I am delighted to formally announce the publication of my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. This is the culmination of a long period of intensive research – partially supported by funding from the Australian Research Council – that investigated the increasingly complex intersections between journalism and social media in the current media ecology. I’ve made the introductory chapter available on this site as a reading sample; it also provides an overview of the contents.

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.

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.

We’re already deep into February 2017, but I thought I’d finally put together an overview of what I’ve been up to during the past year, at least as far as research outputs are concerned. It’s been a busy year by any measure, with a number of key projects coming to completion; research publications from some of these are still in production, but here’s what’s already come out.

Taking a quick break from liveblogging the paper sessions I've seen, I was asked to do a quick interview for the ECREA 2016 YouTube channel – and it's online already. So, here's a quick chat about the future of journalism, and a preview of the themes of my upcoming sequel to the Gatewatching book:

The final paper in this ECREA 2016 session is by Christian Nuernbergk, whose focus is on the interaction of political and journalistic actors via social media. Both now have to deal with emerging personal publics in social media, in addition to their conventional mass media publics; they now need to have in mind a range of such publics in their everyday professional practice.

The next paper at ECREA 2016 is presented by Christoph Neuberger, whose focus is on the dynamic relationship between journalism and its audiences. He points out that the complexity of communication has increased with the range of options for communication that have now emerged in online contexts.

The next paper at ECREA 2016 is by Folker Hanusch and me, and deals specifically with the popular science communication platform The Conversation. Our slides are below:

Journalism-as-a-Service: Amplifying Public Intellectual Contributions through The Conversation from Axel Bruns

The morning session on this final day of ECREA 2016 starts with a panel that emerges from the "Journalism beyond the Crisis" ARC Discovery research project that Brian McNair, Folker Hanusch and I lead. As Aljosha Schapals explains in his introduction to the panel, this explores the changing content forms, journalistic practices, and user reception of factual content, as well as the implications of these developments for overall democratic processes.