The talk was based on findings in my co-authored book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, into how journalists are thinking about their relationship with the people formerly known as the audience.

Comments on stories have become a familiar feature on news websites. But the idea of leaving a space for readers to “have their say” is hundreds of years old.

Early newspapers in eighteenth-century England left blank spaces where readers could add their observations, complete with spelling mistakes, erroneous facts and inane comments, before passing it on to friends or family.

These early experiments in audience contributions were phased out, as newspapers became professional products authored by journalists. Participation became more formal and rigid through channels such as letters to the editor.

Hundreds of years later, spaces for readers to add their thoughts have re-emerged on news websites as one of a myriad of ways for the audience to participate and interact with the news.

For our book, we wanted to find out how far journalists were opening up the news process to the public at a time when digital technologies are creating opportunities for new forms of media participation, production and distribution on an unprecedented scale.

In our journey through newsrooms at more than a dozen newspapers in 10 Western liberal democracies, we found mixed feelings. There was apprehension, confusion, fear and hope, among journalists who are experiencing facing a rapid and radical shift in their traditional power to oversee the flow of information.

Our research found that three approaches in the newsroom. Some took what we call a conventional stance, seeing journalism as a practice to be defended. The priority for these “conventional journalists” was to preserve traditional boundaries between professionals and readers. An American editor insisted that “what we have to offer as our brand is a newspaper and a site that can be trusted.”

On the other side of the spectrum were journalists who were more open to a dialogue with readers. These “dialogical journalists” shared a belief that the newsroom had to be more open to working with the audience. For one American editor, a more open and collaborative form of journalism was a way “to repair the relationship, to regain people’s trust.”

Mostly, journalists didn’t neatly fall into the camp of traditionalists or evangelists. Instead, they expressed reservations about users as participants in the news, while at the same time acknowledging the potential value of a more active audience. It is hardly surprising most people in the newsroom are “ambivalent journalists”, trying to figure out their role at a time of rapid change to long-held rules, norms and values.

Journalists are used to owning the news, in the most basic sense that they decide what and how to report. Yet at the same time, journalism has always been expected to provide a way for voices from outside the media to be heard.

These tensions are being played out every day in newsrooms across the world. Journalists are torn encouraging readers to be more active in the media, while simultaneously defending the core of the news production process.

While participatory journalism is often celebrated for its potential for a more open media, the reality is more humbling dramatic. The audience has few opportunities to influence what makes the news and how it is reported. Instead readers are involved at the start of the news process by sending in tips, photos or videos, and once a story is published by offering their take on the news.

Journalists see the audience as “active recipients” of the news. Citizens are expected to act when news happens, by taking a photo or emailing in a news tip, and then react by commenting. The crucial and central processes of deciding what news is and how to cover and present it remains almost entirely under the journalist’s control.

The way newsrooms have adopted participatory journalism continues to change and evolve as they try to meld a culture of openness and collaboration with an editorial model of hierarchy and control.

For the most part, so far, journalists have sought to find ways to maintain their professional status, rather than redefine what it means to be a journalist.

As one editor in Canada expressed it, “journalism remains journalism, and it’s not going to change its fundamentals.”

Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers by Jane B. Singer, Alfred Hermida, David Domingo, Ari Heinonen, Steve Paulussen, Thorsten Quandt, Zvi Reich, Marina Vujnovic, is published by Wiley-Blackwell.

The raid on bin Laden was being tweeted in real-time by Sohaib Athar (@ReallyVirtual) of Abbottabad, Pakistan, even though he had no idea at the time of what was happening.

The list of messages on Twitter show how the raid unfolded at the time.

In the US, the first reports of the death of bin Laden came from a tweet by a former aide to Donald Rumsfeld.

It has almost become routine for Twitter to be seen as the first choice for breaking news.

But the bin Laden case is also an example of what I have described as ambient journalism.

Acts of journalism are taking place all the time on the social messaging service, with tweets from both citizens and professional journalists.

What this case highlights is how, sometimes, it can be hard to navigate this constant stream of news and information and identify what matters and what doesn’t.

At the time, Athar had no idea about the meaning of what was happening.  His messages were fragments of information, disconnected from meaning and context.

We were only able to interpret the tweets once we had additional information to be able to connect these fragments with other fragments of data.

Here is the key challenge for ambient journalism: if journalism has become like the air we breath, literally all around us, how do we filter and give meaning to the content?

It makes me think of the early days of the web, when companies like Yahoo were trying to index and categorise all the websites in the world. That is, until Google figured out a better way to navigate the web.

