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The next session at ECREA 2012 begins at a more reasonable time, and is on news representations of foreign affairs. Melanie Magin begins by presenting on the mass media representation of the Arab Spring as a 'social media revolution'. This is an overstatement, of course, driven by the mass media's focus on social media in their coverage.

Such coverage in turn also feeds back to the protesters themselves, becoming a self-fulfilling fiction. The myth is aided by the fact that few people outside the region had direct access to the protests, enabling the perpetuation of the myth. As such myths …

The final paper in this ECREA 2012 session is by Teresa Naab, but presented by proxy; it focusses on the use of media for managing the impression that others have of us. People engage with the news conspicuously in order to appear to others in a certain way – but does this actually work? People also perceive other, obvious characteristics about each other, and from this extrapolate (partly stereotypic) impressions; can conspicuous display of media use affect such impressions, then?

Impressions are not formed only based on preset, unchangeable characteristics; smaller aspects may be able to influence them. Teresa's study …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Maria José Brites, whose interest is in young people's perspectives on the news. So far, much journalism research has focussed on the point of view of news producers than audiences; this is true especially for young people's attitudes towards journalism – there is a real need particularly for more longitudinal and participatory studies here.

Maria's work engages with Portuguese youth between 15 and 20 years of age who participate in school parliament programmes, party youth organisations, graffiti, or school newspapers, and/or come from low socioeconomic backgrounds. Youths were also asked to …

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Irène Bastard, whose interest is in the use of the Facebook 'like' button to engage with the news. Talking about news can be a democratic expression, or can enhance social interactions; it can be a driver of attention and buzz, activate weak social links, or serve as a 'bubble' filter. I ordinary conversations, there may also be a range of acceptable or unacceptable topics, depending on the social situation.

On Facebook, the 'like' button provides the simplest possible way of engaging with the news; by liking a news article, it is shared …

The next speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Alison Preston from the UK Office of Communication, whose interest is in the role of online and social media in news consumption, as measured by an Ofcom survey of some 3,300 respondents and various focus groups and interviews. Most people in the UK use television for news; just over half use radio and newspapers for news (the latter is declining); while Internet, mobile, and app-based news consumption is growing rapidly, especially in younger groups. Word of mouth news dissemination, at least face-to-face, is declining, and possibly moving to social media platforms. …

It's the final day of ECREA 2012, and I've wandered into a session on the perception of news. The first speaker on this (uncomfortably early – which means there's hardly anyone here; hello, conference organisers!) Saturday morning is Mark Harmon, whose interest is in examining the value of local news. In the US, news use except for online news has declined; traditional outlets and mainstream broadcast news are down, while local broadcast news is stable, and online (including mobile and tablet) news is growing.

This also reflects changes in the news product, and the perceived value of that product …

The final speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Rob Procter, who shifts our attention to the London and UK riots in August 2011. His project collected some 2.6 million tweets from some 700,000 accounts using relevant hashtags from the Twitter firehose, and combines quantitative and qualitative analysis.

A corpus of tweets consists of tweets and retweets, and the tracking of retweets provides us with a clear identification of information flows, and enables a ranking of content by how far it flowed over time. Many of the longest information flows (the most retweeted messages) were for post-riot cleanup messages, especially …

The next speakers in our ECREA 2012 panel are Laura Ahva and Maria Hellman, whose interest is in the citizen eyewitnessing of crises. Witnessing has always been a central task of crisis journalism, but citizen-generated content is now increasingly important; citizen eyewitness images are especially central now, and are mediated from the sites of crises to the global audience. The Arab Spring provides a very useful recent example for this.

Professional media and citizen eyewitnessing have become co-dependent on each other, leading perhaps even to a symbiotic relationship or congruence between the two. Audiences use such content to make sense …

The next ECREA 2012 paper is presented by Nina Krüger, and focusses on brand communication activities during corporate crises. Enterprises are increasingly using social media for communication with their customers, of course, but to some extent still regard social media as black boxes; much more development – and research – needs to be done here.

Research on brand communication covers both day-to-day communication and issue-related communication, but much of this is still in its infancy; the patterns of communication around brands are still poorly understood. It seems that tweets containing URLs are retweeted more widely than others, for example; also …

The next presentation in this ECREA 2012 session is my co-authored paper with Jean Burgess on our research into the uses of Twitter in the 2011 Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquake. The slides are below, and audio will follow soon. I'm afraid the audio recording didn't work out. Feel free to listen to some of my other presentations on social media and crisis communication instead...

Analysing Twitter Activity in Crisis Contexts from Axel Bruns