“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

The survey data released by social TV startup Zeebox points to a generational divide over the use of Twitter. Overall, 13 per cent of the UK sample said they used Twitter at least daily compared to 10 per cent in the US. The age breakdown suggests that people between the ages of 16 and 34 are the heaviest users. In the UK, 22 per cent of 16-24 year-olds reportedly use Twitter

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

BBC News television and radio editors seem to have a perennial blind spot when it comes to the web.  A review of the BBC’s  coverage of the Arab Spring in 2011 by the BBC Trust found that broadcast outlets would rarely reference the BBC News website. The study (PDF) found that “the BBC news website provides a significant amount of background material, yet no cross reference was made to BBC online in over 97%

In my recent Couchiching Conversation in Toronto, I hoped to spark a discussion on how social media is reshaping how our basic human need for news. We are immersed in media today, both from established media outlets and from each other. The amount of material shared on social media is astounding. A hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second, 140 million daily messages are sent on Twitter and 80

Steve Rosenbaum, author of Curation Nation, on the need to separate signal from noise. Speaking at the BBC spring briefing in London on May 4, Rosenbaum talked about the importance of sharing content that is interesting, valid thoughtful and useful

The British Council has posted a wonderful video on the production of an issue of The Times during the Blitz in the 1940s. The film, called Morning Paper, follows the different stages of the process, from the daily editorial conference to the printing presses. “Britons are inveterate newspaper readers,” says the presenter. “The morning survey of events at home and aboard is for them almost a ritual.” Thanks to Richard Sambrook

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have become part of a reporter’s toolkit. Yet research shows that media outlets and journalists tend to approach these Web 2.0 services with a 1.0 mindset. In an attempt to help newsrooms, journalism professors Susana Herrera and José Luis Requejo have put together a list of 10 best practice guidelines for using Twitter. The article is published in the March 2012 issue of

Here are the posts covering some of the highlights of the International Online Journalism Symposium for 2012 at UT Austin: Japan tsunami photos highlight human cost, study finds In the final research panel at ISOJ, Rosellen Downey, Erika Johnson, and Bailey Brewer, University of Missouri, looked at the coverage in photos of the Japanese tsunami. WSJ Raju Narisetti on the need to create great news experiences The last keynote at

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