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.

As part of their visit, Christoph and Christian also kindly agreed to update us on their wider research activities, and presented a Creative Industries Faculty research seminar last Friday, which we streamed live via YouTube. Below is a video of their presentation – unfortunately our camera ended up overexposing the image and so the slides aren’t very well visible, but they’re also available as a separate document here.

As we’ve previously announced, the QUT Social Media Research Group and the Journalism, Media & Communication Discipline in the Creative Industries Faculty at QUT are delighted to host a special guest lecture by internationally renowned journalism scholar Alfred Hermida today. We’ll also try to livestream the talk, from 12 noon Brisbane time (UTC+10 – that’s 1 p.m. for our less fortunate cousins in the southern states of Australia). Please tune in then – and apologies in advance if the livestream should drop out at some point (it’s an experiment).

Hashtag Dissent: #Idlenomore Aboriginal Counter Narratives on Twitter

A growing body of research points to how social media, and specifically Twitter, is emerging as a hybrid space for the cultural production of journalism, with citizens are involved in the flow, framing and interpretation of news. Studies into recent social movements such as Occupy Wall Street indicate how committed individuals are appropriating social media as one of the tools to articulate a counter narrative, and contest dismissive framing by mainstream media. One such movement is Idle No More. This presentation will discuss how activists in Canada mobilised around the #Idlenomore hashtag and used Twitter to advance their message of dissent. What started as an Aboriginal protest in December 2012 developed into a loosely knit political movement. Twitter served as an alternative platform of public communication that facilitated the visibility of a marginalised social reality. The research provides insights into how engagement with networked technologies by people outside news organisations neutralise, challenge or reinforce the power of media institutions to construct social reality and how it reconfigures journalism’s role to foster a broadly informed and engaged public.

Prof Alfred Hermida is an award-winning British online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. An associate professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, his research on the intersection of communication technologies, journalism and the networked society has been published in Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. He is co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and is working on his new book, Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know and Why It Matters, due to be published by Doubleday Canada. Prof Hermida is a 16-year veteran of the BBC and was a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997.

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PLATFORM SAVVY: THE SMART NEW LESSONS FOR JOURNALISM IN THE SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETPLACE. Featuring:

Alfred Hermida is an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. He is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, where he leads the integrated journalism program.

Jennifer Dudley-Nicholson began specialising in technology journalism eight years ago. As national technology editor for News Corp Australia, she pens articles on consumer electronics, trends and failures and edits the Switched On section in the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph, Courier-Mail, Hobart Mercury and Adelaide Advertiser. She also chats about geekery on the Gadget Girl blog (blogs.news.com.au/techblog).

Brian McNair is professor of journalism, media & communication at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of many books and articles including Journalism and Democracy (2000), Cultural Chaos (2006) and Journalists In Film (2010). He is working on an ARC-funded study of the Australian political public sphere.

MEAA Centenary Lecture: Gerard Ryle, International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (5.30pm)

A four-time Walkley Award-winner and 2013 nominee, Gerard Ryle leads the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists based in Washington DC. A former Fairfax Media journalist, he is regarded as one of the world’s leading investigative journalists and is the first non-American director of the ICIJ, overseeing more than 160 member journalists in more than 60 countries. Please join us after the lecture for networking and drinks.

The QUT Journalism, Media & Communication Discipline
and the QUT Social Media Research Group
present a special guest lecture:

Alfred Hermida

Graduate School of Journalism
University of British Columbia

12:00pm – 2:00pm, Friday 29 November 2013
Z2-315, Creative Industries Precinct, QUT Kelvin Grove
Light refreshments will be served

Prof Alfred Hermida is an award-winning British online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. An associate professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada, his research on the intersection of communication technologies, journalism and the networked society has been published in Journalism Studies, Journalism Practice and the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media. He is co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), and is working on his new book, Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know and Why It Matters, due to be published by Doubleday Canada. Prof Hermida is a 16-year veteran of the BBC and was a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997.

Topic:

Hashtag Dissent: #Idlenomore Aboriginal Counter Narratives on Twitter

A growing body of research points to how social media, and specifically Twitter, is emerging as a hybrid space for the cultural production of journalism, with citizens are involved in the flow, framing and interpretation of news. Studies into recent social movements such as Occupy Wall Street indicate how committed individuals are appropriating social media as one of the tools to articulate a counter narrative, and contest dismissive framing by mainstream media. One such movement is Idle No More. This presentation will discuss how activists in Canada mobilised around the #Idlenomore hashtag and used Twitter to advance their message of dissent. What started as an Aboriginal protest in December 2012 developed into a loosely knit political movement. Twitter served as an alternative platform of public communication that facilitated the visibility of a marginalised social reality. The research provides insights into how engagement with networked technologies by people outside news organisations neutralise, challenge or reinforce the power of media institutions to construct social reality and how it reconfigures journalism’s role to foster a broadly informed and engaged public.