Speaking on the day of Australia’s latest partyroom spill for the Prime Ministership, this was a timely opportunity to reflect on the intersections between journalism, social media, and the public sphere, and I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions after the presentation – many thanks to everyone who came along.

More information about the new book is here: Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere.

Media@Sydney Gatewatching and News Curation – Prof. Axel Bruns https://t.co/l0EfcXBUDG

— MediaAtSydney (@MediaAtSydney) 24 August 2018

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.

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 industry responses to just about any new media form and format, seen most recently for example in the ‘blog wars’ of the 2000s –, journalists and news outlets have now gradually and often grudgingly accepted social media as tools of the trade, and as spaces where news producers and news users come together in new and unforeseen configurations. The question now is whether – as with blogs – the journalism industry will be able to normalise and thus tame this new phenomenon, or whether this time around it is journalism and journalists that will be normalised into social media environments.

My sincere thanks for the entire team at Haifa University for the opportunity to present this keynote at the Symposium, and especially to Daphne Raban for her exceptional hospitality – and many thanks also to Nik John, Karine Nahon, and everyone else whom I caught up with along the way.