Alfred Hermida

Digital Journalism — 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.

Journal of Broadcast and Electronic Media — 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.

Journalism Practice — 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 Studies — 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.

Journalism Practice — 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.

www.huffingtonpost.ca — Canadians living in the bustling metropolis of Montreal and the picturesque city of Victoria are getting a taste of what some media executives hope may be the future -- paying for the news online. The Gazette in Montreal and the Victoria Times-Colonist on Vancouver Island have become the latest testbeds to see if people will pony up to get their local news on the web. From Wednesday, access to the newspaper websites was limited to the first 20 articles, before hitting a paywall. It is part of an experiment by PostMedia Network, Canada's largest publisher of paid English language daily newspapers, in two relatively small markets for its papers.

www.ajeuk.org — Calls for the public to participate in some shape or form in journalism have become almost standard on news websites. But research has shown that journalists are reluctant to allow audiences any kind of agency. For our book, Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, we wanted to investigate how far journalists were relaxing their control on the news. For the study we did semi-structured interviews with more than 60 news professionals drawn from about two dozen leading national newspapers in 10 countries: Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Finland, France, Germany, Israel, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

www.niemanlab.org — Editor's Note: We're wrapping up 2011 by asking some of the smartest people in journalism what the new year will bring. Here's news pioneer Alfred Hermida, a founder of BBCnews.com and currently an associate professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism. I am always hesitant to make predictions, but 2012 may just the year that social media starts to get boring. And this is a good thing. Bear with me while I explain. Social media is largely still seen as a new, shiny entrant into the world of media.