Alfred Hermida
Associate Professor
Courses: Integrated Journalism, Decoding Social Media, New Media and Society: Journalism
Phone: 604-827-3540
Office: Room 211
Office hours: Tuesday 1.30-4.30 p.m.
Email: alfred.hermida@ubc.ca
Twitter: @Hermida
Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer, digital media scholar and journalism educator. He is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia School of Journalism, and was a founding member of the award-winning BBCNews.com website.
Since joining UBC in 2006, Prof. Hermida has emerged as a leading voice in scholarly research on implications of digital technologies for journalistic practices, social media and emerging genres of journalism. He has an extensive CV of scholarly peer-reviewed articles in respected journals and chapter contributions to academic texts.
He co-authored Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers, published in 2011 by Wiley-Blackwell. He is currently writing a book entitled Tell Everyone: How the Stories We Share Shape What We Know, (DoubleDay Canada). The book charts how our enhanced capacity to share information via social media is transforming what we know and how we know it. It examines at how sharing is shaping our notions of an informed and engaged public, a media ecology of competing ideas, and a responsive political establishment.
Prof Hermida teaches in the integrated journalism program at the Graduate School of Journalism. The program is based on a model of professional journalism education based on knowledge-enhancement, emerging media and interdisciplinarity, rather than just on static craft development based on industry-specific norms and structures. Skill development is grounded in learning activities that foster reflexivity into how media is changing due to by the interplay between technologies, journalistic practices and society.
An award-winning journalist, he is a 16-year veteran of the BBC and was a founding news editor of the BBC News website in 1997. During his tenure as daily news editor at the BBC News website, the site won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award for the best news website four years running, from 1998 to 2001, and a NetMedia Award for the Best Story Broken on the Net in 2000. In 2003, he received a NetMedia Award for Technology Reporting for an in-depth report on the use of technology in developing countries.
Prof Hermida joined the website after seven years in BBC radio and television news. working for regional, national and international outlets. Four of these years were as a BBC foreign correspondent in North Africa and the Middle East, mainly covering the Islamic insurgency in Algeria and the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations. During this time, he interviewed the former PLO leader Yasser Arafat twice, as well as the former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. He also contributed articles on the Middle East to The Wall Street Journal and The Times of London, and radio reports for CBC and Christian Science Monitor Radio.
In 2005, Prof Hermida was a Knight-Wallace fellow at the University of Michigan, and has lectured at the American University in London and at City University, London. He holds a post-graduate diploma in International Journalism from City University, London. He also has a Master of Arts in Latin American Studies from University College, London, and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations (First Class Honours) from Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent.
Research
Prof Hermida’s research interests include the impact of digital communications technology on journalism, social media and new models of journalism education. Through his research at UBC, and his earlier work at the BBC, Prof Hermida has built an international reputation as an authority on new media, with his work appearing in Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies and other top tier journals. His work has explored changes in journalistic practices, challenges to established professional dynamics, the role of user-generated content and processes of innovation.
By investigating the information architecture of digital media and the increased opportunities for audience involvement, he has sought to contribute to rethinking the way we understand journalism in the contemporary media environment.
Professional Highlights
Since joining UBC in 2006, Prof Hermida has launched a series of applied research projects designed to connect academic research with industry. These digital initiatives combine scholarly work, student training and practical applications to investigate new directions for media, while contributing to the culture of innovation in Canada.
They include a partnership with CBC Radio 3 to research and develop a participatory online resource for Canadian music, and a collaboration with IBM Canada to investigate the application of data visualization technologies in journalism.
Hermida was named an IBM CAS Canada Research Faculty Fellow in 2010, 2011 and 2012. IN 2011, he received the UBC President’s Award for Public Education Through Media for his work in communicating academic research into media trends to the public.
He was a finalist in the 2011 Digi Awards for Canada’s top social media maven and was a finalist in the New Media BC 2009 PopVox Individual Stand Out Awards in the Digital Education category.
He won a 2010 Canadian Online Publishing Award for best blog for Reportr.net, and a Commendation of Merit in the SNCR Excellence in New Communications Awards program for UBC/CBC Radio 3 project, the Canadian Music Wiki. He was also the first online journalist to be awarded a Knight-Wallace Fellowship by the University of Michigan.
Recent Work
Hermida, Alfred, Seth Lewis and Rodrigo Zamith (forthcoming) “Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.
Lewis, Seth C., Rodrigo Zamith and Alfred Hermida, (2013) “Content Analysis in an Era of Big Data: A Hybrid Approach to Computational and Manual Methods”, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 57 (1), 34-52.
Hermida, Alfred (2013), “Twitter as an Ambient News Network”, in Bruns, K. Weller, J. Burgess, M. Mahrt & C. Puschmann (eds.), Twitter and Society. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Hermida, Alfred (2012), “The Promise and Practice of Participatory Journalism”, in Benoît Grevisse and Amandine Degand (eds), Journalisme en Ligne: Pratiques et Recherches, De Boeck.
Hermida, Alfred (2012) “Tweets and Truth: Journalism as a Discipline of Collaborative Verification.” Journalism Practice, iFirst, March 27, 2012.
Hermida, Alfred, Fred Fletcher, Darryl Korell and Donna Logan (2012) “Share, Like, Recommend: Decoding the Social Media News Consumer.” Journalism Studies, iFirst, March 22, 2012.
Hermida, Alfred (2012) “Social Journalism: Exploring How Social Media is Shaping Journalism“, in Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis (eds) The Handbook of Global Online Journalism. Wiley-Blackwell.
Hermida, Alfred (2011) “Tweet the News: Social Media Streams and the Practice of Journalism” in Stuart Allan (ed) The Routledge Companion to News and Journalism, 2nd edition, Routledge.
Singer, J.B., Hermida, A., Domingo, D., Heinonen, A., Paulussen, S., Quandt, T., Reich, Z., Vujnovic, M. (2011). Participatory Journalism: Guarding Open Gates at Online Newspapers. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Hermida, Alfred. (2010) “E-democracy remixed: Learning from the BBC’s Action Network and the shift from a static commons to a participatory multiplex.” JeDEM – eJournal of eDemocracy and Open Government, 2 (2):119 – 130.
Hermida, Alfred (2010). “From TV to Twitter: How ambient news became ambient journalism.” M/C Journal, 13 (2) May 2010.
Hermida, Alfred (2010). “Twittering the news: The emergence of ambient journalism.” Journalism Practice, 4 (3), 297-308
Hermida, Alfred (2009). “The blogging BBC: Journalism blogs at ‘the world’s most trusted news organisation’”. Journalism Practice, 3(3) 1-17.
Hermida, Alfred and Thurman, Neil (2008), “A clash of cultures: the integration of user-generated content within professional journalistic frameworks at British newspaper websites”, Journalism Practice 2(3), 343 – 356.
