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

George Entwistle, the new director general of the BBC, should recall the recent past as he refashions the corporation for what he calls “the digital revolution.” In his quest for an organisation that can create “genuinely new forms of digital content”, he would do well to look back at the pioneering work of the BBC News website. It has been creating these new forms of digital content since its launch

A new report from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism provides further evidence of how social media is shaping news consumption. The survey of online news consumers across five countries – UK, US, Germany, France and Denmark – found that social media is starting to challenge search engines as a primary way of finding news. In the UK, 30% find the news through search, compared to 20% who

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

The last keynote at ISOJ was Raju Narisetti, managing editor, Wall Street Journal Digital Network Narisetti said the big challenge faces journalism is turning great content into great experiences He noted that great content is now available in a wide variety of places. So just having smart content is not enough. Instead, he said, we have to create experiences to engage the user. We are terrible at turning the multimedia parts

At ISOJ, Alberto Cairo, lecturer in visual journalism, University of Miami, raised some critical questions about the visualisation of data in journalism. Cairo explained that an information graphic is a tool for presenting information and for exploring information. In the past, info graphics were about editing data down and summarising it. But this worries me, he says, as it is just presenting information but does not allow readers to explore the

Day two of the ISOJ started off with a keynote by Bob Metcalfe, professor of Innovation and Murchison Fellow of Free Enterprise, University of Texas at Austin Cockrell School of Engineering. He is behind Metcalfe’s Law, which states that a communications network is proportional to the square number of connected users. Metcalfe set the scene by explaining how the internet has been disrupting industries for many years and posing a challenge

Online journalism start-ups in Europe are struggling, according to a report from the Reuters Institute for the study of Journalism. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen presented the results of the study, Survival is Sucess, co-authored by Nicola Bruno, at ISOJ. They found that journalism start-ups are facing a challenging time. First, news is still dominated by legacy businesses, with national differences. In Germany, there is a strong but declining legacy news media, whereas in

Mark Briggs, author of Entrepreneurial Journalism and director of Digital Media at KING 5, Seattle, got people thinking at ISOJ by going over the six traits for entrepreneurs. First of all, you have to be able to get some funding. You need to be able to make the ask, said Briggs, or you are not an entrepreneur. Then you need to be able to sell, convince others about the value

The first academic presentation at International Symposium on Online Journalism came from Carrie Brown of the University of Memphis. For her study, #Memstorm: Twitter as a community-driven breaking news reporting tool, she looked at real-time flow of information on Twitter during the storms that hit the region. She highlighted how the hashtag, #Memstorm, did not come from the news outlets but from the public. Fox tried to created its own hashtag to brand the storms,