Who decides what is news today?

The process of determining what is news has always involved a variety of actors—from publicists, government officials, and others seeking to get information into the news media to journalists evaluating the newsworthiness of that information. What has changed is that the process has become much more complicated and involves many more people and new technologies. Editors and broadcast news producers who not long ago were the primary "gatekeepers" of what the public saw and heard as news have been replaced in part by the traffic directors and consumers of digital media.

The traffic directors include the leaders of digital native websites; the programmers of algorithms that determine what news is most easily found on search engines and shared on social media; the digital data analysts in news organizations who discover which content attracts the most traffic to their sites and how it arrives there; curators of personalized content digital media; and so-called "power user" digital news consumers who are most active in sharing what they like online. They all help decide what people first see when they click on websites or what pops up on the screens of their computers and mobile devices.

News consumers, for their part, have their own say in ways that include the Twitter feeds they follow, the Facebook pages and links they prefer, and the digital news alert subjects they select. Websites and social media increasingly try to feed back to consumers the kinds of content they have most often clicked on in the past, just as advertisers try to feed to them ads that fit the profiles their keystrokes have drawn over time.

Traditional news media gatekeepers still play a role by deciding what news their organizations cover, which is still the largest amount of news available to be shared digitally. But they lose much of their influence after that—as their content bounces around the Internet like a beach ball in a sports crowd.