Lead researcher Meredith Ringel Morris surveyed avid Twitter users to identify 32 features of a tweet that help determine credibility. What features were associated with low credibility? The use of non-standard grammar and punctuation; not replacing the default egg account image; using a cartoon or avatar as an account image; and following a large number of users but being followed by few.

Features associated with high credibility “generally concerned the author of the tweet”:

Author influence (as measured by follower, retweet, and mention counts)
Topical expertise (as established through a Twitter homepage bio)
History of on-topic tweeting, pages outside of Twitter, or having a location relevant to the topic of the tweet
Reputation (whether an author is someone a user follows, has heard of, or who has an official Twitter account verification seal)

Mapping Digital Media: Digital Media, Conflict and Diasporas in the Horn of Africa

Academic article cites my blog posts.

Article cites my blog post.

Internet usage has grown from 200 000 users in 2000 (0.7 per cent of the population) to 3.6 million in 2009 (8.6 per cent).

Most Kenyans access the internet through mobile phones and internet cafés as opposed to personal computers, either at
work or at home. The Digital Life Survey, a report recently launched by TNS Research International shows that 60 per cent of the people use their handsets, compared to 29 per cent using PCs at home, 33 per cent using PCs at work and 41 per cent accessing the internet in cyber cafés. The leading activities on mobile internet are social networking for 67 per cent of users and accessing e-mails (54 per cent). Fourteen per cent use it for administrative work like filing tax returns and conducting internet banking.

This article presents an analysis of the flow of information in a network of online news sites. Social network theory and research on hyperlinked networks of Web pages are used to develop a model of information flow among Web sites. Kleinberg's authority-hub model is extended by introducing sources of information in the network. Significant support was found for a Source–Authority–Hub model, which shows the source, directionality, routing, and destination of news information flow through a network of authorities and hubs. This model demonstrates the ability of key Web sites to control the flow of news and information. Applications of the model to over-time data have the potential to predict future changes in the online news industry.

This article describes a content and qualitative analysis of quotations from sources in Canadian newspaper items on homelessness. Experts dominate as sources on homelessness. Homeless people are not completely deprived of a voice, but are limited to the devalued voice of experience. Quotes from homeless people themselves promote a narrative of homelessness that marginalizes the people who experience it and contributes to their social exclusion.

This experimental study tested the knowledge gap hypothesis at the intersection of audience education levels and news formats (newspaper versus online). The findings reveal a gap in public affairs knowledge acquisition between South Korean citizens (N = 123) from different educational backgrounds. Moreover, the high education group comprehended news with the same level of efficiency across online and newspaper formats while low education participants gained more knowledge from reading a newspaper than using an online news source. Taken together, this study’s findings confirm the knowledge gap hypothesis through experimental research and offer evidence of its potential contribution to the digital divide.

Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these ‘internet scandals’ impacting politics in the semi-authoritarian political environment? To address this and related questions, I juxtapose two case studies of police corruption scandals that erupted in the social media sphere in 2009/2010. Drawing on the findings, I argue that Russia’s ruling elites are presently very much capable of managing these outbursts of public outrage. Mainly with the help of the powerful state-controlled television, public anger is very swiftly redirected towards lower-level authorities and foreign, supposedly hostile powers.

Over the past decade Brazil has become well known for its open embrace of new media technologies. In tandem, an increasing number of Brazilian candidates have begun to use web and social media sites as an integral part of their overall campaign efforts. The present study is the first effort at large-scale modeling of these relationships in an emerging Latin American democracy. To explore the relationship between using digital media in a candidate’s political campaign strategy and voter support, I built an original dataset of the 2010 elections for the lower house of the Brazilian Congress. I investigate factors such as a candidate’s use of web and social networking sites in conjunction with other traditional influences such as candidate gender, age, incumbency, party affiliation, coalition membership and campaign spending. I demonstrate that having a robust web presence and using social media, holding other factors constant, can be a significant contribution to the popularity of a cand

Iraq was the top story overall in 2007, accounting for 15.4% of the newshole that year, according to PEJ’s analysis, as Congress and President Bush battled for control of Iraq policy. But as the U.S. drew down troops, and the domestic policy debate subsided, American media outlets also withdrew reporters from Iraq, and attention to the war has declined by more than 95% percent since 2007. For 2011 so far, the Iraq has filled 0.6% of the newshole, less than the attention to the trial of Casey Anthony or the Mexican Drug War.

