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 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.

I’m delighted to share a couple of new publications written with my esteemed colleagues in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre – and as if we weren’t working on enough research projects already, this year is about to get an awful lot busier soon, too. First, though, to the latest articles:

Axel Bruns, Brenda Moon, Avijit Paul, and Felix Münch. “Towards a Typology of Hashtag Publics: A Large-Scale Comparative Study of User Engagement across Trending Topics.” Communication Research and Practice 2.1 (2016): 20-46.

This article, in a great special issue of Communication Research and Practice on digital media research methods that was edited by my former PhD student Jonathon Hutchinson, updates my previous work with Stefan Stieglitz that explored some key metrics for a broad range of hashtag datasets and identified some possible types of hashtags using those metrics. In this new work, we find that the patterns we documented then still hold today, and add some further pointers towards other types of hashtags. We’re particularly thankful to our colleagues Jan Schmidt, Fabio Giglietto, Steven McDermott, Till Keyling, Xi Cui, Steffen Lemke, Isabella Peters, Athanasios Mazarakis, Yu-Chung Cheng, and Pailin Chen, who contributed some of their own datasets to our analysis.

Folker Hanusch and Axel Bruns. “Journalistic Branding on Twitter: A Representative Study of Australian Journalists’ Profile Descriptions.” Digital Journalism (2016).

We are now inviting applications for the 2016 CCI Digital Methods Summer School. The deadline for application is Monday 21 Sep. 2016.

Hosted by the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), the 2016 event will focus on digital methods for sociocultural research. It is designed for university researchers at all stages of their careers, from doctoral students, postdoctoral and mid-career academics to established scholars.

The week-long intensive program will focus on new quantitative, qualitative and data-driven digital methods and their research applications in the humanities and social sciences, with a particular focus on media, communication and cultural studies and their applications in the creative industries.

Participants will work with leading researchers, engage in hands-on workshop activities and will have the opportunity to present and get feedback on their own work.

The Summer School will offer a range of introductory hands-on workshops in topics such as:

• Digital ethnography
• Issue mapping
• Social media data analytics
• Software and mobile app studies
• Analysing visual social media
• Geo-spatial mapping
• Data visualisation
• Agent-based modelling
• Web scraping

The program will be conceptually grounded in the problems of public communication and privacy, digital media production and consumption, and the ethical issues associated with big data and digital methods in the context of digital media environments. There will be talks on these topics in addition to the workshops.