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

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 is the presentation I gave at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin of our paper, Sourcing the Arab Spring: A case study of Andy Carvin’s sources during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. The abstract is available on the papers site of the International Symposium on Online Journalism. Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions View more presentations from

The first academic presentation at International Symposium on Online Journalism came from Carrie Brown of the University of Memphis. For her study, #Memstorm: Twitter as a community-driven breaking news reporting tool, she looked at real-time flow of information on Twitter during the storms that hit the region. She highlighted how the hashtag, #Memstorm, did not come from the news outlets but from the public. Fox tried to created its own hashtag to brand the storms,

Twitter, participation, start-ups, community, networks and trust are among the topics tackled by research papers due to be presented at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at UT Austin in April. The international scope of the research is impressive, with scholars from the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Finland, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The abstracts for the papers have been posted online after a competitive peer review process.Only

On February 17, I was interviewed for CBC News Network on the Twitter campaign against Canadian Public Safety Minister Vic Toews and how social media has changed the way the public interacts with elected officials

The world of journalism and Twitter is buzzing following the new Sky News policy on Twitter and the BBC’s new guidance on breaking news. Both organisations have told their journalists not to break news on Twitter first. In a post on the BBC’s Editors blog, social media editor Chris Hamilton acknowledged the value of Twitter but concluded: We’ve been clear that our first priority remains ensuring that important information reaches

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

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