A framework for understanding generative AI impacts on gatekeeping and agenda-setting in the brave new journalistic world

With GenAI transforming newsrooms at warp speed, it is imperative to consider its implications for foundational gatekeeping and resultant agenda-setting. We offer a new framework with which to view these issues, describing the rapid deployment of GenAI in newsrooms and its impact on newsgathering, newsroom research, news production, and news distribution. With these gatekeeping issues laid out, we follow up by offering a series of research questions and hypotheses for how AI will influence first, second, and third level agenda-setting, along with troubling normative implications on the horizon.