Social Media in the Newsroom | #SMnews @ ICWSM 2016 | 17 May 2016

Welcome to SMnews 2016, the First “Social Media in the Newsroom” workshop, which will be co-located with the International Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM 2016), and will take place in Cologne, Germany, 17th May, 2016.

Keynote Speaker

Wilfried Runde
Head of Innovation Projects, Deutsche Welle
Wilfried heads the innovation team at Deutsche Welle. Always thriving to improve journalism’s creative toolset he has worked as an information specialist, freelance print and TV journalist and Online editor before joining DW back in 2002. He’s also a lecturer for “Technical Journalism” and “International Media Studies” at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. See an abstract of the keynote speech here.

SMnews Overview

This workshop aims to focus on the intersection of social media and journalism, as a subset of Computational and Data Journalism. It will particularly focus on the development of novel algorithms, methods, and tools, and to further understand and to make the most of social media content for the purposes of news and media industries and journalism practitioners.

In this workshop we are interested in addressing a variety of research questions from both theoretical and particularly pragmatic perspectives. For example, how can we best utilise social media for news production? What technologies can we use for breaking news detection, filtering, aggregation and contextualisation? How can we assess the veracity of social media content and sources? What moral, legal, and ethical issues arise when professional journalists use social media as a source? How can we organise, interpret, and retain a record of social media around news events? What does this record contribute to our larger understanding of news, and the writing of news?

As well as being a big opportunity and having changed the day-to-day practices in the newsrooms, social media has introduced a number of challenges when it comes to news production, reporting and dissemination. These include real time monitoring of streams, event detection, noise filtering, contextualisation, source and content verification and fact checking. The development of better algorithms and tools for journalists requires not only furthering research in computational techniques, but also engaging more closely with journalists to understand how they work, what problems they’re facing when using social media, and how this process can be improved.

This workshop aims to bring together practitioners and academics in the fields of journalism and news production, information science, data science and computer science, facilitating a multidisciplinary discussion on these topics in order to advance research in the broad area of Data and Computational journalism, with specific focus on social media data for news production and reporting.

Important Dates
27th February, 2016: Paper submission deadline.
11th March, 2016: Notification to authors.
17th March, 2016: Camera-ready papers due.
17th May, 2016: Workshop day.