The paper is available on the site of the International Symposium on Online Journalism.

The paper, Tweets and Truth: Journalism as a Discipline of Collaborative Verification, appears in the journal, Journalism Practice.

The abstract gives a flavour of the argument in the paper:

This paper examines how social media are influencing the core journalistic value of verification. Through the discipline of verification, the journalist establishes jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality to claim a special kind of authority and status. Social media question the individualistic, top-down ideology of traditional journalism. The paper considers journalism practices as a set of literacies, drawing on the theoretical framework of new literacies to examine the shift from a focus on individual intelligence, where expertise and authority are located in individuals and institutions, to a focus on collective intelligence where expertise and authority are distributed and networked. It explores how news organizations are negotiating the tensions inherent in a transition to a digital, networked media environment, considering how journalism is evolving into a tentative and iterative process where contested accounts are examined and evaluated in public in real-time.

The paper was presented at the Future of Journalism conference at Cardiff University in September 2011.

The paper, Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer, reveals the extent to which people are turning to Facebook and Twitter for the news.

I presented the results of the study at the Future of Journalism conference held at the University of Cardiff in September 2011.

Here’s the abstract:

This study examines the impact of social media spaces on news consumption, based on an online survey of 1600 Canadians. News organizations are rushing into social media, viewing services like Facebook and Twitter as opportunities to market and distribute content. There has been limited research outside the United States into the effects of social media on news consumption. Our study found that social networks are becoming a significant source of news for Canadians. Two-fifths of social networking users said they receive news from people they follow on services like Facebook, while a fifth get news from news organizations and individual journalists they follow. Users said they valued social media because it helped them keep up with events and exposed them to a wider range of news and information. While social interaction has always affected the dissemination of news, our study contributes to research that suggests social media are becoming central to the way people experience news. Networked media technologies are extending the ability of users to create and receive personalized news streams. Investigating how networked publics are reframing the news and shaping news flows would contribute to our understanding of the evolving relationship between the journalist and the audience.

The paper will be available in print later this year.

The visualisation is the result of a collaborative project between the UBC Graduate School of Journalism, CBC and CAREX Canada, a research initiative cataloguing Canadians’ exposure to carcinogens while on the job.

The aim of the collaboration was to highlight exposure to cancer-causing chemicals in the workplace.

The project involved Candis Callison and myself from the j-school faculty, together with Anne-Marie Nicol, an assistant professor in the UBC School of Population and Public Health and executive director of CAREX.

Two j-school students, Aleksandra Sagan and Sam Eifling worked as researchers on CBC News database.