Currently, the tools we have to navigate Twitter are fairly basic and strain our cognitive abilities. Yet there are companies like Sulia, as well as many others, that are trying to help us make sense of this ambient media ecosystem.

(Image of Osama courtesy of el cinto)

But I wanted to share the slides and text of my paper presentation for those who weren’t about to make the conference. The paper is also available as PDF.

“We don’t know,” said Lisa Frazier, President & CEO, The Bay Citizen, one of the new startups in this area.

The Bay Citizen has a clear civic mission to provide local news and, secondly, to stimulate innovation in journalism, with 27 people working in editorial and innovation.

Since its launched in 2009, it has reached 150,000 unique visitors a month. It reaches an additional 61,000 readers through its stories appearing in print in the Bay Area editions of the New York Times on Friday and Sunday.

One of the innovative projects Frazier highlighted is a literacy micro-site and a bicycle accident tracker project to map where accidents where taking place in San Francisco. She said this has led some riders to change routes to avoid hotspots.

Frazier said part of their mission was to engage news consumers in the debate on the future of journalism. She said local news had declined by 60%, often replaced by wire stories. Education of news users is really important, she stressed.

The Bay Citizen can be a “test kitchen” for journalism, technology and business models. “We have to fail fast,” said Frazier.

To make the model sustainable, takes time but also takes money to make money, she said.

“The community will decide if nonprofit is sustainable,” said Frazier.

Progress towards sustainability

A decline in local coverage is also an issue in Texas, where the Texas Tribune was created with the mission to help citizens make better informed decisions in their civic lives.

“Public media will be a larger part of the media ecosystem in twenty years from now,” said John Thornton, chairman of the board, Texas Tribune at ISOJ.

“We haven’t proven sustainability for nonprofit news, but we are gaining on it,” he said.

The site’s 50 million page views annually, which brings in $1.5 to $2m in corporate sponsorship (advertising).  Annual costs are around $3m.

The site has raised more than $8m from wealthy individuals and foundations, but it hoping to reduce its reliance on donations, and make up the difference in premium content and memberships.

We don’t want to be reliant on major giving, said Thornton.

Sustaining investigative journalism

A different perspective came from Gustavo Gorriti, founder director, IDL-Reporteros in Peru. He asked whether nonprofit investigative journalism in a country like Peru was sustainable.

It started out as a small outfit with four journalists, plus Gorriti.

has published thousands investigative stories on corruption, drug-trafficking and bad cops.

We have to be nimble and agile, said Gorriti. The site normally tackles stories that it can cover in a relatively short time, as it has to publish on a regular basis.

The site uses free web resources such as Vimeo and YouTube, and runs on WordPress.

Gorriti said he has a budget of $200,000 a year, supported by foundation dollars.

The challenge for the site, he said, is that there is no chance to get advertising or sponsorship from either Peruvian or international companies in the country given the type of stories it reports on

“I came looking for ideas,” said Gorriti. He argued investigative journalism is good for the country and good for society as it promotes democratic ideals of accountability.

One option Gorriti suggested was seeking financial support from companies interested in supporting initiatives that promote civic society and create a more transparent business climate.

He compared this to the fair trade movement for coffee, suggesting perhaps there is a gap here for fair trade journalism.

“The need for good investigative journalism is there,” he concluded.

Dale Blasingame from Texas State University, San Marcos, looked at how Twitter was changing TV news.

He started by saying that a web first approach in newsrooms is no longer enough due to the instant dissemination of news via Twitter.

Twitter allows both professionals and citizens to “jump the gate” and send news directly to audiences, challenging the traditional gatekeeping role of the journalist.

Blasingame studied coded almost 2,300 tweets from San Antonio newsrooms on a shooting incident.

He said it this case study showed how Twitter could be used as a tool to deliver news, but added “it would be foolish to suggest this happens on a daily basis.”

In terms of his analysis of tweets, the most were promotional in nature, followed by breaking news.

The results were worse for official station Twitter accounts. One station account just sent promotional links for web stories automatically.

Blasingame recommended that newsrooms should restrain promotional tweets to just 20% of all their messages.

Student uses of Twitter

Next up, Carrie Brown, University of Memphis, together with Elizabeth Hendrickson, University of Tennessee and Jeremy Littau, Lehigh University, presented a study on how Twitter could help journalists reach underserved communities.

Brown qualified the study as exploratory and largely descriptive, but it provides a useful starting point.

One group she studied was young people, students between 19 – 29. She found many of them know each other and post about what they are doing or banter during class. Twitter was used as a social tool for informal communication

Students saw Twitter as a pseudo-anonymous space, with lots of use for Twitter for fun and entertainment. A few were using it for professional networking.

