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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

The next ECREA 2012 session is on social media and crisis communication, and I have my final paper for this trip in this session as well. We start with Farida Vis, though, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by the London Metropolitan Police. This relates also to the emergence of data journalism, to the work to understand the positioning of Twitter in the wider mediasphere, and to the overall interest in the 'big data' question which has grown over the last year or so. All of this is related to issues of surveillance, user profiling, and other data …

The second keynote speaker in this ECREA 2012 plenary is Daya Thussu, whose interest is in the internationalisation of media studies, with specific reference to China and India. Where we are today in terms of global media is a mix of material of Hollywood-imported or -inspired programming (in music, television, films, news, sports, children's programming, and also in online media); the US continues to dominate the entertainment industry, in particular.

In news and current affairs, the US and UK form a duopoly of dominance; the world's top five media companies are based in the US. But this status quo beginning …

ECREA 2012 continues with another round of keynotes, and the first speaker is Slavko Splichal. His interest is in the marketisation of the public sphere, and he begins by noting that the rise of the term 'public sphere' began only after the publication of an English translation of Habermas's work in the late 1980s. In addition, however, there are also many other theories of publics and public spheres; these receive considerably less exposure. This may also have something to do with Habermas's explicitly normative perspective, which may be especially attractive to some scholars; much of the other work takes a …

The final paper in our ECREA 2012 panel is presented by Jennifer Wladarsch, who focusses on the recent resignation of the German federal president following a corruption scandal. Scandals represent a specific constellation of actors – the scandalised actor themselves, the scandalising actors who point out and report the scandal, and the general public who respond (with outrage) to the scandal.

Online communication broadens the range of potential participants in this process; audiences can participate in the scandalising by providing or reacting to information, for example. Jennifer and her colleagues examined this in the context of a scandal which revealed …

The next ECREA 2012 speakers are Hallvard Moe and Anders Larsson, who compare social media use in the Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish elections. They begin by noting that social media, and specific platforms, are deeply integrated with each other and with the wider mediasphere, and that this raises questions over the genres of use for each of these platforms, and the key actors which emerge in each case.

The three countries examined by the project are similar in their political systems and structures, and the project examined the use of Twitter during their campaigns; in particular, it explored the use …