This post is slightly off topic, but it relates to issues of technology, copyright and social media. Go to a gig today and there’ll be dozens of people shooting photos or video on mobile phones or small point and shoot cameras. I am usually one of these people and have never had any trouble. Last night, I was at the Rush gig in Vancouver. Yes, I fess up, I have

Buried in the BBC Trust’s review of bbc.co.uk is some revealing information about how the corporation has adopted blogging. In a section on accountability, the Trust explores how the BBC’s commitment to “to forge a new relationship with licence fee payers” online and suggests that “recent developments, such as the development of BBC editors and management blogs, mean that the BBC may be able to fulfil this commitment much better

The BBC Trust’s review of the BBC online activities has been published, with some media seizing on the overspend of £36m. Overall, the Trust is positive about bbc.co.uk, describing it as an “excellent service that is highly valued by users and makes a strong contribution to delivering the BBC’s public purposes”. But it adds that “it is essential that the service remains distinctive” and more significantly that: The Trust will

The state of journalism in Canada is coming under scrutiny in an event on Thursday May 29 in Toronto organised by the Canadian Media Research Consortium. The one-day event, entitled The Future of News, aims to “bring together the best minds in industry and media studies to consider some of the challenges posed by today’s media landscape”. The event aims to examine how audiences are changing, the impact of citizen

Good news. I’ve received some funding from the University of British Columbia to investigate online news habits in Canada. Here’s the abstract for the research project, Behind the Discourse on Online Media Democracy: The Canadian Experience, which I will be starting over the summer: Pundits, policy-makers and academics suggest that new online information sources are challenging traditional media elites. Yet recent studies suggest the democratization of sources is more myth

Hold the front page – citizen journalists can produce original news! This came out of research by Zvi Reich of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel presented at the ICA annual conference in Montreal on Saturday. He looked at three mainstream news organisations in Israel and compared them to the Israeli citizen journalism site, Scoop. What he found was that 52% of the material on Scoop were original news

Joseph Carrabis, founder and chief research officer of NextStage Evolution, talks about how there are two kinds of bloggers, the Holmes and the Watson. (Shot on a Nokia N95 at the ICA annual conferencein Montreal)

I have been at the ICA annual conference in Montreal this week, talking about the research that Neil Thurman and myself have done into “participatory journalism” in Britain. What follows is a shortened version of the talk by Neil Thurman and myself, but it is still on the long side for a blog post. The term participatory journalism is itself rather ill defined. We’ve taken it to mean the technical,

Media scholar David Domingo talks about the he co-edited with Chris Paterson, Making Online News: The Ethnography of New Media Production. The volume is a compilation of research into the working routines and values of online journalists. [vodpod id=Groupvideo.1232558&w=425&h=350&fv=] (Shot on a Nokia N95)

Have you ever switched your instant messaging status to ‘away’, even if you are at your computer? Then you are not alone. According to a paper presented at the ICA annual conference, the use of this white cyberlie is common among older teens. The findings came in a paper by Mariek Vanden Abeele of the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Beligum and Keith Roe, of the Catholic University, also at Leuven,