what they want because “the microphone holders fill the space pretty well..While we’re a very new blog at battleofthemasks.com, haven’t paid our dues,don’t expect to be high on anyone’s list,etc., we’ve done what I think are some very relevant posts relative to a number of “happening” discussions. We’ve had some traffic, not much–to be expected, not a complaint (well, maybe, just a little…) But today, I posted about Tom Fox, the Quaker hostage in Iraq who was killed. Within a couple of hours it was linked to by a an ultra right-wing blogger chastising me for calling a person guilty of treason a “human rights activist.” My point is not his politics–its that he must have searched for posts on this topic–granted, just to have a launching pad for some things he wanted to say–but still, he searched. He “opened the gate” from his end, something bloggers I would have thought would be interested in our subject matter haven’t done. (or maybe they have, and just disagree about the quality of the content!) Maybe the difference is that those with the microphone don’t need a launching pad, or they have “rounded up the usual suspects” as launching pads. So they close the gate on information they let in. Thanks for continuing to explore this topic.Kathy Hale