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 in a multimedia world

Create a breaking news site in minutes with WordPress

Studies find journalists use Twitter for broadcast

How journalists are using Twitter

Social networking sites challenge journalism ethics

Who owns a journalist’s Twitter account?

Social media transforming how people get the news

Thanks to all who take the time to read the blog and I wish you all the best for 2012.

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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 traffic to a news outlet’s website.

Just over 90 per cent of the tweets analysed during a week provided a link to a news story on the organisation’s own website.

Twitter was used far less as a reporting tool or as a way to filter information. Just two per cent of tweets asked for information or for eye-witness accounts. A minute one per cent of tweets were retweets from outside a news outlet.

There was a slight variation when it came to the Twitter feeds of individual journalists, rather than institutional accounts.

A study of the accounts of 13 individual journalists found that three per cent of tweets asked for information and six per cent were retweets of material not sourced from their news outlet.

Pew concludes:

“These findings reveal limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.

This behavior resembles the early days of the web. Initially, news organizations, worried about losing audience, rarely linked to content outside their own web domain. Now, the idea is that being a service – of providing users with what they are looking for even if it comes from someone else – carries more weight.”

Admittedly, Pew only studied a small sample. But other research has also highlighted how news outlets have tended to use social media to try to reach a broader audience, rather than engaging in an exchange with the audience.

A study by Marcus Messner, Maureen Linke, and Asriel Eford (PDF) found that the official Twitter accounts of the top newspaper and TV outlets in the US functioned largely as an automated RSS feed of the latest news stories.

Another study found that many newsrooms automatically generated a tweet  (PDF) with a link when a story was published on the website.

The use of Twitter and other social networking tools to go beyond broadcast is still the exception in newsrooms. Yet there is potential for so much more.

In a chapter on Twitter for the new second edition of The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, I explore how newsrooms are adopting and adapting to social media, concluding:

Twitter is affecting how news organisations respond to breaking news, how journalists go about their reporting and whose voices are heard. New journalistic genres are emerging as news outlets incorporate social media services into daily routines. A process of negotiation is taking place, as traditional ways of working bump up against social, cultural and technological practices that disrupt established journalistic norms.

The Pew study analysed one week of tweets on the main Twitter feed of 13 different news organisations, amounting to more than 3,600 tweets.

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Jim Long, @newmediajiim, from NBC News, starts by pointing out how social media has shifted power from a few people at the top to everybody.

Liz Heron, @lheron, social media editor for The New York Times, picks up on the theme. In her view, social media has been a hugely democratising force, with so much of the news played out over social media.

But she also points out that journalists have a role in identifying the news from the noise.

Lynn Sweet, @lizsweet, Washington bureau chief for the Chicago Sun-Times, explains how social media has affected coverage of the White House. She checks Twitter feeds constantly, and Flickr, where the White House will often post photos.

She gives the example of how social media helped out figure out what Michelle Obama was doing. The White House now sends news out first on Twitter.

There is no substitute for entry-level, shoe leather reporting, says Sweet.

The discussion moves onto verification, a common theme in debates on social media. Heron says journalists need to use new skills by identifying signals that help to check information.

NBC is hiring a social media editor, says Long, who is going to have an overview of what is coming in and how NBC news is using social media.

At the Times, Heron says she trains journalists on how to use social media, as well as thinking strategically about the main accounts and what the news organisation should be doing on social media.

“My job will probably won’t exist in five years,” says Heron, because every journalist will be on social media. But she hopes there will still be a centralised team that will be thinking strategically about understanding and developing strategies.

Heron says you need to be a journalist to be a social media editor, not a marketing consultant. She talks about how the NYTimes is asking readers to send in questions during the GOP debates on social media so that its journalists can fact check and add context.

Heron also explains how the Times team will come up with a hashtag to pull together a conversation and crystallise the exchange on Twitter, pulling some of  the tweets into the live blogs.

The discussion moves onto whether you should break news on Twitter. Sweet says that if it is a scoop that she has developed, she will work with her editors to figure out how to break the news.

Heron notes that what happens if you see a scoop on Twitter that others have not noticed, such as the tweet about the death of Bin Laden.

Sweet says she would not retweet it, while Heron says she would, saying in the tweet “we’re hearing…”

Long also says that he would hold a scoop and instead maybe tweet that NBC has a big story coming.

