It’s that time of the year again, when I set off for the usual end-of-year round of conferences – and this year has turned out to be an especially busy one. As I write this, I’m already in Toronto for the inaugural workshop of a Canadian-funded, multi-partner research project on Social Media and Campaigning which is led by Greg Elmer of Ryerson University; this comes at an interesting time, of course, with electioneering south of the border in full swing. We’re already tracking the Twitter performance of both campaigns’ key accounts – more on that as it develops.

My next stop is Helsinki, where I’ve been invited to present two guest lectures to the international Masters students. The first of these will be an update of the keynote “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism”, which I presented at the Brazilian Society of Journalism Researchers last year, and addresses the challenges faced by journalism in an always-on, social media-driven environment; the second presents the work which my Mapping Online Publics colleagues and I have done on “Social Media and Crisis Communication”.

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.

Here are some more updates on my recent adventures in the world of Twitter research. First, I’m very happy to report that a new chapter on the impact of Twitter on the long-standing melée between industrial and citizen journalism has now been published. In the article, co-written with my CCI colleague Tim Highfield, we explore how the emergence of Twitter as a middle ground between the branded spaces of news Websites and citizen journalist blogs and other sites complicates the previously somewhat more obvious battle lines between the two sides – extending a process of, if not convergence then at least increasing interconnection, which has been evident for some time (except for the last remaining cold warriors of the blog wars).

The article has been published in Produsing Theory in a Digital World, edited by Rebecca Ann Lind – congratulations on what looks like a very interesting volume. (And on a personal note, it’s also very gratifying to see yet another colleague take up the produsage idea and do interesting things with it, of course.)

Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield. “Blogs, Twitter, and Breaking News: The Produsage of Citizen Journalism.” In Rebecca Ann Lind, ed., Produsing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2012.

A couple more new publications before I head off overseas again (mainly for research workshops, but I’ll also take in the Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg and the Conference on Science and the Internet in Düsseldorf):

Tim Highfield and Axel Bruns. “Confrontation and Cooptation: A Brief History of Australian Political Blogs.” Media International Australia 143 (2012): 89-98.

This article in a special issue of Media International Australia on the history of the Internet in Australia, edited by Gerard Goggin and Jock Given, reviews the development of the Australian political blogosphere, from the earlier ‘blog wars’ especially around the 2007 election to the increasing incorporation of leading blogs and bloggers into mainstream media stables.

Stephen Harrington, Tim Highfield and Axel Bruns. “More than a Backchannel: Twitter and Television.” In José Manuel Noguera, ed., Audience Interactivity and Participation. Brussels: COST Action Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, 2012. 13-17.

A very brief introduction to our current thinking on the role of Twitter in relation to television. We outline a number of dimensions to this relationship, and point to key areas for further research and development.

OK, so to save this blog from turning completely into a conference blog (watch out for the Australia/New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, starting next week), here’s a round-up of my most recent publications. Most of these build on our Twitter research – and you can find more detailed updates about those projects over at Mapping Online Publics.

I’ve had three co-authored journal articles published over the past few weeks. Of these, the most recent one is in First Monday, and was co-authored with Eugene Liang Yuxiang from the National Cheng Chi University in Taipei, following on from a workshop on Twitter and crisis communication research which took place there last October. In the paper, Eugene and I compare our approaches to tracking disaster-related communication on Twitter – I discuss our work with yourTwapperkeeper and Eugene outlines the infrastructure the Taiwanese team have built. For more, see:

Axel Bruns and Eugene Liang Yuxian. “Tools and Methods for Capturing Twitter Data during Natural Disasters.” First Monday 17.4 (2012).

Two other publications are co-authored with my QUT colleague Jean Burgess, and appeared in Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice within two days of each other. The first of these is another methodology article, and outlines how our methods for Twitter research may be used by journalists and journalism researchers; it’s based on the paper we presented at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2011. More details are here:

Time for a quick update again: I’m hardly even back from the SBPJor conference in Rio de Janeiro in November, but my keynote “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism” from the conference has already been published in the Brazilian Journalism Research journal, alongside the other keynotes. I posted the slides and audio from the presentation last month – and a similar presentation in German, from my visit to Vienna in March, is also online here.

When I arrived back in my office from the Rio trip, I was also very pleased to see that the Digital Difference book, collecting papers from the 2007 Ideas, Cyberspace, Education 3 conference on the shores of Loch Lomond, had finally arrived. It’s been a long road, but congratulations to the editors, Ray Land and Siân Bayne, for sticking with the project. My article, “Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age”, applies produsage concepts to explore new approaches to education.

Rio de Janeiro.
My own keynote presentation started the second day of SBPJor. Powerpoint and audio are below; the full paper (which attacks the topic from a slightly different angle, but makes much the same points) is also online.

My sincere thanks to Carlos Franciscato and the SBPJor organisation for the invitation to speak at the conference; it’s been great to meet some of the many Brazilian journalism researchers whose work I’ve been aware of for some time now. I’m sorry that because of the language barrier I’ve not been able to participate more fully in the conference itself, but I hope my contribution has been useful – some good discussion in question time, certainly!

Rio de Janeiro.
The next keynote speaker at SBPJor is Marcos Palacios (whose speech I hear in live translation, so we’ll see how this liveblog goes…). Marcos suggests that there are hurrahs as well as uh-ohs in the transformation of journalism for the digital media environment: in the first place, as we venture into a digital environment, we learn that media have memory – that there are more uses for yesterday’s newspaper than to wrap today’s fish.

News has been called the first draft of history, of course – journalism has an input into both historiography, and into the formation of the collective memory of societies. Such journalistic memory was only able to be used in a limited fashion during the pre-digital age; today, it is much more widely and permanently available. The place of memory in journalism production is growing, therefore; memory becomes the fabric that builds the journalism we are coming to know today, and is embodied in it. This enables historical analogies and nostalgia, for example, but also has many other uses.

Rio de Janeiro.
As part of my last overseas trip for this year, I’ve made it to Brazil for SBPJor, the conference of Brazilian journalism researchers – which opens with a keynote by John Pavlik. (My own plenary presentation follows tomorrow morning.) John’s focus is on the consequences of digital journalism for democracy: chief amongst these, disruption and innovation in the journalism industry; the emergence of a digital divide between those with and without access; the development of more robust interactive media; greater transparency in government; and increased civic participation.

Disruption and innovation is driven by greater access to high-speed wired and wireless Internet, as well as new (also mobile) technologies which enable us to connect to these networks. Additionally, the global economic downturn also presents great challenges for the media to reinvent themselves; this has been a problem for the mainstream media, but also provides opportunities for new media players to step into the breach.

Berlin.
The next speaker in this session at the Berlin Symposium is the Hans-Bredow-Institut’s Wolfgang Schulz, whose focus is on the impact of social media in changing the public sphere. Social media combine two key aspects: they articulate the social graph (providing social networking functionalities), and they lower the barriers for user-generated content (providing communicative and content sharing functionalities).

Uses of social media are governed by various rules: legally protected interests include copyright, personal data, communication transparency, protection of the private sphere, protection of minors, prohibition of hate speech, etc.; governance, though, takes place through technological means (software design and code), crowd-originated social norms, and other processes.