Twittering the newsThe Emergence of

Ambient Journalism

Alfred HermidaUBC Graduate School of Journalism

Twitter timeThe Daily ShowMarch 2, 2009

131 Twitter accounts

1.47 million followers

UK National newspapers

Ruth Barnett, Sky News

Twitter correspondent

Aggregator of journalists’ tweets

MuckRack.com

Maureen Dowd, 2009

“A toy for bored celebrities and high-school girls.”

Ellen Goodman, 2009

“It’s like searching for medical advice in an online world of quacks and cures.”

Quoted in Brian Stelter, 2009

“Twitter? I won’t touch it. It’s all garbage.”

Multi-faceted, fragmented news experience

Georges SeuratLa Parade (1889) (detail)

Awareness systems

Computer-mediated communication systems “intended to help people construct and maintain awareness of each others’ activities, context or status, even when the participants are not co-located.” Markopoulos et al. 2009

Awareness systems

“As this technology becomes more affordable, with greater quality and diversity, awareness systems offer tremendous potential for innovation, with a wide range of forms and contexts for transforming the space around us.”

Markopoulos et al. 2009

Awareness systems

Awareness defined as “the ongoing interpretation of representations i.e. of human activity and of artifacts.”

Chalmers, 2009

Ambient journalism

Micro-bursts of data

Twitscoop.com

NowPublic.com Scan

Retw

eet: @

Daily

Us

Ambient conversation

The “stream of messages provided by Twitter allows individuals to be peripherally aware of discussions without being contributors.”

boyd et al, 2009

The future of Twitter

Thank you