This major new volume is designed as a sequel – rather than simply an updated edition – of my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. Picking up where the previous book left off, Gatewatching and News Curation documents how professional and citizen journalism, and news audiences’ everyday engagement with journalism and journalists, has developed over the past decade and more. It shows that the practice of gatewatching is now more central to all of this than ever before (that it has become demotic) – but also that it has continued to transform and adapt to new communicative platforms, most centrally including social media like Twitter and Facebook. As a result, although the fabled ‘random acts of journalism’ might not have eventuated, most social media users now perform habitual acts of news curation instead.

The book covers these changes to news users’ engagement with journalism, both in the context of breaking news and in everyday newssharing practices, and how this has changed the news itself; it then reviews how both journalists and news organisations have attempted to respond to this transformation, variously by proactively embracing change or burying their heads in the sand, and highlights the format of news liveblogs as a key example of the new realities of news in a hybrid media environment. It concludes by reflecting on the impact that our changing, complex social news media system must have on our understanding of the public sphere.

I’m delighted with the advance praise the book has already received, some of which is here, along with a PDF of the book’s introductory chapter. The book itself is available from Peter Lang, Amazon, and other booksellers – and the eBook version comes under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) licence! The introductory chapter is available on my Website as a reading sample.

At a time of such intense focus on the intersections and conflicts between journalism and social media, I hope this book makes a valuable contribution to the debate. My sincere thanks to everybody who has helped me refine the thoughts presented here.

We’re delighted to announce the launch of the first book to emerge from the QUT Social Media Research Group, in collaboration with the Junior Researchers Group “Science an the Internet” at the University of Düsseldorf. Twitter and Society, edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, was launched at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Denver on 26 October 2013. The book is now available in paperback and hardcover from Amazon and the Peter Lang Website, and an eBook version will also become available shortly.

Twitter and Society is a 450-page anthology of the very best of current Twitter research, providing a comprehensive overview of research methods, concepts, challenges, and applications. It features some 31 chapters, with a number of key contributions from members of the Social Media Research Group itself, a foreword by the University of Amsterdam’s Richard Rogers – and we’re particularly proud to have been able to use the painting Die Zwitschermaschine (The Twittering Machine) by Paul Klee as the book cover. Many, many thanks to our 45 contributors for their fabulous contributions. A full list of chapters is below – and you can also follow further updates about the book at @twitsocbook!

Table of Contents

Foreword: Debanalising Twitter: The Transformation of an Object of Study
Richard Rogers

Twitter and Society: An Introduction
Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, & Cornelius Puschmann

Part I: Concepts and Methods

CONCEPTS

1 Twitter and the Rise of Personal Publics
Jan-Hinrik Schmidt

2 Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter
Axel Bruns & Hallvard Moe

3 Structure of Twitter: Social and Technical
Alexander Halavais

4 The Politics of Twitter Data
Cornelius Puschmann & Jean Burgess

METHODS

5 Data Collection on Twitter
Devin Gaffney & Cornelius Puschmann

6 Metrics for Understanding Communication on Twitter
Axel Bruns & Stefan Stieglitz

7 Sentiment Analysis and Time Series with Twitter
Mike Thelwall

8 Computer-Assisted Content Analysis of Twitter Data
Jessica Einspänner, Mark Dang-Anh, & Caja Thimm

9 Ethnographic and Qualitative Research on Twitter
Alice E. Marwick

10 Legal Questions of Twitter Research
Michael Beurskens

Part II: Perspectives and Practices

PERSPECTIVES

11 From #FollowFriday to YOLO: Exploring the Cultural Salience of Twitter Memes
Alex Leavitt

12 Twitter and Geographical Location
Rowan Wilken

13 Privacy on Twitter, Twitter on Privacy
Michael Zimmer & Nicholas Proferes

14 Automated Twitter Accounts
Miranda Mowbray

15 Information Retrieval for Twitter Data
Ke Tao, Claudia Hauff, Fabian Abel, & Geert-Jan Houben

16 Documenting Contemporary Society by Preserving Relevant Information from Twitter
Thomas Risse, Wim Peters, Pierre Senellart, & Diana Maynard

PRACTICES

Popular Culture

17 The Perils and Pleasures of Tweeting with Fans
Nancy Baym

18 Tweeting about the Telly: Live TV, Audiences, and Social Media
Stephen Harrington

19 Following the Yellow Jersey: Tweeting the Tour de France
Tim Highfield

20 Twitter and Sports: Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets
Axel Bruns, Katrin Weller, & Stephen Harrington

Brand Communication

21 Public Enterprise-Related Communication and Its Impact on Social Media Issue Management
Stefan Stieglitz & Nina Krüger

22 Twitter, Brands, and User Engagement
Tanya Nitins & Jean Burgess

Politics and Activism

23 Political Discourses on Twitter: Networking Topics, Objects, and People
Axel Maireder & Julian Ausserhofer

24 Twitter in Politics and Elections: Insights from Scandinavia
Anders Olof Larsson & Hallvard Moe

25 The Gift of the Gab: Retweet Cartels and Gift Economies on Twitter
Johannes Paßmann, Thomas Boeschoten, & Mirko Tobias Schäfer

Journalism

26 The Use of Twitter by Professional Journalists: Results of a Newsroom Survey in Germany
Christoph Neuberger, Hanna Jo vom Hofe, & Christian Nuernbergk

27 Twitter as an Ambient News Network
Alfred Hermida

Crisis Communication

28 Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters
Axel Bruns & Jean Burgess

29 Twitpic-ing the Riots: Analysing Images Shared on Twitter during the 2011 U.K. Riots
Farida Vis, Simon Faulkner, Katy Parry, Yana Manyukhina, & Lisa Evans

Twitter in Academia

30 Twitter in Scholarly Communication
Merja Mahrt, Katrin Weller, & Isabella Peters

31 How Useful Is Twitter for Learning in Massive Communities? An Analysis of Two MOOCs
Timo van Treeck & Martin Ebner

Epilogue: Why Study Twitter?
Cornelius Puschmann, Axel Bruns, Merja Mahrt, Katrin Weller, and Jean Burgess