An analysis of 43,738 tweets from 1,443 users offers some valuable insights into emerging communication norms on Twitter. The study (PDF) by researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech aimed to uncover what makes for a good message on Twitter. The team found that the most valued tweets were informative, funny and encouraged conversation. Perhaps surprising, they also found that self-promotional messages also elicited a positive response. By comparison,
PDF For this month’s Carnival of Journalism, Michael Rosenblum asks if a good journalist can be a good capitalist? The question is timely, given the raft of new entrepreneurial programs at journalism schools. There has always been an entrepreneurial streak in journalism, typified in the freelance journalist who makes a living by pitching and selling their work to a range of clients. Journalists, by necessity, have to be entrepreneurial in finding
The demise of Eastman Kodak is a story of a company which did not take on the challenges of disruptive innovation. After 133 years, the company has filed for bankruptcy. Essentially, Kodak was caught out by a combination of factors. The technologies that enable us to represent with world in still images changed radically with the development of digital cameras. The rise of digital was bad news for a company that made
In a column, Washington Post ombudsman Patrick Pexton asked if the newspaper was innovating too fast. Pexton noted how “hardly a week goes by without the Web site or newspaper launching some feature, or a venture to attract more revenue, or a blog, or a social media innovation.” He later added, “I’m wondering, and readers are too, whether there’s just a bit too much innovation, too fast.” In response, the
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 Nieman Journalism Lab asked me to contribute to its series looking ahead to what 2012 will bring for journalism. For my contribution, I suggested that the excitement and hype over social media may start dying down in the coming year, and this is something to be welcomed. My argument draws from Roy Amara’s First Law of Technology: With every change in technology that affects consumer behaviour, We tend to overestimate the
The news that mainstream media organisations use Twitter as a broadcast channel is hardly surprising. The study of Twitter feeds from 13 major news outlets in the US by the Pew Research Center’s Project in Excellence in Journalism is in line with earlier academic studies. The Pew study, in collaboration with the George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs, found that Twitter was mainly used to distribute news and boost
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.
One of the leading thinkers on journalism ethics, Stephen Ward, laid out a six-point approach towards teaching journalism ethics at a time of media transition at the Journalism Interactive conference. Ward’s starting point is that in a mixed media environment, everyone has the potential to perform an act of journalism. As a consequence, he argued, ethics is for everyone. The responsible use of media tools needs to be taught across the