Alfred Hermida is an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. An associate professor at the Graduate School of Journalism of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, his research and teaching focuses on investigating the convergence of media technologies, industries, content and audiences, through scholarly papers, applied projects and media activities designed to bridge theory and practice.

He is a co-author of Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, published in 2011 by Wiley-Blackwell.

His new book, Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know and Why It Matters, is due to be published by Doubleday Canada. The book charts how our enhanced capacity to share information via social media is shaping our notions of an informed and engaged public, a media ecology of competing ideas, and a responsive political establishment.

He was named an IBM CAS Canada Research Faculty Fellow in 2010, 2011 and 2012, and won the 2011 UBC President’s Award for Public Education Through Media. He was nominated in the 2011 Digi Awards for Canada’s top social media maven.

He won a 2010 Canadian Online Publishing Award for best blog for Reportr.net, and a Commendation of Merit in the co-creation and collaboration media category of the SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards program for UBC/CBC Radio 3 project, the Canadian Music Wiki.

Hermida is a 16-year veteran of the BBC and was a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997. During his four years as daily news editor, the site won the BAFTA for best news website four years in a row. His has also written for The Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, The Times of London, The Guardian and NPR.

Through his research at UBC, and his earlier work at the BBC, he has built an international reputation as an authority on new media, with his work appearing in Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, Journalism Practice and Journalism Studies. His research interests include participatory journalism, social media and emerging genres of digital journalism.

Prof Hermida serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media and the journal, Digital Journalism.