On the Internet, no one has to be a gatekeeper, but everyone can be

[Commentary] While the Internet's made it possible for information to flow more directly from source to consumer, in practice, much information consumed on the Internet now flows through many more intermediaries than before.

Sources tweet information that then shows up on blogs, which are picked up by radio reporters, then make their way into newspapers, where readers post the stories to their Facebook pages, which prompts someone else to tweet about it... and the cycle begins again, taking slightly different paths with each circuit.

. Publishers, including online journalists, need to remember this if they're to maximize the audience for their work. All that's been lost has been the established news media's once-monopoly status as those gatekeepers. What's lost is lost.

Those who've gained money and influence by assuming gatekeeper status won't easily give it up to old media competitors simply because those newspapers, magazine and TV stations want back their monopoly profits. If the gatekeepers of today are to lose their influence, they will lose it the same way that the old media gatekeepers lost theirs - because they aren't paying sufficient attention while someone else was finding a better way to reach their audiences.