Heron points out that you can add value without being first.

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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 as Sky and the BBC.

Saltzis found that the first drafts of stories and initial updates were very brief. A quarter of updates took place within half an hour of publication, with the figure rising to 60% of updates for the first two hours.

But it was extremely rare for stories to be updated beyond a single day, suggeting the daily news cycle remained in place.

In fact, half of stories finalised with four hours of publication.

Significant differences emerged between newspapers and broadcasters. For example, BBC journalists would spend 6 jours and 28 minutes updating a story compared to Telegraph journalists who spent 2 hours 18 minutes.

Updates were more frequent and intense in broadcasters while newspapers tended to be slower and less frequent in the updating process.

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The report found that the news agenda of blogs closely followed the mainstream media, with both agreeing on nine of the top 10 stories of the year, including the economy, the midterm elections, the health care debate and the war in Afghanistan.

But a different picture emerged when it looked at the links to news-related subjects in the media and blogs compared to on Twitter.

The news links shared on Twitter were fundamentally different, with none of the top five mainstream or blog topics subjects making the list of five top stories on Twitter.

Instead, the top four stories shared on Twitter were about technology giants –  Apple, Google, Twitter and Facebook.

The news agenda on Twitter was also more global. Four of the top 10 subjects had an international focus, including the war in Afghanistan, the Haiti earthquake, the European economy, the elections in the UK and WikiLeaks.

The report suggests:

The dominance of technology topics on Twitter also suggests that the platform has a different function than the mainstream press or even blogs. At least for now, users employ Twitter in part as a consumer affairs forum, to publicize, share and critique new gadgets and advances.

It also remarked that while some blogs may be the equivalent of an online version of a cable or radio talk show, this was rarely seen on Twitter.

Pew acknowledges that Twitter and other social media technologies are still very young, so “all this may evolve in the years ahead”, especially given the trend towards the use of social media to share and receive the news.

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I am very pleased to say that I have received a $10,000 award from IBM to support research into visualisation in journalism.

Big thank you to the research team at IBM Canada for the grant.  We’ve been talking about doing some research into best practices in journalism for the use of IBM’s ManyEyes.

Here’s the announcement posted to the UBC Graduate School of Journalism website:

UBC journalism professor Alfred Hermida has been awarded $10,000 from IBM to support his research into the application of visualization in journalism.

The 2010 IBM Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS) Faculty Award is designed to support Prof Hermida’s research in the area of business intelligence for journalism. IBM said the award was in recognition of the quality of his research and its importance to the industry.

Prof Hermida is researching the application of visual analytics to develop of new digital story-telling techniques that take advantage of the ability to manipulate and represent complex datasets in visual and compelling ways.

Visual analytics is an emerging area of research that applies the science of analytical reasoning supported by highly interactive visual interfaces.

It is increasingly being adopted in journalism to communicate information clearly and effectively through the use of computer-generated images, gaining insight and knowledge from data, and its inherent patterns and relationships.

The UBC journalism school is developing a Visualization Lab for Civic and Investigative Journalism to research and develop innovative approaches to data manipulation, integration and querying for the purpose of understanding complex public policy issues using investigative journalism and visual analytics.

The aim of the visualization project is to improve access to essential data on public policy issues benefits all Canadians. Reducing barriers to information access is valuable because the democratization of data plays a meaningful role in fostering civic engagement.  It is a response to the growing need for credible information on key quality of life issues brought directly to Canadians in a visual form that is both easily accessed and understood.

The IBM Centre for Advanced Studies (CAS), established in 1990 at the IBM Toronto Software Laboratory, brings together IBM researchers and technical leaders with academic and government research organizations from around the world.

The IBM CAS awards recognize individuals who best epitomize the mission of CAS to facilitate the exchange of academic research knowledge and real world industry.

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His concerns: the unbundling of content and the challenge of monetising civic news.

(Via Project for Excellence in Journalism)

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Journalism students graduating this year have the talent and the skills that the industry needs, but the question is whether news organisations will invest in them.

