What may be more telling is how both of these highly engaged Twitter groups — in addition to an “overall disregard for verification” — ignored traditional media, and one another. In instances when Twitter users did attempt to provide verification, it often came in the form of a link to an outside source. But rarely was that source a traditional journalistic outlet.

News consumption has changed over the past decade from a pattern characterised by clear points in time, to one that has become so uniform we are now barely aware of it: no longer an irregular but pronounced beat, it is now a constant static.

Consumers are promiscuous in their news consumption: 65% of internet users do not have a favourite website, while research in 2009 by Oliver & Ohlbaum found that readers of the print edition of the Telegraph, for example, only spent 8% of their time reading online news on the website; in contrast other print competitors in the quality press accounted for 20% of their time (graphic below from the Economist - click to see original in context):

In October 2011 Oxfam GB completed a feasibility study in Mogadishu on the viability of using mobile phones to implement public health promotion in the insecure areas of the city. According to the findings phone usage amongst 400 IDP households is 55%. A further 43% of households who do not own a phone are able to share their neighbour’s. Over 75% of the respondents indicated interest in using mobile phones for communicating about health related issues and 91% said they preferred an interactive communication medium. The most preferred means of communicating health information on phones as identified by participants in the study was through interactive short stories (67%), songs (22%) and poems (11%) The positive results of the feasibility study suggest that an interactive mobile phone application could be used to engage and educate communities in preventive public health in Mogadishu.

Study of citizen reporting of revolution 2009-2011 shows that citizen journalists have become "better" adapting to the values and professional needs of news organisations.

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

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.

A more appropriate ancient analogy for editorial processes at many news <br />
websites is Cerberus, Hades’ three-headed hound, the editor, the reader, and the <br />
algorithm making up the three heads, collectively filtering news output. In most literary <br />
tellings, Cerberus’s heads represent the past, the present, and the future. Today, editors <br />
share gate-keeping functions with readers in ways unimagined in the past. The place of <br />
the algorithm in the future of news filtering is assured; what forms it will take we are <br />
only just beginning to glimpse.

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.

The report found that the news agenda of blogs closely followed the mainstream media, with both agreeing on nine of the top 10 stories of the year, including the economy, the midterm elections, the health care debate and the war in Afghanistan.<br />
<br />
But a different picture emerged when it looked at the links to news-related subjects in the media and blogs compared to on Twitter.