Our collaborators at the Digital Research Enterprise Institute at NUI Galway have launched a national survey to determine the ways in which journalists use social media in their work.
Our collaborators at the Digital Research Enterprise Institute at NUI Galway have launched a national survey to determine the ways in which journalists use social media in their work.
For immediate release
July 2, 2013
DERI launches national survey on journalists’ use of social media
Social media has become a vital tool to the modern journalist. From Syria, to Turkey and Brazil international news stories are being broken by ordinary citizens on social media everyday and it’s not just serious news. The latest football transfer rumours or celebrity scandal is now more likely to break on Twitter than by conventional means. The emergence of this new technology is fundamentally changing the way journalists work and source stories.
Despite the proliferation of social media particularly among journalists, until now, no formal study on Irish media professionals’ use of social media has been carried out. Researchers at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI) at NUI Galway have launched the first national survey on how Irish journalists use social media. This new study aims to measure the prevalence of social media use among professional journalists in Ireland, how often it is being used and for what purposes.
The researchers are calling on all journalists working in print, TV, radio and online media to take just 10 minutes out of their busy schedules to fill out the online survey. “The ubiquity of social media is quickly changing the global media landscape, leading us to query Ireland’s contemporary journalistic practices,” said Dr. Bahareh Heravi, the project manager and leader of the Digital Humanities and Journalism group at DERI. “This survey will help to not only delineate these practices, but the data collected has the potential to ultimately result in more informed and accurate reporting,” she added.
The project is being run by the newly formed Digital Humanities and Journalism group, at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute (DERI), which runs a number of projects exploring how new technologies are impacting the world of journalism and other digital humanities like archiving.
DRI's Natalie Harrower, who is an associate member of the group, has written a blog post on the importance of the survey on the HuJo site
The survey can be accessed here https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/IrishSocialJournalism and more information on the research group can be found at http://hujo.deri.ie/
