Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholars of political communication have long examined newsworthiness by focusing on the
“gatekeepers,” or organizations involved in newsgathering (Lewin 1947, White 1950, Sigal
1973, Gans 1979). However, in recent years these gatekeeper organizations have increasingly
been joined or even supplanted by “new media” competitors, including cable news, talk radio,
and even amateur bloggers. The standards by which this new class of gatekeepers evaluates news
are at best partially explained by prior studies focused on “professional” journalists. In this study,
we seek to correct this oversight. We do so by content analyzing five online news sources –
including wire service, cable news, and blog sites – in order to compare their gatekeeping
decisions in the four months prior, and approximately three weeks immediately following, the
2006 midterm election. To determine each day’s major political news, we collected all stories
from Reuters’ and AP’s “Top Political News” sections. We then investigated whether a given
story was also chosen to appear on each wire’s Top News page (indicating greater perceived
newsworthiness than those that were not chosen) and compare the wires’ editorial choices to
those of more partisan blogs (from the left: DailyKos.com, and from the right:
FreeRepublic.com) and cable outlets (FoxNews.com). We find evidence of greater partisan
filtering on the latter three web sources, and relatively greater reliance on traditional
newsworthiness criteria on the news wires.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Psychiatrists, like other medical professionals with a diagnosing or prescribing role, control access to a range of forms of treatment, medication and service that their patient, or their patient’s carer, may want access to. In this paper, we explore psychiatrist-patient interactions in the distinctive institutional site of the UK NHS Gender Identity Clinic, where the psychiatrist’s ‘gatekeeping’ role is renowned. We focus on some interactional features of the psychiatrist’s gatekeeping role as it gets played out, and oriented to in a specific class of questions that they ask transsexual patients. This class of questions involve the psychiatrist putting to the patient a possible future hypothetical scenario where the patient’s treatment is withdrawn. We show how these hypothetical questions function in the assessment of transsexuals, and how the psychiatrist’s institutional, gatekeeping role, is made manifest in the design of the hypothetical question, and in the response that is elicited from the patient. We suggest that in contexts where the doctor is a gatekeeper, hypothetical questions work rather differently than they have been shown to do in more therapeutic environments. We end by considering the extent to which hypothetical questions can be deemed a useful, or ‘successful’ strategy in the psychiatric assessment of transsexuals.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper applies the concept of “monitorial citizen”, developed by Schudson (1998) for coping with the complexity of the present democracies, to the innovation brought to journalism by the new network-based communication technologies. The first conclusions present a framework based on the idea that we need to develop a model of journalism that:
1) exploits the cognitively and socially efficient formats of information search and distribution, that interactive and multimedia communication offers;
2) conceives the role of journalism not only as informational or partisan-based but also as resource-building;
3) integrates the gatekeeping role of journalists with the self-organizing abilities of the new network-based social networks

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: We use institutional theories of bureaucratic formation and performance to examine how the American states govern the teaching profession. Since the 1970s, nearly all states have adopted professional standards boards to regulate the licensing of public school teachers. These boards vary in their composition, powers, and relationship to other government institutions. Some boards possess much autonomy and authority, while others are primarily advisory. Nearly all have some functional overlap with state boards of education, which are more general governing bodies that help develop and administer elementary and secondary education policy in the states. Empirically, our paper examines state professional standards boards from two angles. First, it draws upon Moe’s (1989) theory of structural choice to consider the factors influencing the emergence of state professional standards boards. Second, the paper considers the impact that these boards have on state policies for teacher licensing. As others have shown theoretically (Hammond and Knott 1996, 1999) and empirically (Heinrich and Lynn 2000), politics and different institutional configurations can influence the kinds of policies that governments produce. By exploiting institutional and policy variation in the American states, we provide a robust test of those claims in the increasingly important area of teacher policy. In so doing, our paper builds upon the work of other scholars who have examined education in the states but focused on state governance of higher education (Lowery 2001; Knott and Payne 2004) not state institutions and policies governing elementary and secondary schools.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Traditional news media are unable to publish all news items because of structural constraints or limited capacities, such as the availability of news holes and staff reporters, resulting in issue constraints that favor a small range of issues over diverse alternative issues. This study explores the question of to what extent such issue constraints are present in news sites. Changes in issue categories across different posting areas of news sites during the two 24-hour news cycles are examined. News sites focus on seven to eight issues over time, regardless of posting areas. This finding is confirmed by small proportions of issue changes by national and secondary news sites over time, and the news sites do not show any significant differences in changing issue categories in both first main sections and secondary sections. Issue constraints originating from limited capacities of the public and news sites fundamentally discourage news sites from publishing diverse issue categories.