Alfred Hermida

Twittering the News: The Emergence of Ambient Journalism

This paper examines new para-journalism forms such as micro-blogging as “awareness systems” that provide journalists with more complex ways of understanding and reporting on the subtleties of public communication. Traditional journalism defines fact as information and quotes from official sources, which have been identified as forming the vast majority of news and information content. This model of news is in flux, however, as new social media technologies such as Twitter facilitate the instant, online dissemination of short fragments of information from a variety of official and unofficial sources. This paper draws from computer science literature to suggest that these broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on systems are enabling citizens to maintain a mental model of news and events around them, giving rise to awareness systems that the paper describes as ambient journalism. The emergence of ambient journalism brought about by the use of these new digital delivery systems and evolving communications protocols raises significant research questions for journalism scholars and professionals. This research offers an initial exploration of the impact of awareness systems on journalism norms and practices. It suggests that one of the future directions for journalism may be to develop approaches and systems that help the public negotiate and regulate the flow of awareness information, facilitating the collection and transmission of news.

A Clash of Cultures: The Integration of User-Generated Content within Professional Journalistic Frameworks at British Newspaper Websites

This study examines how national UK newspaper websites are integrating user-generated content (UGC). A survey quantifying the adoption of UGC by mainstream news organisations showed a dramatic increase in the opportunities for contributions from readers. In-depth interviews with senior news executives revealed this expansion is taking place despite residual doubts about the editorial and commercial value of material from the public. The study identified a shift towards the use of moderation due to editors’ persistent concerns about reputation, trust, and legal liabilities, indicating that UK newspaper websites are adopting a traditional gate-keeping role towards UGC. The findings suggest a gate-keeping approach may offer a model for the integration of UGC, with professional news organisations providing editorial structures to bring different voices into their news reporting, filtering and aggregating UGC in ways they believe to be useful and valuable to their audience. While this research looked at UGC initiatives in the context of the UK newspaper industry, it has broad relevance as professional journalists tend to share a similar set of norms. The British experience offers valuable lessons for news executives making their first forays into this area and for academics studying the field of participatory journalism.

SHARE, LIKE, RECOMMEND Decoding the social media news consumer

This study examines the impact of social media spaces on news consumption, based on an online survey of 1600 Canadians. News organizations are rushing into social media, viewing services like Facebook and Twitter as opportunities to market and distribute content. There has been limited research outside the United States into the effects of social media on news consumption. Our study found that social networks are becoming a significant source of news for Canadians. Two-fifths of social networking users said they receive news from people they follow on services like Facebook, while a fifth get news from news organizations and individual journalists they follow. Users said they valued social media because it helped them keep up with events and exposed them to a wider range of news and information. While social interaction has always affected the dissemination of news, our study contributes to research that suggests social media are becoming central to the way people experience news. Networked media technologies are extending the ability of users to create and receive personalized news streams. Investigating how networked publics are reframing the news and shaping news flows would contribute to our understanding of the evolving relationship between the journalist and the audience.

Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin's Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions

News sourcing practices are critical as they shape from whom journalists get their information and what information they obtain, mostly from elite sources. This study evaluates whether social media platforms expand the range of actors involved in the news through aq uantitative content analysis of the sources cited by NPR’s Andy Carvin on Twitter during the Arab Spring. Results show that, on balance, nonelite sources had a greater representation in the content than elite sources. Alternative actors accounted for nearly half of the messages. The study points to the innovative forms of production that can emerge with new communication technologies, with the journalist as a central node trusted to authenticate and interpret news flows on social awareness streams.

Content Analysis in an Era of Big Data: A Hybrid Approach to Computational and Manual Methods

Massive datasets of communication are challenging traditional, human-driven approaches to content analysis. Computational methods present enticing solutions to these problems but in many cases are insufficient on their own. We argue that an approach blending computational and manual methods throughout the content analysis process may yield more fruitful results, and draw on a case study of news sourcing on Twitter to illustrate this hybrid approach in action. Careful combinations of computational and manual techniques can preserve the strengths of traditional content analysis, with its systematic rigor and contextual sensitivity, while also maximizing the large-scale capacity of Big Data and the algorithmic accuracy of computational methods.

