“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

Congratulations to all the winners and finalists in the Online Journalism Awards. The General Excellence Awards went to BBC News, The Globe and Mail, Voice of San Diego, NJ Spotlight, OWNI and La Nacion in their  respective categories. The UBC Graduate School of Journalism was a runner-up in the Online Video Journalism (small site category). Here is the full list of winners: Knight Award for Public Service Barnegat Bay Under Stress –

A Pew Research into trust in the US media offers some insights into the impact of social media in the news diet of Americans. Pew found that just over a quarter (27%) of adults say they regularly or sometimes get news or news headlines through Facebook, Twitter or other social networking sites. This rises to 38% for younger adults. These figures applies to all the 1,501 people surveyed. Digging deeper into the

The second day of the Future of Journalism conference was opened with a keynote by Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Picking up from Emily Bell’s Thursday keynote, McChesney agreed there were some great experiments being done in the US, but he said he didn’t believe that was going to be enough. He insisted there was a need for

One of studies presented at the Future of Journalism conference looked at the practice of updating stories on news websites. Kostas Saltzis from the University of Leicester looked at how the news story was changing, given a 24/7 news cycle in an online environment when a story can be constantly updated. He studied the news sites of several UK newspapers such as the Guardian and the Times, and broadcasters such

Emily Bell, professor of Professional Practice and Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism, kicked off the Future of Journalism conference discussing the many futures of journalism. Talking about how we have viewed the profession, Bell argued that journalism is becoming less defined by the businesses that support it than by the activities it involves. She made the good point that arguing who is a journalist

On Friday 9 September, I am presenting a second paper at the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff on how social media is changing the way we get our news and information. Here is the abstract and slides from the paper, Your friend as editor: The shift to a personalized social news stream This study examines the impact of social media spaces on news consumption, based on an online survey

On Thursday 8 September, I’ll be presenting my paper, Tweets and truth: Journalism as a discipline of collaborative verification, at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff. For those who can’t make it, here is the abstract from the paper and the slides from my presentation. This paper examines how social media is influencing the core journalistic value of verification. Through the discipline of verification, the journalist establishes jurisdiction over

This week I’m off to the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University, September 8-9. The conference brings together the latest research into what is happening in journalism. The keynote speakers this year are Robert W. McChesney and Emily Bell, formerly of the Guardian and now Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at the Columbia School of Journalism. The research to be presented at the conference ranges from studies on Twitter to Wikileaks, from foreign

The finalists in the 2011 Online Journalism Awards bring together an impressive range of digital media from around the world. In a year marked by momentous events such as the Arab Spring and distressing disasters like the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the list includes heavyweights such as the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and BBC News. Al Jazeera is also up for two awards, as are a host