We’re in the final panel at ECREA 2018, and it’s the panel presenting the work of our ARC Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis, which triangulated between the self-perceptions of journalists in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., their observable social media engagement, and the existing and emerging landscape of news outlets in these countries. The first paper in the panel is presented by Julia Conrad and also involves Christoph Neuberger, and explores emerging news content providers at the periphery of conventional journalism in Germany.

As the boundaries of journalism continue to move and perhaps dissolve, there is an …

My own presentation is next in this ECREA 2018 session, and covers the central themes of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. The slides are below:

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.

On social media, audiences receive deep links to news stories on news Websites; they increasingly bypass the homepage of …

The next ICA speaker is Aljawhara Almutarie, whose focus is on citizen journalism via Twitter in Saudi Arabia. Twitter has become an important space for such citizen journalism in the country, in part in response to the economic crisis in the country that followed the 2014 collapse in oil prices.

Aljawhara interviewed both professional and citizen journalists for this study, and on the citizen journalism side these are largely focussing on hyper local matters. For them, Twitter serves as a kind of unofficial ‘Saudi Parliament’, where citizens are able to discuss current issues and make their voices heard. This has …

A few weeks ago I visited Israel to present a keynote at the inaugural Haifa-LINKS Symposium on Content Producers. The keynote draws on my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere, and focusses especially on the news industry’s responses to the growing role that gatewatching and newssharing via social media play in the dissemination of news and related journalistic content. The presentation slides are below.

Following the initial scepticism about (and, in some cases, belligerent dismissal of) social media as a new channel for journalistic activity – a response that mirrors past …

Also in connection with the AoIR 2017 conference last week, I answered a few questions about the field of Internet research, and the conference, for the University of Tartu magazine. Here is what I had to say:

What are the major challenges in Internet research?

The central challenge is the object of research itself. The nature of the platforms, content, communities, and practices that constitute 'the' Internet is constantly and rapidly in flux – we are dealing with platforms like Snapchat that didn't exist ten years ago, and with practices like 'fake news' that were nowhere near as prominent even …