Tweets and Truth: Journalism as a Discipline of Collaborative Verification

This paper examines how social media are influencing the core journalistic value of verification. Through the discipline of verification, the journalist establishes jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality to claim a special kind of authority and status. Social media question the individualistic, top-down ideology of traditional journalism. The paper considers journalism practices as a set of literacies, drawing on the theoretical framework of new literacies to examine the shift from a focus on individual intelligence, where expertise and authority are located in individuals and institutions, to a focus on collective intelligence where expertise and authority are distributed and networked. It explores how news organizations are negotiating the tensions inherent in a transition to a digital, networked media environment, considering how journalism is evolving into a tentative and iterative process where contested accounts are examined and evaluated in public in real-time.

#JOURNALISM: Reconfiguring journalism research about Twitter, one tweet at a time

Scholarship about social media in general, and Twitter in particular, has increased dramatically in recent years as adoption by individuals and institutions has burgeoned; especially by journalists and media organisations. Much of the journalism research on Twitter has focused on the dynamics of professional news practices on the social media platform, with journalism considered as a cultural field of production. This paper considers Twitter as a networked communication space that results in a hybridity of old and new frames, values and approaches. It highlights research that points to the hybrid and innovative forms of news production on open, networked platforms, suggesting new paradigms of journalism at play that break with classic narrative structures and deviate from long-held and fiercely defended norms.Scholarship about social media in general, and Twitter in particular, has increased dramatically in recent years as adoption by individuals and institutions has burgeoned; especially by journalists and media organisations. Much of the journalism research on Twitter has focused on the dynamics of professional news practices on the social media platform, with journalism considered as a cultural field of production. This paper considers Twitter as a networked communication space that results in a hybridity of old and new frames, values and approaches. It highlights research that points to the hybrid and innovative forms of news production on open, networked platforms, suggesting new paradigms of journalism at play that break with classic narrative structures and deviate from long-held and fiercely defended norms.

EXPLORING THE POLITICAL-ECONOMIC FACTORS OF PARTICIPATORY JOURNALISM

This comparative study of user-generated content (UGC) in 10 Western democracies examines the political economic aspects of citizen participation in online media, as assessed by journalists who work with this content. Drawing on interviews with more than 60 journalists, we explore their perceived economic motivations for an ongoing redefinition of traditional journalistic roles, as UGC becomes an increasingly dominant feature of news websites.

THE BLOGGING BBC

Blogging has shifted from an activity largely taking place outside established media to a practice appropriated by professional journalists. This study explores how BBC News has incorporated blogging in its journalism, looking at the internal debates that led to the adoption of blogs and charting how they became a core part of the corporations news output. Using a case study approach, it examines the impact of blogging on BBC editorial values and considers how journalists have sought to maintain their authority in a digital media environment by integrating a new form of journalism within existing norms and practices. The BBC offers a unique case study as its long-standing editorial values of accuracy, impartiality and fairness appear at odds with the notion of blogs as immediate, uncensored and unmediated. The research reveals that blogs emerged initially as an activity peripheral to the main newsgathering functions of the organisation and were rapidly transformed into key mechanisms for communicating analysis and commentary to the public. It contends that, for now, blogging has had a greater impact on the style, rather than substance, of BBC journalism. While the systems whereby journalists deliver information have evolved, the attitudes and approaches have, so far, remained relatively static.

From Mr. and Mrs. Outlier To Central Tendencies

This study examines the impact of computational journalism on the creation and dissemination of crime news. Computational journalism refers to forms of algorithmic, social scientific, and mathematical processes and systems for the production of news. It is one of a series of technological developments that have shaped journalistic work and builds on techniques of computer-assisted reporting and the use of social science tools in journalism. This paper uses the Los Angeles Times’ Homicide Report and its Data Desk as a case study to explore how technological adaptation occurred in this newsroom in the early twenty-first century. Our findings suggest that computational thinking and techniques emerged in a (dis)continuous evolution of organizational norms, practices, content, identities, and technologies that interdependently led to new products. Computational journalism emerges from an earlier and still ongoing turn to digital within broader organizational, technological, and social contexts. We place this finding in the local, situated context of the Homicide Report, one of the first crime news blogs to adopt computational journalism in North America.