Smartphone-Enabled Citizen Journalism and the Transformation of Gatekeeping in Indian News Media
Description
The smartphone is the main medium where Indian citizens read, make and share news and has changed the gatekeeping system that used to dominate journalism. This paper conducts a secondary analysis to analyse the prevalence of citizen journalism through smartphone in the Indian media landscape and its impact on the news coverage. The paper, which draws from verified secondary sources like the Reuters Institute Digital News Report and the India-specific edition of the report, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) performance reports, and peer-reviewed empirical studies published in reputed journals, presents a synthesis of quantitative and qualitative evidence on the mobile-first news context in India. The analysis draws on Gatekeeping Theory (Lewin, 1947; White, 1950; Shoemaker & Vos, 2009), and the Domestication of Technology framework (Silverstone & Haddon, 1996) that together begin to describe the process of the smartphone being taken up into everyday news and civic work along with the dispersal of editorial control from professional newsrooms. The study shows that a significant majority of Indian online news users use their smartphones as their main device to access news and that news outlets like YouTube and WhatsApp are now on par or surpassing traditional outlets as their news source. Meanwhile, survey evidence published by others indicates that people value citizen-created content because of its immediacy and reach, but that this type of content is seen as less objective than professionally created journalism unless there is clear evidence of sources. The paper argues that the smartphone has created a distributed gatekeeping model in India, which while enabling mass participation in the news-making process, also places a greater burden on the people to verify the news, media institutions and the regulators.
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Institutions
- Manipal University JaipurRajasthan, Jaipur