Studying the intersection of journalism, interactive communications and public discourse
As a follow up to my Poynter piece about online audience participation and some lessons news websites can learn from talk radio, The Salt Lake Tribune invited me to participate in a Google chat about online comments. Streamed live on Mar 10, 2014. “Like newspapers across the country, The Salt Lake Tribune has grappled with …
With a 45-minute commute back and forth to UConn’s Storrs campus, I listen to a lot of NPR. One of my favorite radio shows is “On Point with Tom Ashbrook.” The show is smart, timely, features interesting guests, and includes perspectives from callers around the country. Discussions on the show are civilized and insightful, unlike …
For better or worse, social networks are an integral part of how people communicate now. It’s how people share news and their emotional reaction to it. The 24-hour online news cycle delivers a never-ending avalanche of information, misinformation, reaction, shock, surprise, disgust, satire, confusion, reposts/retweets, commentary, debate, speculation, collaboration and trolls. Online news and social …
In honor of the 2014 Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday, the Windsor Historical Society and Archer Memorial AME Zion Church in Windsor, CT invited me to give a presentation on how social media is changing activism and community building. In particular, the organizers asked me to explore how King might have used social media …
In an exclusive interview with CNN’s Drew Griffin, unmasked Reddit troll Michael Brutsch blamed Reddit’s culture for fostering his deplorable online behavior. Realizing he had a penchant for angering people anonymously online, Brutsch regularly used Reddit’s unfettered system of open access to create hundreds of subforums dedicated to topics like “Rapebait,” “Incest,” “Pics of Dead …