Seattle.
The next speaker at AoIR 2011 is Raquel Oliveira, whose focus is on citizen journalism. The very definition of that term remains disputed, of course, and discussions over what citizen journalists are able to contribute continue apace. Citizen journalism is a phenomenon rather than a fully defined concept. Individuals use journalistic – and especially online – tools to make contributions which are of journalist interest to other. A related question is whether the Net is able to advance democracy by making possible practices such as citizen journalism.

What such practices do is to change traditional news production models, shifting the balance of power further towards news users. Raquel’s work examines the use of two citizen journalism communities which do this – Viva Favela and Índios Online: the former of these was greated in July 2001 and focusses on issues of interest to poor communities; the latter started in 2004 as a project coordinated by an NGO, and is now run autonomously by native Indio communities.

Cardiff.
The next speakers in this session at the Future of Journalism conference are Tanja Aitamurto and Seth Lewis. Their focus is on open innovation in the news industry: the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate innovation. Such innovation is necessary in news, due to the continuing increase in media platforms, the shortening of product lifecycles, the rapid change of consumer habits, and the diminishing resources available.

Tanja and Seth have identified three cases which exemplify such innovation. How does such innovation manifest in the news industry, and what implications does it have in research and development work? At the macro level, one such example is the Knight News Challenge. It is a high-profile competition examining the future of news, and can be seen to be setting the agenda for journalism innovation; overall, it has wide influence in journalism. Knight follows an inside-out process by providing funds, reports, and signals to the industry, as well as an outside-in process that taps into the wisdom of actors outside of journalism; this results in a coupled process which straddles the boundaries of journalism by linking journalists and technologists.

Cardiff.
Leslie-Jean Thornton finishes the session at Future of Journalism by discussing the spread of information on Twitter. She points us to the San Diego fire and the #sandiegofire hashtag, which really was a breakthrough for the use of hashtags on Twitter; this was the first time that hashtags were successfully used for the coordination of discussion around major crisis events.

It is interesting for such breaking news stories to examine the timeline of events on Twitter, of course; this also requires detailed qualitative, even ethnographic work. Early on, journalism on these events hasn’t even emerged yet, so we can study how events are being characterised by the users who just raised them; especially at these early stages, gatewatching and citizen journalism practices may be able to be observed particularly clearly.

Cardiff.
Our own paper was next at the Future of Journalism conference. Here’s the presentation (and the full paper) – audio to follow soon, hopefully… now online, too.

Cardiff.
The next session at Future of Journalism 2011 starts with the fabulous Alfred Hermida, whose focus is on the shift of news organisations to digital, networked environments, with specific reference to Twitter. How do journalists find a place in this, and especially, how do they deal with verifying information on those platforms?

Twitter is used for a variety of purposes, of course, and the volume of messages on this platform is immense. This represents the lives, interests, and views of its users – and includes acts of journalism; Twitter can be seen as a platform for ambient journalism, therefore. This challenges established ways of communication for journalism, usually about current things, and it disrupts the way we think about space and time, private and public. For journalists, it disrupts truth (or the pursuit of truth, which they have elevated to their ultimate professional goal): discovering and reporting truth by journalism is seen as essential to the profession.

Cardiff.
If it’s Thursday, it must be Wales: I’ve made it to the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, which starts with a keynote by Emily Bell. She begins by noting that discussions about the future of journalism only started in the UK with the Murdoch papers’ move to Wapping, and it has been mainly about the role of technology in the transformation of journalism; before then, there was a strong commitment to continue doing journalism as it had always been done.

Today, journalism is becoming less defined by the business models that support it, and more by the activities which it consists of – types of journalistic activity are now scattered widely across many domains. Journalism is a craft, and arguing over who might or might not be a journalism today is futile. If Julian Assange or Rebekah Brooks say they’re journalists, or a random citizen taking first-hand footage does so, who is to say they aren’t? We may gather random forms of activity, and ask whether they are journalistic, but there’s little point in doing so any more.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Barbara Pfetsch, whose focus is on media agenda building in online and offline media. She suggests that research is needed to assess the impact of the Net on public debate: how could one go about this work? There have been hopes that the Net may lead to greater public participation and deliberation; also, however, what is the discursive opportunity structure which is provided by the Net? What is the potential for new civil society actors to enter the debate, and how may they be included in the process?

What theoretical and empirical approaches may be suited to researching these questions? First, there is an elite bias in traditional mass media; they tend to exclude ‘outside’, non-mainstream actors, and the hope is that the Net removes such biases. Second, media agenda building depends on local contexts: the political system, the media system, and the constellation of current conflicts in a country, for example. How does traditional media agenda setting change because of the Internet, as new challengers make their views heard?