My research question is two-fold. Has Twitter changed the process of news dissemination and, in turn, forced newsrooms to re-evaluate the gate keeping theory?
To figure this out, I created a Twitter account and followed every news person from San Antonio with a Twitter account. The number stands at 66, but I will likely eliminate station employees who do not work in the newsroom and also non-active accounts (anyone who hasn’t tweeted in the past month). The biggest pain in this has been finding the proper coding categories for the tweets. Luckily, I found a blog on the AEJMC website which I hope will provide the parameters.
Once tweets are coded, I should be able to focus on a category that notes alerts and updates as the key category. This will show that news is being released on Twitter before it hits airwaves, or even the stations’ websites. I will then conduct interviews with newsroom employees about Twitter and use my own experience to determine how gate keeping plays a role in all this.
