An analysis of 43,738 tweets from 1,443 users offers some valuable insights into emerging communication norms on Twitter. The study (PDF) by researchers Paul André of Carnegie Mellon, Michael Bernstein of MIT, and Kurt Luther of Georgia Tech aimed to uncover what makes for a good message on Twitter. The team found that the most valued tweets were informative, funny and encouraged conversation.  Perhaps surprising, they also found that self-promotional messages also elicited a positive response. By comparison,

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

The runaway popularity of social media is prompting a rethink of rules on election reporting in Canada. During the last federal vote in May, Elections Canada warned people against tweeting or sharing on Facebook the results from polls in the east of the country, before voting had ended in the west. A 70-year-old law prohibits the premature transmission of election results.  The idea was to prevent radio broadcasts of results in

The different news agendas of the US mainstream media, blogs and Twitter are one of revelations of the annual State of the Media report for 2011 from Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. The report found that the news agenda of blogs closely followed the mainstream media, with both agreeing on nine of the top 10 stories of the year, including the economy, the midterm elections, the health care debate and

The Latin American journalism blog, Clasesdeperiodismo.com, recently asked me for my views on journalism education and more. The e-mail interview is available on the site in Spanish. But if you don’t speak Spanish or are not sure Google Translate will be able to figure out what I mean, here’s the English version: Q: What do you think about the education of today’s journalists? A: Journalism education is in a process

So far I’ve been following the whole #twitdef saga from a distance. Whatever the rights and wrongs of that issue, this editorial by The Australian betrays a complete misunderstanding of Twitter. It has a provocative headline, “Truth is Twitter’s First Casualty”, and goes on to rally against the social media service. The Australian appears not to appreciate that Twitter is a platform. It is a way to publish and distribute content,

NPR has a fascinating study of its audiences on Twitter and Facebook. The survey highlighted significant difference in content, engagement and media habits.  It found that NPR Twitter followers: Get all or most of their news online Prioritise hard, breaking news Click on fewer links compared to Facebook fans The findings suggest that audiences value Twitter for its immediacy and short-form messages, which is ideal for sending out breaking news

This parody of Twitter, based on the trailer for The Social Network movie has been around for a while. But since we talked about Twitter in journalism class this week, it seemed a apt time to share. Enjoy “The Twit Network&#

News of the 5.5 earthquake that hit the Ontario-Quebec border broke on Twitter. The snapshot from Trendsmap, taken shortly after the quake, highlights the stream of messages. People were tweeting about what had happened and searching for more information about the scale of the tremor. Within minutes, there were dozens of reports of a quake from across the eastern seaboard on Twitter, providing an idea of how widely it was