The paper by Alfred Hermida analysing Twitter as a system of ambient journalism was published online by Journalism Practice in March 2010, ahead of a printed special edition later that year drawn from the Future of Journalism conference held at Cardiff University in 2009.
Its move is to treat services that disseminate fragments of news instantly as awareness systems: broad, asynchronous, lightweight and always-on, and therefore able to let citizens hold a mental model of events around them without following every message.
The conclusion pushes that towards a research agenda rather than a verdict. Twitter is, because of the speed and volume of messages, a noisy environment where posts arrive in whatever order the system receives them, so a future direction for journalism may be to build approaches and tools that help the public negotiate and regulate that flow. Journalists would then be sense-makers rather than reporters of news, an extension of the role Bardoel and Deuze described in 2001 as a professional “who serves as a node in a complex environment between technology and society, between news and analysis, between annotation and selection, between orientation and investigation”. In ambient journalism, the paper suggests, that role may be designing the tools that analyse, interpret and contextualise a system of collective intelligence, rather than selecting and editing content.
The abstract and references were open on the journal’s site; the full text sat behind a subscription.