But students also talked about getting information on Twitter, stumbling across news.

Brown also found that students were very receptive to getting news on Twitter from journalists. In the survey, students reported more engagement with the news.

But some wanted more of a relationship with journalists on Twitter, rather than just broadcast headlines.

Littau said students wanted connectivity, information, expression and entertainment from Twitter. But African-American students expressed more of a preference for information and expression than Caucasian students.

Shovelling tweets

Marcus Messner, Virginia Commonwealth University, with Maureen Linke and Asriel Eford, presented research on how traditional news media in the US were adopting Twitter and social bookmarking.

For their study, they looked at the top 99 newspapers and top 100 TV stations in the US. By 2010, 198 of them had Twitter accounts. These were the main Twitter feeds from the news organisation, rather than from individual reporters.

As for social bookmarking, 36% offered this in 2009 and 92% by 2010. Facebook has become almost fully adopted by the news media, with Twitter adoption jumping from a third in 2009 to more than 90% in 2010.

In terms of Twitter use, one in three news media did not tweet in 2009, falling to one in four by 2010.

Most of the tweets were news related.  Personal communication accounted for just 5.7% in 2009 and 3.5% in 2010.

Messner said the tweets were largely used as promotional tools for web stories, with few differences between newspapers and television.

He concluded that Twitter has been fully adopted by the US news media but not used to its full potential.

“Most tweets are still shovelware,” he said, “they are not engagement of the community.” He urged news organisations to look at Twitter as a social space, rather than just another publication platform.

International perspective on Twitter

The final paper came from a team of researchers who looked at the use of social media in 27 news outlets in 7 Iberian and Latin American countries.

Presenting the findings Elvira García de Torres (Universidad CEU Cardenal Herrera, Spain) found that most messages on Twitter and Facebook were based on headline links.

Only 5.6% were conversational on Facebook. Only five newspapers engaged in a conversation with users on the news.

As might be expected, the researchers found that conversational messages have more potential to engage audiences.

The team found few requests for information from users, but also that journalists received little response from the audience.  Journalists did see some value in going to Facebook to find photos of people.

Surprising, the researchers found there were no rules, or no planning in the newsroom, around the use of social media.

Storify that makes it easy to add content from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and other social media sites to a story with a simple “drop and drag” function.

The platform highlights what I have called ambient journalism. In a couple of papers published last year, I argued that:

Journalism, which was once difficult and expensive to produce, today surrounds us like the air we breathe. Much of it is, literally, ambient, and being produced by professionals and citizens. The challenge going forward is helping the public negotiate and regulate this flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection, transmission and understanding of news.

Storify is one tool that helps us filter the constant flow of acts of journalism taking place all around us.

At a time when we are swimming in an ocean of news and information being reported, distributed and shared, it also emphasizes the need for professionals such as journalists who can help navigate all this data.

It puts the journalist in the role of curator, selecting the best fragments of news to create a coherent story experience, adding context and analysis.

Storify, in private beta for now, has its limitations. In using it in class, we found that collaborating on a story is possible but clunky.

My students also found it seemed to worked best with breaking news, as it is difficult to search for tweets from more than a day ago. A search by date function would be useful in helping to pull together a timeline of an event.

And thanks to the CEO and co-founder of Storify, former AP foreign correspondent Burt Herman, who Skyped in to the class to talk about the ideas behind the platform.

The question takes it cue from the Knight Foundation’s 15 recommendations on the news and information needs of communities.

One clear way for journalism schools to contribute is by having students cover the city. Our students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism already do this, as do many other j-schools.

By doing this, j-schools are filling the gap left by shrinking newsrooms. However, this only addresses part of the issue.

There are more acts of journalism being done by more people than ever before. The problem isn’t necessarily a lack of supply, but, as Clay Shirky puts it, filter failure.

The challenge is not just to increase the number of news sources, but to help communities navigate news and information that is networked and distributed.

Andy Carvin of NPR demonstrated the value in applying a journalistic lens to curating information flows on social media about the protests in Tunisia and Egypt.

Such an approach recognises that journalism has become ambient. As I wrote in a recent paper:

Journalism, which was once difficult and expensive to produce, today surrounds us like the air we breathe. Much of it is, literally, ambient, and being produced by professionals and citizens. The challenge going forward is helping the public negotiate and regulate this flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection, transmission and understanding of news.

There is a role for journalism schools to act as news hubs, to bring together and curate information flows in their around communities.

Additionally, j-schools can develop as centres of innovation and experimentation, tapping into the resources within the university and beyond, to work on new ways to help communities find the news and information they need.

