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This study examines how mainstream journalists who microblog negotiate their professional norms and practices in a new media format that directly challenges them. Through a content analysis of more than 22,000 of their tweets (postings) on the microblog platform Twitter, this study reveals that the journalists more freely express opinions, a common microblogging practice but one which contests the journalistic norm of objectivity (impartiality and nonpartisanship). To a lesser extent, the journalists also adopted two other norm-related microblogging features: providing accountability and transparency regarding how they conduct their work and sharing user-generated content with their followers. The journalists working for national newspapers, national television news divisions, and cable news networks were less inclined in their tweets than their counterparts working for less "elite" news outlets to relinquish their gatekeeping role by sharing their stage with other news gatherers and commentators, or to provide accountability and transparency by providing information about their jobs, engaging in discussions with other tweeters, writing about their personal lives, or linking to external websites.

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News sourcing practices are critical as they shape from whom journalists get their information and what information they obtain, mostly from elite sources. This study evaluates whether social media platforms expand the range of actors involved in the newsThis paper presents a case study on the use of sources by National Public Radio's Andy Carvin on Twitter during key periods of the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Carvin, a social media strategist at NPR in the US, emerged as a key broker of information on Twitter during the Arab Spring. 1 Through Twitter, Carvin would often link to images from demonstrators, curate a range of discussion and opinion about events, and frequently ask his followers (then about 50,000 strong) to help him make sense of the bits of information he encountered. This study examines the different actor types on the social media platform to reveal patterns of sourcing of information used by Carvin in order to further an understanding of how sourcing is evolving in an era of networked digital media-a space that, by its nature, allows for new research possibilities in tracking the influence of sources.

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Artificial intelligence (AI) and people’s interactions with it—through virtual agents, socialbots, and language-generation software—do not fit neatly into paradigms of communication theory that have long focused on human–human communication. To address this disconnect between communication theory and emerging technology, this article provides a starting point for articulating the differences between communicative AI and previous technologies and introduces a theoretical basis for navigating these conditions in the form of scholarship within human–machine communication (HMC). Drawing on an HMC framework, we outline a research agenda built around three key aspects of communicative AI technologies: (1) the functional dimensions through which people make sense of these devices and applications as communicators, (2) the relational dynamics through which people associate with these technologies and, in turn, relate to themselves and others, and (3) the metaphysical implications called up by blurring ontological boundaries surrounding what constitutes human, machine, and communication.

Journalists and technologists increasingly are organizing and collaborating, both formally and informally, across major news organizations and via grassroots networks on an international scale. This intersection of so-called ‘hacks and hackers’ carries with it a shared interest in finding technological solutions for news, particularly through open-source software programming. This article critically evaluates the phenomenon of open source in journalism, offering a theoretical intervention for understanding this phenomenon and its potential implications for newswork. Building on the literature from computer science and journalism, we explore the concept of open source as both a structural framework of distributed development and a cultural framework of pro-social hacker ethics. We identify four values of open-source culture that connect with and depart from journalism—transparency, tinkering, iteration, and participation—and assess their opportunities for rethinking journalism innovation.

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