Einar Thorsen

Professor of Journalism and Communication at Bournemouth University

Publications | Conferences | Teaching | Projects

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The Future of Social Media in Journalism

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Vadim Lavrusik:

all media as we know it today will become social, and feature a social component to one extent or another. […]

But more importantly, these social tools are inspiring readers to become citizen journalists by enabling them to easily publish and share information on a greater scale. The future journalist will be more embedded with the community than ever, and news outlets will build their newsrooms to focus on utilizing the community and enabling its members to be enrolled as correspondents. Bloggers will no longer be just bloggers, but be relied upon as more credible sources.

Excellent overview of:
– Collaborative Reporting
– Journalists as Community Managers
– The Social Beat
– Social Stories
– Online Curation for a “Time-Poor Audience”
– The Social Network as the New Editor
– Beyond Twitter & Facebook
– Monetizing Social
– A Social Newsroom and the Personal Brand
– A Mobile Social Experience

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University of Colorado may shut down journalism school to create a more tech-oriented degree program

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Stefanie Chernow writing at the Editors Weblog:

Digital trends in the media are affecting every aspect of the journalism field, including education. The University of Colorado at Boulder is pondering closing its journalism department in favor of a new degree program that would combine journalism and computer science skills. According to Editor & Publisher, the new academic unit could compound on existing strengths in journalism, yet adding computer science course will "prepare students for an ever-changing communications and media marketplace."

Another example of other disciplines taking over journalism education.

Still baffles me how the industry struggles to differentiate between online / multimedia journalism and web development / production… the two are not and never will be the same thing.

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Let’s subsidize open broadband, not journalists (newspaper industry deserves to die)

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Dan Gillmor:

I love newspapers. I worked in them for almost 25 years. But I'm not itching to bail out a business that is failing in large part because it was so transcendentally greedy in its monopoly era that it passed on every opportunity to survive against real financial competition. With a few exceptions, the newspaper industry essentially deserves to die at this point.

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Ad-funded Guardian could switch off presses by 2015

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Alan Rusbridger:

We are earning tens of millions of pounds and it’s increasing at about 100 percent a year at the moment

[…]

Let’s say we’re earning about £40m at the moment in digital revenue.

Peter Kirwan:

Now these are important numbers. Among other things, they suggest that Guardian News & Media (GNM) might yet succeed in building a fully-digital future without any help from paywalls, even if Wapping does meet with success.

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Commercial Hack Day Results

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Michael Brunton-Spall:

The Guardian ran a 'Developer Challenge' as part of the Open Platform launch last week. The idea was to emulate the Hack Day formula but with an interesting twist: our media partners gave us briefs to answer.

We asked all the media partners invited to attend the launch event to stay and brainstorm concepts with us that would demonstrate the power of the Open Platform. For example, they could ask us to create an engaging user experience around gardening DIY, eco friendly travel, social search, mapping, etc.

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