The evolving role of journalists as gatekeepers in the age of (generative)

Over the last decades, journalism has always influenced technology, and technology has always altered journalism (Pavlik, 2000). Since 2022, technologies in the form of (generative) artifi-cial intelligence (AI), ¹ not least large language models (LLMs), have increasingly permeated the news ecosystem, impacting the entire journalistic value chain from information gathering to content production and distribution (Diakopoulos et al., 2024; see Chapters 1 and 2). This growing integration of algorithms has heightened the focus on research examining human-machine communication (for an overview, see, for example, Guzman & Lewis, 2020), consid-ering not only the work processes of news professionals but also the implications for journalism's traditional roles, not in the least the function of gatekeeping (see Chapter 10). Historically, journalists and editors functioned as the primary gatekeepers, determining which news was worthy of publication or broadcast. Shoemaker and Vos (2009) described who decides which messages passed through the gates. The classic gatekeeping theory elucidates how various elements are transformed into news and how that news is framed, narrated, emphasized, placed, and promoted (Vos, 2015). In executing these roles, journalists selectively gathered, sorted, wrote, edited, positioned, scheduled, repeated, and otherwise curated information into news (Vos & Thomas, 2019).