My book, Social Media at BBC News: The Re-Making of Crisis Reporting, has just been published with Routledge in the Research in Journalism series. I am delighted share an excerpt with Culture Digitally, and I hope that it will foster an enriching dialogue with this intellectual community.

The premise of my book is that the transformation of BBC news production is not the result of a fluke. Instead, we should understand the effect of social media in BBC crisis reporting as part of a wider political, economic, cultural, technological, and institutional shift occurring at the BBC.

An important finding is that the increasing use of social media in BBC journalism acted as a catalyst for the increase in power of tech-savvy journalists in the newsroom. The growth of a new breed of tech-savvy journalists can be explained by the BBC’s need to manage social media material and the emergence of new structures in the newsroom.

As we think about the ways that news tools and new participation by citizens is reshaping news production, we should also reflect on the role of major institutions. By examining the inner workings of these institutions, we can reveal the increasingly collaborative nature of news production. So too can we understand the ways in which news media shape and are shaped by society.

If you’d like to see what else I have to say, the full book is available on Routledge and Amazon.  A brief introductory video is also available here. Routledge will also have the full Introduction posted soon.  Email me (my email is on my site, my profile on CD or Google) if you have questions about how to get a review copy, etc.  Thanks for reading and taking an interest!