The Role Change From The Gatekeeper To The Gate-Opener

The last decade marks the huge transformation in China’s media industry. The city newspapers, which were founded in the late-mid period of1990, encountered development bottleneck, and, in the meantime, new media forms were booming and thriving. The center of journalism quietly changed with the powers of reporters and editors (authors and gatekeepers) becoming weakened and readers (audiences) becoming more and more proactive. In order to attract the readers, the reporters and editors have to present news-reporting of the best quality, carefully study the likes and dislikes of their readers, and update their positioning. They have transformed from "gatekeeper", in the traditional of the term, to "gate-opener", but their responsibilities as gatekeepers remain. The role of "gate-opener" has enriched the traditional gatekeeper theory and made the new career orientation clear to the stuff members in the city newspaper industry.Qilu Evening News and Daily Life, which account for the major sales in Jinan newspaper industry, have repositioned the editors’ role since2007, with a core ideology that the editors’ positioning has to be made forward, their productivity enhanced, and reporters directed, in order to present news-reporting of higher quality, meet the demands from the audiences and promote the core-competitiveness. And the achievements of reforming need to be protected with a rational system, thus the reconstruction of city newspapers’ editing process has become more and more important.The survival of city newspapers cannot exist in isolation from newspaper groups, which are now facing the convergence of media. In the context of media groups’ convergence, the remoulding of editors’ role and the reconstruction of editing process have thus become a sub-process.1But the newspaper groups are concerned with the larger-scaled information-chain designing, the multi-leveled information development and the production-flow reconstruction within the groups. In the omnimedia era in which the media is converging, the reconstruction of editing process reflects the potential demands of the content providers, because the content reveals the core competitiveness that the newspaper could rely on. And the editors’repositioning in the editing process is a core element in the reconstruction of editing process, and the evolution of gatekeeper theory offers a convincing theoretical support for it.What would the future media be? Now that the systemic reform of culture industry has started, city newspapers founded in the old system, such as Qilu Evening News and Daily Life, will be transformed into enterprises and go to the market. Undeniably, because media have ideology and their development is influenced by policies and politics, the media that are politically-favored and protected by policies have a natural advantage. However, the possible leaders in the media industry still belong to those which are marketalized early, highly adapted to the market, enjoys a higher degree of marketalization, comprehends the theories well, and abides by the law of the market.