I’m please to say that a new article of mine has been published in Media International Australia (which means I’ve now had articles in consecutive MIA issues…). The issue in question, on “The ‘New’ News”, was edited by my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Brian McNair, and looks like a bumper collection of exciting work – full details are here.

My article is on the use of Twitter by Australian journalists, looking especially at the Rudd/Gillard leadership spill in June 2010, and the federal election night in August. Below is the abstract – the full article is here, and a pre-print version is here.

Journalists and Twitter: How Australian News Organisations Adapt to a New Medium

From the substantial volume of tweets during the Rudd/Gillard spill, the 2010 election campaign, and the screening of Q&A episodes to Australian editor Chris Mitchell’s threat to sue journalism academic Julie Posetti for reporting on statements about him at an academic conference, Twitter has developed an increasingly visible presence in Australian journalism. While detractors like Mitchell remain vocal, many other journalists have begun to explore manageable approaches to incorporating Twitter into their work practices, and for some – like the ABC’s ‘star recruits’ Annabel Crabb and Latika Bourke – it has already become a career driver.

Building on the data generated by a continuing, three-year ARC Discovery project, this article examines the tweeting practices of selected high-profile Australian journalists during significant political events, and explores their positioning within and interactions with the wider network of Australian Twitter users. It employs innovative data processing approaches to assess the centrality of these professional journalists to the networks of Australians discussing the news on Twitter, and places these observations in a wider context of journalist/audience relations, a decade after the emergence of the first citizen journalism Websites.

On an unrelated matter, I’ve also realised that I’ve forgotten to add a reference to a co-authored paper with my colleagues Jean Burgess and Tim Highfield which I presented at a symposium on the Arab Spring at Swinburne University in Melbourne in June. Abstract below, and the full presentation (with audio) is here.

Inter and Intra-Language Engagement on Twitter in Arab Spring Hashtag Communities

The 2011 protests and unrest of the ‘Arab Spring’ have led to a substantial amount of social media activity. On Twitter alone, several millions of tweets containing hashtags such as #libya or #egypt have been generated during 2011, for example, both by directly affected citizens of these countries, and by onlookers from further afield. What remains unclear is the extent to which there has been any direct interaction between these two groups (also considering potential language barriers between them), and whether the information sharing activities by outsiders have any significant impact on locals on the ground.

Building on hashtag datasets gathered since January 2011, this paper compares patterns of Twitter usage during the popular revolution in Egypt and the civil war in Libya. Using custom-made tools for processing ‘big data’ (boyd & Crawford, 2011), we examine the volume of tweets sent by English-, Arabic-, and mixed-language Twitter users over time, and examine the extent to which such users interact (through @replies and retweeting) only within their own language group, or also across language boundaries. We also examine how such patterns of interaction, and the relative presence of different language groups in overall hashtag activity, shifted over time during the course of the year, and draw connections between such shifts and events on the ground.

Further, we will examine the URLs shared in these hashtags by Twitter participants, to identify the most prominent overall information sources, examine differences in the information diet experienced by predominantly English- and Arabic-language users, and investigate whether there are any online sources whose URLs are transcending language boundaries more frequently than others. This provides unprecedented insight into the intermedia flows and information ecology which emerged around Twitter during the Arab Spring.