The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Anssi Männistö, who shifts our focus to the Boston Marathon bomb attack. Mobile social media played an important role in covering this attact: tweets and mobile media were no longer just sources of information, but also tools to very facts and photos and to identify potential suspects, through image recognition software and other facilities.

In Boston, journalists rapidly discovered the first reports and images of the attack from Twitter, and soon came to use them in their own coverage. Such material was then used in official investigations, unofficial hunts for the culprits …

Next up at ECREA 2014 is Sanja Kapidzic, whose interest is in how the NSA scandal was communicated in Germany via Twitter. The public sphere is seen here as having a triadic structure, between journalists, official spokespeople, and citizens. Traditionally, this has been dominated by the mass media, but shifts toward online communication have changed this balance; direct bidirectional communication is now possible between all three points of the triad.

This is especially notable in social media environments such as Twitter; however, new hierarchies and elites may also emerge here. What are the new structures of influence in …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2014 session is Scott Eldridge, whose interest is in the role of rumour and gossip as 'pre-news'. Rumour is institutionally unfounded, and is not part of the discourse of journalistic products – but it is a kind of reality-testing especially when insufficient verified facts are available.

Rumour is the intervention of the unauthorised voice within the flow of information, then. It is a perishable commodity, and historically the development of formal news reporting is a process of sequestering rumour to a handful of defined categories (letters to the editor, comments, vox pops) that are …

The next presenter at ECREA 2014 is Marcel Broersma, who begins by flagging Robbie Williams's recent livetweeting of the birth of his child: such tweets were also used widely by the mainstream news media, of course. This demonstrates the emerging role of Twitter as a newsbeat for journalists, who now frequently quote from tweets in their articles.

This is especially prominent for celebrity tweets, and in a sense empowers these celebrities to manage their public personae without losing control of their privates lives. For journalists and news organisations this is interesting as celebrit sells papers, but it also changes the …

The next speakers at ECREA 2014 are Vadim Hladík and Vaclav Štetka, whose interest is in the intersections of social media and journalism in the Czech Republic. What has emerged is a hybrid media system, impacting on organisational setups and routines; on the use of social media as sources (with distinct patterns during breaking news and everyday routine, respectively); and on intermedia agenda-setting processes.

Twitter, for example, has become a kind of newsbeat for journalism: a rich and easy resource for news content, and a tool that allows sources to maintain better control of their messages, as tweets are …

The next ECREA 2014 speaker is my Norwegian project partner Eli Skogerbø, whose interest is in the connections between journalists and politicians on Twitter. How do journalists connect with politicians on Twitter; how do politicians respond to being approached on Twitter?

The project focussed especially on the timeframe around the 2013 Norwegian election. During this time, journalists' activities varied widely; one political journalist was very highly active (producing some 9,000 tweets over the course of one year), while the average level of Twitter activity across journalists was a great deal lower.

For the most part, the journalists' …

The final speaker in this session at ECREA 2014 is Christian Pentzold, whose focus is on the discussions around the 2013 affair about the use of protesters' mobile phone data by police in Saxony. There is a discursive social construction of the term 'big data', and different frames of big data have emerged so far.

Transmedia discourse is combining a number of different conceptualisations, and this enables a number of different analytical perspectives and approaches; the speed of the dynamic reconfiguration of these different modes also affects how analysis may proceed.

How can we use slower analytic methods to make …

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on big data on Twitter. Few people know at this point what 'big data' actually means; what discourse about big data are we constructing here? So is big data just a marketing concept? The uses of big data in social networks have largely shaped our understanding of the big data concept; is there therefore a common discourse about big data at least in a social network such as Twitter?

Frederic's project gathered some 400,000 tweets mentioning the term big data or the hashtag #bigdata, and explored …

Our own paper on mapping the Australian Twittersphere was next at ECREA 2014, and I've posted the slides below. Audio to come later, I hope!

Mapping a National Twittersphere: A 'Big Data' Analysis of Australian Twitter User Networks from Axel Bruns