This year’s Media in Transition (MIT8) conference at MIT addresses question of the shifting nature of the public and the private, kicking off with a panel on oversharing. The panel brings together Feona Attwood, Middlesex University (UK), David Rosen, author and Jonathan Zittrain, Harvard University, moderated by Nick Montfort. Montfort introduces oversharing by talking about how people are voluntarily divulging information online that makes other people uncomfortable. He asks why are people willing to share in this way, but also why

The UK journalism site, journalism.co.uk, has put together a list of 50 blogs on journalism. The list  covers “blogging reporters who share their tips and experiences of mobile journalism, blogging journalism educators, and blogging photojournalist.” It is required reading for anyone interested in gaining insight and perpectives on the changing  of journalism. I’m honoured that this blog, Reportr.net, is included on a list. Among the other blogs by journalism educators are Mindy

This blog has been somewhat neglected over the past few months. My writing energies have gone into working on my new book,  Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know and Why It Matters. Tell Everyone shows us how to thrive at a time when our vastly expanded ability to share has given individuals much greater power to influence what is published, changed the way people organize, challenged institutional

My keynote at the Neo-journalism conference in Brussel was called “The Ambient News Network: Twitter and the reconfiguration of journalism.” It looked at how Twitter has developed as a network for real-time news and information, influencing how news organisations respond to breaking news, how journalists go about their reporting and whose voices are heard. Twitter facilitates the instant, online dissemination and reception of short fragments of information from sources outside

At the Neo-Journalism conference in Brussels, Anders Olof Larsson of Uppsala University presented his research into the journalists’ use of Twitter in a talk show context in Sweden. In a brief presentation, he explained how he examined the use of Twitter by a new current events talk show called Hubinette, shown on public service TV in Sweden. He collected 2,314 tweets with the hashtag #Hubinette. His analysis showed that messages spiking

At the Neo-journalism conference, Manuela Farinosi a post-doc at the Università di Udine presented her research into the motivations behind citizens who gathered and shared news following the 2009 quake in L’Aquila close to Rome. For the study, there were 20 in-depth interviews with the most active citizen contributors. The most common motivation was related to mainstream media coverage in Italy. The citizens said they felt media reporting was incomplete and pro-government.

In the second keynote of the Neo-Journalism conference, Judith Donath from Harvard examined signals of  reliability in networked news. She started off by talking about how online and social media provided detailed information about the recent fires in southern California. It was a community of people who knew each other and turned to each other for reliable information. Donath also cited Mexico as an example of how sites like Twitter

I am at the Neo-Journalism conference in Brussels, where academics will debate where journalism is at and where it is going. I am giving a keynote on Thursday 4 October. But the conference kicked off with a keynote by Mark Deuze, Associate Professor at the Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications. He started off by laying the groundwork about the purpose of journalism. He points out how early humans needed individuals who

For the third year in a row, Reportr.net has been nominated for Best Blog in the Canadian Online Publishing Awards. The blog is a finalist in the blue division, which is the business-to-business, professional association, farm and scholarly category. I am honoured to be among the nominations. Reportr.net won the award in 2010. The work of my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism has received four nominations, including best online-online

Here is the presentation I gave at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin of our paper, Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. The abstract is available on the papers site of the International Symposium on Online Journalism. Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions View more presentations from