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

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

I’m delighted to announce that Doubleday Canada will be publishing my new book, Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know and Why It Matters. The book charts how our enhanced capacity to share information via social media is transforming what we know and how we know it. It examines at how sharing is shaping our notions of an informed and engaged public, a media ecology of competing

The forthcoming changes announced by Twitter limiting what others can do with tweets has angered developers. But news organisations and others involved in aggregating and curating material from social media should also be concerned. The “Display Guidelines” will become “Display Requirements” and impose strict rules over how tweets can be shown, in order “to ensure that Twitter users have a consistent experience wherever they see and interact with tweets.” As

The suspension of the Twitter account of journalist Guy Adams highlights the disconnect in how we view social media. Adams, The Independent’s Los Angeles correspondent, was suspended by Twitter for supposedly violating the service’s rules when he published the corporate email address of an NBC executive. The decision prompted a backlash on Twitter, with thousands of angry #nbcfail messages and suspicions about the reasons behind the suspension, given that Adams had

“This is for everyone,” tweeted Tim Berners-Lee during the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics in London. The inventor of the worldwide web was one of the highlights, at least for me, of the exuberant, eccentric and energetic journey through Britain masterminded by film director, Danny Boyle. Nearly 27m people watched opening ceremony in the UK, while millions more shared photos, videos or impressions about the Olympic extravaganza. What they weren’t

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