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
PDF 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
Here are the slides and audio from my presentation at the Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland. The title of the talk was Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer. Abstract: Social media is becoming ever more ingrained in the experience of news consumers. Social networking sites are evolving from being more than spaces for personal exchanges, becoming one of the mediums for sharing and recommending the
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.
The Journalism Interactive conference at the University of Maryland kicks off with a panel on social media, with an introduction by Mashable editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow, @adamostrow. 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
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
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 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