The most popular posts for 2011 are dominated by Twitter and social media, as this has increasingly become a focus on my academic research. But the top five are older posts from 2007, 2008 and 2009 that continue to resonate with readers. Principles of journalism as a word cloud What a word cloud says about this blog How to find out anything about anyone online The new roles for journalists

The Washington Post’s Mark Luckie gave an insight into his role during a session on innovative storytelling at the Journalism Interactive conference. Luckie is national innovations editor at the Post. His job is to be responsible for web section of the national coverage, figuring out a web strategy for the stories that reporters are working on and editors are planning. Luckie explained how the Post had moved away from the web as an

Here is the video from the emerging research panel I took part in at the Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland. The three presentations were by Zizi Papacharissi of University of Illinois at Chicago, Adrienne Russell of the University of Denver and myself. The session was moderated by Kalyani Chadha of the University of Maryland. The research presented: Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer; by Alfred Hermida.

Here is a visualisation of the top 25 most influential news media accounts on Twitter, based on the number of followers. It is based on a list of the 100 most influential accounts, produced by Cornell University PhD student Daniel Romero. There is more to influence on Twitter than the number of followers, as a visualisation by Journalism.co.uk shows

Google has hired two of the leading researchers in visualization. In an understated post entitled That was fast!, Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg announced that they had joined Google. Viégas and Wattenberg led IBM’s Visual Communication Lab, where they created the ground-breaking collaborative visualization platform Many Eyes. They left and set up Flowing Media a few months ago. But in the post dated August 5, the pair said they were “bidding the company adieu.”

A couple of highlights from a session on infographics. Alberto Cairo, assistant professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill talks about the three levels of infographics. First there are instructional ones, where people click through a graphic. These are everywhere now but less commonplace are graphics where you can manipulate data. Cairo says these graphics allow users to adapt it to their needs and goals. These types of

The World Journalism Education Congress held at the end of June in Singapore issued a declaration of principles laying out a framework for the teaching of journalism. Some 27 associations across the world signed up to the document (PDF link). It seeks to position journalism education “a balance of conceptual, philosophical and skills-based content” and as “an academic field in its own right with a distinctive body of knowledge and

Invisible Inkling has summed up 10 key points about the future of newspapers. They are pretty obvious points to anyone involved in new media, such as “it is not Google’s fault”. Essentially newspapers need to stop complaining and instead start training reporters with a new skillset that takes advantage of all the opportunities offered by Internet technologies

A satirical take on citizen journalism and user-generated content has caught the attention of editors at the BBC. David Kermode, editor of the BBC TV Breakfast show, cites a sketch by British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb on their radio show, That Mitchell and Webb Sound. Kermode describes it as “very funny. It is also a bit painful”. The radio show is available online, but the BBC only offers

The International Online Journalism Symposium at the University of Texas in Austin is taking place this weekend. It is fast becoming a key event on the journalism conference circuit. Part of its attraction is that it brings together both senior editors and academics. This year, more than 250 people have registered for it. I am presenting a paper on Saturday, co-authored with Neil Thurman of City University London, that examines