A month ago I was able to present the themes of my latest book Gatewatching and News Curation at the University of Sydney, as part of its Media@Sydney series of talks – my sincere thanks to Francesco Bailo, Gerard Goggin, and everyone else who made this possible. The M@S team also posted video and audio recordings of the talk, which I’m sharing below; in case the presentation is difficult to make out in the video, I’ve also included the slides themselves.
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.
For the past few years I have published regular monthly updates of the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) at The Conversation and at Mapping Online Publics. As that partnership has now come to an end and the writing of regular updates had become somewhat onerous, we’ve developed a new approach to sharing the trends in how content from Australian news sites is being shared on Twitter.
From now on, ATNIX is published through a live, interactive dashboard which shows day-to-day trends and lists the most shared URLs for any given timeframe (click ‘full screen’ to enlarge):
I’ll continue to publish ATNIX updates on major trends and developments from time to time, but this dashboard provides a much faster way to make these live trends available. (As a next step in the process, I also hope to automate the @_ATNIX_Twitter account so that it highlights major news articles as they are trending.)
The book is designed as a sequel – not as a new edition – to my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. It picks up the story where that book left off: after briefly revisiting the first wave of citizen media, which was dominated by citizen journalism sites and independent news blogs and gradually dissipated towards the end of the 2000s, the remainder of the book focusses on what I’ve come to describe as a second wave of citizen media. That second wave is building especially on the widespread adoption of contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter not only, but to an important extent, for disseminating, discussing, and curating the news, and it has posed substantial new challenges for journalists and news organisations – challenges that have yet to be fully resolved.