As a conclusion to my brief trip to Germany this April, I had the opportunity to present some of my current work to the newly established Center for Advanced Internet Studies, a collaborative institution involving several of the leading universities in North Rhine-Westphalia. I used this as a chance to present the general argument of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (Peter Lang, 2018), as well as the key ideas of a new book, Are Filter Bubbles Real?, which is slated for release by Polity in July 2019.

The latter also picks up on some of the themes emerging from the Gatewatching book, and acts as something of a companion to it; the question of whether echo chambers and filter bubbles exist emerged as an increasingly pressing issue when considering the scholarship on journalism and its translation to social media, of course, but much of the extant scholarship on these deeply problematic concepts remains all too vague and confused to be useful.

The slides for the two presentations are below – for more, please see the respective books!

We’re in the final panel at ECREA 2018, and it’s the panel presenting the work of our ARC Discovery project Journalism beyond the Crisis, which triangulated between the self-perceptions of journalists in Australia, Germany, and the U.K., their observable social media engagement, and the existing and emerging landscape of news outlets in these countries. The first paper in the panel is presented by Julia Conrad and also involves Christoph Neuberger, and explores emerging news content providers at the periphery of conventional journalism in Germany.

My own presentation is next in this ECREA 2018 session, and covers the central themes of my recent book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. The slides are below:

A month ago I was able to present the themes of my latest book Gatewatching and News Curation at the University of Sydney, as part of its Media@Sydney series of talks – my sincere thanks to Francesco Bailo, Gerard Goggin, and everyone else who made this possible. The M@S team also posted video and audio recordings of the talk, which I’m sharing below; in case the presentation is difficult to make out in the video, I’ve also included the slides themselves.

Speaking on the day of Australia’s latest partyroom spill for the Prime Ministership, this was a timely opportunity to reflect on the intersections between journalism, social media, and the public sphere, and I thoroughly enjoyed the discussions after the presentation – many thanks to everyone who came along.

More information about the new book is here: Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere.

The first paper session on this last day of Social Media & Society 2018 is Michaël Opgenhaffen, whose interest is in gatekeeping on social media. Gatekeeping is one of the fundamental processes in the news industry: editors and journalists choose what stories end up in the final newspaper, news bulletin, or news Website. But selection processes might now diverge across print and online news publications, and the arrival of social media as a medium for the news further complicates this picture.

The next ICA speaker is Aljawhara Almutarie, whose focus is on citizen journalism via Twitter in Saudi Arabia. Twitter has become an important space for such citizen journalism in the country, in part in response to the economic crisis in the country that followed the 2014 collapse in oil prices.

I am delighted to formally announce the publication of my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. This is the culmination of a long period of intensive research – partially supported by funding from the Australian Research Council – that investigated the increasingly complex intersections between journalism and social media in the current media ecology. I’ve made the introductory chapter available on this site as a reading sample; it also provides an overview of the contents.

The book is designed as a sequel – not as a new edition – to my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. It picks up the story where that book left off: after briefly revisiting the first wave of citizen media, which was dominated by citizen journalism sites and independent news blogs and gradually dissipated towards the end of the 2000s, the remainder of the book focusses on what I’ve come to describe as a second wave of citizen media. That second wave is building especially on the widespread adoption of contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter not only, but to an important extent, for disseminating, discussing, and curating the news, and it has posed substantial new challenges for journalists and news organisations – challenges that have yet to be fully resolved.