(a) Habitual Access. As the term implies,
habitual access exists when an individual or
group is so situated t h a t their own event needs
routinely coincide with the newsmaking activ-
ities of media personnel. Thus, for example,
the President of the United States is always
assumed t o say "important" things. This
"importance" is taken-for-granted, and a
Washington reporter who acts on the opposite
assumption will probably lose his job. Habitu-
al access is likely limited in this country t o
high government officials, major corporate
figures, a n d , t o a lesser e x t e n t , certain d a m -
our personalities (cf. Tuchman, 1972b). Such
people, especially those in political life, nicst
be concerned with keeping their podia alive
and organizing the news so t h a t their goals d o
not suffer in the continuing competition t o
create publics.

See Vol 5 (2011) - more features for Arab Spring articles

"There was no way to undo the vow of every soldier who had knelt on this soil and let his tears mix with the spilled blood of his comrade and who had promised that he would never forget to hate the man -- and every man who looked like him -- who took the life of his brother. You can't rewind war. It spools on, and on, and on. Looping and jumping, distorted and cracked with age, and the stories contract until only the nuggets of hatred remain and no one can even remember, or imagine, why the war was organized in the first place."<br />
<br />
Alexandra Fuller, Scribbling the Cat.

Despite the proliferation of social media  – with Twitter and Facebook touted as playing pivotal roles in such pro-democracy movements as the Arab Spring –  the bulk of today’s blogs, websites and video-sharing sites represent the perspectives of college-educated, Web 2.0-savvy users, the study says.<br />
<br />
“Having Internet access is not enough. Even among people online, those who are digital producers are much more likely to have higher incomes and educational levels,” said Jen Schradie, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley and author of the study published in the May online issue of Poetics, a Journal of Empirical Research on Culture, the Media and the Arts.<br />
<br />
<br />
Schradie, a researcher at the campus’s Berkeley Center for New Media, analyzed data from more than 41,000 American adults surveyed between 2000 and 2008 in the Pew Internet and American Life Project. She found that college graduates are 1.5 times more likely to be bloggers than are high school graduates

It has become commonplace for the people caught up in the news to provide the first accounts, images and video of events unfolding around them.

what we found that the main reasons people turned to journalist blogs was to get additional information about a story (61 per cent) or because they enjoyed reading the posts (59 per cent).<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
Just over half, 51 per cent, said blog posts helped them get a better understanding of the story, and 45 per cent said they were interested in the behind-the-scene details of a story.<br />
<br />
But I was surprised to see that audiences were less enthusiastic about the ability to connect and engage with journalists via their blogs. Only a third said they follow journalists online to learn more about them or to share their views on a story.

They <br />
became known as blogs. <br />
Though not very common at the time of my first fieldwork phase in <br />
2001/02, they were becoming more popular by the time of my second fieldwork <br />
phase in 2003/04. A blog is often like a personal diary that additionally offers (local) <br />
news coverage. As a new virtual subculture, bloggers were engaged in innovative <br />
forms of democratic self-expression, networking, global politics, media critique, and <br />
local/alternative journalism. Many blogs are increasingly political and over the last <br />
years a wide variety of left-oriented blogs have been created and have organized <br />
themselves in solidarity networks (Kahn and Kellner 2004:92). Besides Rafah-Today, <br />
Tabula Gaza became a well-known Palestinian blog; both are from Gaza. By gaining <br />
more legitimacy, and sometimes cited by mainstream media, these ‘personal’ sources <br />
have become part of the Palestinian information flows.

It marks the emergence of a new model of watchdog function, one that is neither purely networked nor<br />
purely traditional, but is rather a mutualistic interaction between the two.

"But new news journalists will need the flexibility to cope. They will need to network with the audience as much as they do with their colleagues. The audience is becoming a vast but still untapped news source. The most go-ahead journalists are using social networking tools to help find information and interviewees.<br />
<br />
"Responding on blogs and using those to promote a dialogue with informed members of the audience is leading to improved journalism. It can be time-consuming but it can yield real benefits.<br />
"So journalists will need changed culture, changed organisation and an improved understanding of the modern tools of journalism – audience insights, blogging, Twitter, multimedia production. It sounds like being pretty challenging...But I suspect that the public may well appreciate a journalism that puts serving their information needs at its heart, rather than one which is about organising the world in the way that journalists prefer.'