The way forward is recognising that the media has become a space shared by professional journalists and citizens and coming up with ideas that take advantage of our mixed media ecosystem.

(Photo courtesy of Kris Krug)

I used to be based in Cairo in the early 1990s for the BBC. In countries like Egypt, part of the government’s power comes from controlling the media. What social media does is allow citizens to get around controls on the media, by sharing information and connecting around a common cause.

The government’s response has been to disconnect the internet as well as suspending mobile phone services. By doing this, it is trying to make it harder for people to organise, but also to find out what is happening in different parts of the capital and in other cities. It is an attempt to enforce its control of the media.

Compared to Iran, where the protests were largely coordinated by the opposition, in Egypt, there is no one opposition politician that has emerged as the leader of the protests. Instead what we are seeing is different groups coming together, frustrated with corruption and repression. Social media services such as Facebook are a way to spread information about protests and show solidarity with one another.

We all need information to make decisions. Social media provides a channel for Egyptians to share information, find out what is happening. It gives everything their own printing press or TV station. But social media didn’t cause the protests. These have tapped into long-running and deep-seated resentment at 30 years of autocratic rule, exacerbated by the economic crisis.

But social media services have been a catalyst, helping to spread information about the protests and providing a way to share details about what is happening where. We say the role of journalism is to provide citizens with the information they need to be free and self-governing. In societies where the media is censored, social media can filled the void, with citizens themselves reporting on what is happening around them

But social media can also be used as a tool of repression. We saw this in Iran, where the authorities were monitoring what was said on Twitter and used the same tools to spread disinformation and identify protesters.

Seeing a 140 character tweet is not going to overthrow the Mubarak regime. But it can be a call to action, inspire others to take to the streets and realize that there are others like you who want to see political change.

(Photo courtesy of Al Jazeera English)

One of the key roles of the university has to foster critical thinking, graduating students who have the ability to ask the right questions and think through solutions to problems.

For the revival of the Carnival of Journalism, David Cohn has asked the journalist/scholar bloggers taking part to consider the place of the university in the information ecosystem.

Journalism schools are uniquely placed within the academic environment to play a leading role in rethinking how academia fits into news and information flows today.

Some journalism schools already are filling in gaps left by shrinking media. Our journalism students at the University of British Columbia do this, from covering local stories in Vancouver to producing in-depth, investigative work on international issues.

J-schools can go further than producing stories. After all, we are living in a time when the barriers to producing journalism are non-existent. In a participatory media culture, anyone can do an act of journalism.

As a result, what we consider journalism and who is producing it is evolving. Universities, and j-schools in particular, can make a critical contribution to enabling students to be informed citizens with the ability to apply a critical eye to the world around them.

The first step is helping students understand how the world of media is shifting and providing them with the theoretical framework and practical tools to be informed consumers of news and information.

This is just the start. The classroom provides a space to teach students how to be able to create media by applying some of the rigours of journalistic practice.

We need to recognise that journalism has gone beyond something that just happens in newsrooms. At universities, a broad array of people, from academics to students, are doing what could be called journalism.

There is, then, an opportunity for journalism schools to rethink their place within the university environment, approaching journalism as a space to be shared, rather than a profession to be defended.

Lost Remote has a good round-up of how reputable news organisations such as Reuters, NPR and the BBC wrongly tweeted that the congresswoman had died.

The challenge of ensuring accuracy when covering breaking news online is nothing new.  We faced the same questions when I was the daily news editor at the BBC News website in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

This was, of course, before Twitter. Since then, if anything, the pace of breaking news has got faster.

Twitter provides a platform for streams of information but it is a noisy media system.

Dan Gillmor has argued for a slow news approach – taking “a deep breath, slow down and dig deeper as a normal part of our media use.”

It seems unlikely that the new rapid-fire news cycle will slow down. There are two factors that journalists and audiences have to contend with today: immediacy and distribution

Information travels in near real-time on platforms such as Twitter and a message grow exponentially as others along the network rebroadcast it to their friends, colleagues and acquaintances.

This environment provides little room for considered fact-checking.  What is taking place is a shift in how this fact-checking takes place.

Journalism can be a messy process. This process used to take place behind close doors in newsrooms, as reporters and editors considered conflicting reports, weighed up incoming information and made decisions on what to publish.

Today, the process of journalism is taking place in public on media platforms such as Twitter. Information is published, disseminated, checked, confirmed or denied in public through a pro-am collaboration facilitated by social networks.

The process of journalism in this media system turns on its head the traditional approach of filter, then publish.

Instead breaking news becomes a process of publish, then filter.

The journalistic functions of verification and authentication take place in public, done by both professional journalists and citizens.