The role of Twitter in breaking and spreading news of the killing of Osama bin Laden is fascinating. 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
In class this week, we looked at collaborative story-telling through social media, using the Storify platform to look at different aspects of the situation in Libya. 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,
My paper, “From TV to Twitter: How Ambient News Became Ambient Journalism“, has been published in the May 2010 edition of M/C Journal on the theme of ambient. In the paper, I argue 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
Here are the slides and the text of my presentation on ambient journalism at the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University: Twittering the News View more presentations from Alfred Hermida. Twittering the News: The emergence of ambient journalism My paper looks at new para-journalism forms such as micro-blogging as “awareness systems”. For this I have drawn from literature on new communications technologies in computer science to suggest that these
I’ll be presenting my paper on Twitter at journalism first thing on Thursday on day two of the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University. In the paper, I suggest that Twitter can be described as ambient journalism, defined as an awareness system that offers diverse means to collect, communicate, share and display news and information. Here a taste in the abstract of the paper: This paper examines new para-journalism