I am delighted to formally announce the publication of my new book Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere. This is the culmination of a long period of intensive research – partially supported by funding from the Australian Research Council – that investigated the increasingly complex intersections between journalism and social media in the current media ecology. I’ve made the introductory chapter available on this site as a reading sample; it also provides an overview of the contents.
The book is designed as a sequel – not as a new edition – to my 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. It picks up the story where that book left off: after briefly revisiting the first wave of citizen media, which was dominated by citizen journalism sites and independent news blogs and gradually dissipated towards the end of the 2000s, the remainder of the book focusses on what I’ve come to describe as a second wave of citizen media. That second wave is building especially on the widespread adoption of contemporary social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter not only, but to an important extent, for disseminating, discussing, and curating the news, and it has posed substantial new challenges for journalists and news organisations – challenges that have yet to be fully resolved.
My argument in this book is that – contrary to the first wave of citizen media, whose practices were eventually normalised and integrated into mainstream journalistic practice, and whose disruptions were thereby defused – this second wave poses a significantly more existential challenge to the news industry, and that at present it seems considerably more likely that this time it is journalism and its practices that will be normalised and absorbed into social media than the other way around. We see this also in the current controversies around ‘fake news’, in fact – and while the book manuscript was completed before the ‘fake news’ debate had fully ignited, many of the developments I observe in the book provide important context for the way that debate has developed in recent months.
All of this also has profound implications for our understanding of ‘the’ public sphere, of course, and towards the end of the book I therefore also spend some time on thinking through how we might need to reconceptualise that idea for the social media age. From my point of view, the idea of a single public sphere has by now been revealed as unsustainable: instead, it becomes necessary to envisage multiple interconnected publics, public spherules, and public spheres of varying size, dynamics, and longevity that together make up the network of communicative environments that sustain society. News – from conventional journalistic as well as novel other sources – continues to provide important inputs to what circulates within those networks, and social media play a crucial role in facilitating that circulation by connecting these various publics both horizontally and vertically.
Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere is published by Peter Lang, New York, and available from Amazon and many other bookstores in print and eBook versions. Note that the eBook version is released under a Creative Commons licence.
I’m delighted with the advance praise the book has already received, some of which is here. At a time of such intense focus on the intersections and conflicts between journalism and social media, I hope this book makes a valuable contribution to the debate. My sincere thanks to everybody who has helped me refine the thoughts presented here.