1. In general, the number of hyperlinks at online news websites has increased over time.<br />
2. At newspaper websites, the amount of linking to external sites is minimal and may have actually decreased.<br />
3. The little rigorous comparison that exists between blog and news site linking practices show that these sites occupy different citational universes.<br />
4. Finally, the question of “what links count” (particularly the differences between sidebar links and inline links) represents a particularly difficult analytical question that highlights the need for a qualitative methodological strategy that goes beyond counting links.

Prior to recent theoretical work on social networks, the usual explanations invoked individual behaviors: some members of the community had sold out, the spirit of the early days was being diluted by the newcomers, et cetera. We now know that these explanations are wrong, or at least beside the point. What matters is this: Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality.

If you were a broadcast media outlet thinking about community building, here are five things you would think about:

Though it is tempting to think that we can somehow do away with the effects of mass media with new technology, the difficulty of reaching millions or even tens of thousands of people one community at a time is as much about human wiring as it is about network wiring. No matter how community minded a media outlet is, needing to reach a large group of people creates asymmetry and disconnection among that group -- turns them into an audience, in other words -- and there is no easy technological fix for that problem.

BBC ..considerable recognition in Afghanistan; 96% of those who have listened to radio have heard of a BBC radio station and 82% have actually listened to a BBC program. Of those who have listened to a BBC program (864), 75% listened to the program in the last week and 84% listened in the last month. BBC radio use has remained over the past few years high, and it is among the most often used stations in Afghanistan.

85% of all blogs were male (where gender could be identified at all); the largest group were in the 41-50 age bracket; some 15% posted more than one article per day, but the largest group of bloggers were far less active. Content was distributed across describing personal experiences (37%), documentation (41%), interviews (4%), and quotes (23%).

Hallvard examined discussions in the Norwegian blogosphere around the European data retention directive..the blogosphere is a low-density network which also includes a number of prominent leftist politicians' Websites. The blogosphere is open, free of authoritarian control, moderately networked, with relatively young voices alongside more established perspectives, with low levels of partisanship. A-List bloggers tend to use blogs for dissemination, and dialogue seems to be more prominent among the left than the right

Citizen sources were divided into victim or family (local or foreign), witness, vox pop (local or foreign), and citizen journalist (local or foreign), for a total of seven categories; other source categories included government, police, etc. She also examined the timing of source use (beginning, middle, or end of the events).

Thorsen highlighted the tensions at the BBC over user contributions.

To say that objectivity has a history is to say that it is not a transcendent self-generating and eternal intellectual virtue. (5) It is rather an idea that finds its origins in the ideas of utilitarianism and the enlightenment beginning in the 19th century. It is an idea that stems from essentialist thought because it is based on the assumption, that the world can be understood by gathering facts and bringing them in the right order. It is also a concept that tries to deal with two difficulties: On the one hand a lack of resources to document all the knowledge that is out there (There simply isn’t just enough paper to publish each and every thought).

The new media environment presents a number of opportunities and challenges for the journalistic values of impartiality and objectivity. Alternative media sources have become readily accessible, but they are not held to the same deontological codes as mainstream journalists. To combat this problem, the mainstream must use new media to its advantage by increasing community participation and encouraging a public journalism model. Especially in cases where extremist views begin to enter the mainstream discourse, journalists have a civic responsibility to sacrifice some objectivity and impartiality to protect liberal-democratic institutions and values. If they seriously consider themselves to be the “fourth estate,” journalists must use the means available to them to challenge militias and others who incite hatred and violence.

..the blogosphere soon became an indispensable addition to the daily dose of BBC and Lebanese media. Blogs simply became the medium of choice for many people outside of Lebanon who wanted to follow and understand the conflict.

During the Israel–Hezbollah War of 2006, bloggers caught Reuters publishing doctored images from Lebanon. Known by bloggers as Fauxtography, the scandal provides an important site to analyze the ability of blogs to challenge mainstream media. One blog in particular was almost single–handedly responsible for unearthing and for publicizing the scandal — Little Green Footballs. This paper uses the scandal as a case study to assess how Little Green Footballs was able to mount a challenge to mainstream media. Despite theorizing to the contrary about the collective promise of networked publics, Fauxtography reveals that one of the biggest challenges of late to mainstream media came from the activities of a single blogger.