Who are the gatekeepers of news? How effective is investigative reporting at informing the public?

When a story comes into a newsroom it has two possible roads to travel, either it makes its way into the broadcast or newspaper and it becomes part of the news, or it is decided that there is either not enough room, not enough time in the broadcast, or not enough evidence to pursue the story. The people who make the decisions on whether the story will make it or not are called the gatekeepers, who have the job of deciding what is important enough to inform the public about and when and how it will be presented. Gatekeepers can also use their position to make creative changes to stories, like condensing a story to make it more potent or adding more footage to increase the credibility.

Before the story makes it to the gatekeepers it must first make it through the reporters, who decide whether to pursue a story or not. Among these reporters are the hard-hitting investigative reporters, who, instead of just showing up to a scene to report about a break in at a hotel, try to find out who broke in and why. Two of these reporters were Woodward and Bernstein, who covered the break in at the Democratic headquarters in Washington and connected the crime back to President Nixon, eventually forcing him to resign. Investigative reporting is very effective at informing the public of important information which they otherwise would never had received.