10 research articles on blogging, Twitter, UGC and journalism 2010-1

So I'm doing my viva examination for the PhD later this month - nothing like a couple of hours worth of questioning as reward for several years hard work.

In preparation for the impending engagement, I'm trying to get a handle on the latest research around blogging and related subjects. And I thought I'd collect them here for those of you who are interested...

(Afraid these are all institutional or Athens-type log-in access only...which forms part of the complaint about academic publishers in this recent article in The Guardian.)

1. D. Murthy, Twitter: Microphone for the Masses? Media, Culture and Society, 2011

"Twittering citizen journalists are ephemeral, vanishing after their 15 minutes in the limelight. In most instances, they are left unpaid and unknown. Although individual citizenjournalists usually remain unknown, Twitter has gained prominence as a powerful media outlet...It is from this perspective that Twitter affords citizen journalists the possibility to break profound news stories to a global public."

2. M. El-Nawahy & S. Khamis, Political Blogging and (Re) Envisioning the Virtual Public Sphere: Muslim— Christian Discourses in Two Egyptian Blogs, Int. Journal of Press/Politics, 2011

"Our analysis showed that although there was a genuine Habermasian public sphere reflected in some of the threads on the two blogs, there was a general lack of rational— critical debates, reciprocal deliberations, and communicative action as envisioned by Habermas. It also showed that this newly (re)envisioned virtual public sphere aimed to revitalize civil society, through broadening the base of popular participation, which in turn led to boosting and expanding the concept of citizen journalism, beyond the official sphere of mainstream media."

3. S. Steensen, Online Journalism and the Promises of New Technology, Journalism Studies, 2011

Useful survey of current research into hypertext, interactivity and multimedia.

4. A.M. Jonsson & H. Ornebring, User-Generated Content and the News, Journalism Practice, 2011

"Our results show that users are mostly empowered to create popular culture-oriented content and personal/everyday life-oriented content rather than news/informational content. Direct user involvement in news production is minimal. There is a clear political economy of UGC: UGC provision in mainstream media to a great extent addresses users-as-consumers and is part of a context of consumption."

5. Williams et al, Have they got news for us?, Journalism Practice, 2011

"Our data suggest that, with the exception of some marginal collaborative projects, rather than changing the way most news journalists at the BBC work, audience material is firmly embedded within the long-standing routines of traditional journalism practice."

6. A. Hermida, Twittering the News, Journalism Practice, 2010

"Traditional journalism defines fact as information and quotes from official sources, which have been identified as forming the vast majority of news and information content. This model of news is in flux, however, as new social media technologies such as Twitter facilitate the instant, online dissemination of short fragments of information from a variety of official and unofficial sources."

7. C. Neuberger & C. Nuernbergk, Competition, Complementarity or Integration?, Journalism Practice, 2010

"At first glance, three different relations can be identified between professional and participatory media: competition, complementarity and integration. We found little evidence that weblogs or other forms of participatory media are replacing traditional forms of journalism. It seems to be more likely that they complement one another. Besides this, we observed that the integration of audience participation platforms into news websites is expansive."

8. G. Walejko & T. Ksiazek, Blogging from the Niches, Journalism Studies, 2010

"Results indicate that science bloggers often link to blogs and the online articles of traditional news media, similar to political bloggers writing about the same topics. Science bloggers also link heavily to academic and non-profit sources, differing from political bloggers in this study as well as previous research."

9.  A. Kuntsman, Webs of hate in diasporic cyberspaces: the Gaza War in the Russian-language blogosphere, Media, War and Conflict, 2010

"This article looks at ways in which a military conflict can produce circuits of hatred in online social spaces. Ethnographically, the article is based on the analysis of selected discussions of Israeli warfare in Gaza in 2008 and 2009 as they took place in the Russian-language networked blogosphere."

10. T. Johnson & B. Kaye, Believing the Blogs of War?, Media, War and Conflict, 2010

"This study surveyed those who used blogs for information about the war in Iraq...In both 2003 and 2007, blog users judged blogs as more credible sources for war news than traditional media and their online counterparts. This study also found that different types of blogs were rated differently in terms of credibility in 2007 with military and war blogs rated the most credible and media blogs being judged the lowest in credibility."

Let me know if you spot any good ones I've missed out...