Even student journalism award winners are finding it tough. Azeem Ahmad, the winner of Birmingham University Student Journalist of the Year award sponsored by media group, Trinity Mirror, has talked about his struggle to find a suitable opening:

It’s not that there is a lack of job opportunities, but there is definitely a lot of competition for the more interesting roles, naturally. I believed that achieving my award would set me apart from the competition and make potential employers take more notice of me, but I’m still finding myself just as unsuccessful in getting my foot on the ladder as I did before I won the award.

His advice to budding journalists reflects how landing for a job has changed:

Blog as often as possible; subscribe to and read the key influencers/speakers in your chosen field – and comment too Let the author know you’ve read what they’ve written and agreed or disagreed with it; start and get involved in the discussions, engage with the community online and create one around yourself; join Twitter and become a networked journalist.  Engage, engage, engage – I can’t stress that enough.

This is career-seeking 2.0 for journalists. Dan Schawbel at Mashable provides some good advice in using social media for job-hunting.

Among the recommendations – create a video resume, capitalise on LinkedIn and tap into Twitter to network and make connections.

It is a far cry from mailing a CV and cover letter to the HR department.

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Image via Wikipedia

As the report highlights:

On one hand, financial pressures sap its strength and threaten its very survival. On the other, the rise of the web boosts its competitiveness, opens up innovative new forms of journalism, builds new bridges to readers and offers enormous potential for the future. Many editors believe the industry’s future is effectively a race between these two forces.

Editors are clearly divided on the potential of the web, and this is to be expected. After all, some veterans may hark back to a mythical golden age of newspapers.

The make-up of newsrooms is changing, with the report finding that staff are “smaller, younger, more tech-savvy, and more oriented to serving the demands of both print and the web”. But there is a cost, with less experience and knowledge in the newsroom as the older generation take lucrative buyouts.

The section on the influence of the web provides a more detailed look at how digital is impacting newsrooms. There appears to be an acceptance that the web is not the enemy:

Although several editors voiced concerns about the web as a distraction that deflects resources from the print edition, overall, the view of the web appears to be increasingly positive.

At the same time, the study suggests that print remains the primary focus for editors. This is understandable given the importance of print revenues. But it also suggests that print is still considered more important editorially to the web.

Interviews for the study showed that editors felt the growing demands of the web on newsrooms at times sapped attention and energy from the print edition, as reflects in this quote: “The demands of producing more web content are diminishing the print product.”

This suggests that editors still think of themselves as print people, rather than as leaders of a news outlet with different distribution points reaching different audiences. This is the fundamental shift that needs to take place in newsrooms.

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The question was whether journalism is better the more local it is. The range of responses shows this is a rich area for debate.

I sat out the carnival as I was on honeymoon in Thailand. But one of the entries from Paul Bradshaw, arguing that online all journalism is potentially local, got me thinking whether we are asking the wrong question.

The concept of local news is based on the news value of geographical proximity – the notion that events close to us are more relevant than those in far away lands.

The problem with this approach is that it is based on an out-dated model of news, where there was a scarcity of news and information and the sources for this were limited by geography.

In other words, news was hard to come by and the primary source for this was the local daily paper.

The explosion of electronic media, from radio to TV to the Internet, has undermined this model. We now live in a world where there is an abundance of news from an abundance of sources.

Maybe rather than asking whether journalism should be local, we should ask ourselves what does local mean in the 21st century. Geographical proximity is still a factor in news, as people are interested in what their neighbours are up to.

But perhaps we should pay more attention to the notion of cultural proximity, so stories concerned with people who speak the same language, look the same, and share the preoccupations as the audience receive more coverage than those concerned with people who speak different languages, look different and have different preoccupations.

The issue then becomes how do we decide on what is cultural proximity? Take Vancouver as an example. This is a Canadian city, with several significant and vibrant ethnic communities.

The result is a multifaceted local population, where diversity rather than homogeneity is the norm.

In this case, local takes on a meaning beyond geography, encapsulating issues of demographics, culture and values. Take the example of a story by Anupreet Sandhu Bhamra, one of my students at the UBC School of Journalism.

She produced a video piece on how attitudes to the elderly are changing among Canada’s Asian community.

This story is based in Vancouver but it has a relevance beyond the city. It resonates on a national and global level, as well as across demographics.

You don’t have to live in Vancouver, or in Canada, to be interested in the piece, so to call this “local news” is to deny its wider appeal.

The issue then is less whether local is better, but rather how do we redefine local to remain relevant in a digital news environment.

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