Tom Rosenstiel, then director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, told the science journalists at the Knight science journalism symposium in Boston in February 2008 that the gate-keeping metaphor no longer described what a reporter does. The useful part of his talk was what he proposed to put in its place: four roles. The authenticator helps the audience work out what to believe and what can be trusted. The sense-maker helps them derive meaning from events, on the argument that a story without meaning is worthless. The navigator helps them find their way around a story and points them to the material worth reading. The forum-leader helps them take part in a discussion knowledgeably.
One question from the room was whether a story should link out to the sources it cites, on the worry that links send readers away from the article. Rosenstiel’s answer was that readers go to those sources regardless, and that supplying the links adds value to the work and builds exactly the navigator role he had described.
Behind the four labels sat a larger claim he made in the same talk: that journalism was shifting from a product to a service, and with it a news outlet from a final destination to one node in a network.