The second day of the Future of Journalism conference was opened with a keynote by Robert W. McChesney is the Gutgsell Endowed Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Picking up from Emily Bell’s Thursday keynote, McChesney agreed there were some great experiments being done in the US, but he said he didn’t believe that was going to be enough. He insisted there was a need for

One of studies presented at the Future of Journalism conference looked at the practice of updating stories on news websites. 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

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

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

The Asian American Journalists Association held its first inaugural meeting in Vancouver on Friday 18 September, hosted by the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. I was honoured to be on the panel to discuss issues of diversity and the future of the journalism industry. In my remarks, I focused on how journalism is changing and how the way we teach journalism is evolving. Here is the audio of my brief

In my latest piece for PBS Mediashift, I discuss how the mainstream media is incorporating user-generated content, drawing on research presented at the recent Future of Journalism conference.  Here’s an excerpt: The ability of anyone to play an active role in the process of collecting, reporting, analyzing and sharing news and information is seen as one of the big shifts in journalism over the past 10 years. But a growing

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

Maria Grafstrom and Karolina Windell of Uppsala University in Sweden analysed how business journalists were using blogs. Presenting at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, they found that the number of business articles that talked about blogs. By 2006, more than 1,000 articles about blogs from none in 2002. More than 20% cited a blog as a source. But when journalists were asked if they used blogs, 63% said

Deborah Wenger of the University of Mississippi looked at what the top US news companies were looking for in new hires. In her presentation at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, she outlined what skills and attributes were mentioned in job listings. They found 715 job postings. In newspapers, a third of them for reporters and just 12% for web writers/multimedia producers. In postings for reporter positions, the most

At the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, one of the papers lookedat how are news media in the US adopting Twitter to communicate the news and engage with readers. Marcus Messner presented the paper, co-authored with Asriel Eford.  They looked at almost 200 newspapers and TV stations with Twitter accounts, analysing the number of tweets, the news value and the use of links The study found that only a