From Actors to Context: Visual Gatekeeping in Convergent Newsrooms
(2026) Journalism Practice — p. 1-20 (2026)
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- (en) In contemporary digital news environments, photography plays a central role in attracting audience attention and shaping editorial storytelling. Image selection is increasingly embedded in convergent newsroom workflows involving multiple actors, platforms and constraints. This article examines how visual gatekeeping operates in such contexts through ethnographic observations and interviews conducted in five French-speaking daily newspapers in Belgium, France, and Switzerland. Our findings show that visual gatekeeping is a distributed and negotiated process involving multiple actors whose roles are variably defined within newsroom organizations. Beyond individual preferences or traditional news values, image selection is shaped by contextual influences linked to the temporality of news production, the publication medium (print or web), and anticipated audience engagement. We argue that visual gatekeeping is best understood as a context-driven and situated process, in which selection criteria vary depending on temporal, technological, and platform-specific conditions. This study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of visual gatekeeping as a situational and organizational mediated process in contemporary journalism.
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Zecchinon, P. (2026). From Actors to Context: Visual Gatekeeping in Convergent Newsrooms. Journalism Practice, 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1080/17512786.2026.2682273 (Original work published 2026)