Call for papers - Social Media Mining for Journalism

The exponential growth of social media as a central communication practice, and its agility in capturing and announcing breaking news events more rapidly than traditional media, has changed the journalistic landscape: social media has been adopted as a significant source by professional journalists, and conversely, citizens are able to use social media as a form of direct reportage. This brings along new opportunities for newsrooms and journalists by providing new means for newsgathering through access to a wealth of citizen reportage and updates about current affairs, as well as an additional showcase for news dissemination.

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 gathering, verification, production, reporting and dissemination. These include real time monitoring of streams, event detection, noise filtering, contextualisation, source and content verification, fact checking, annotation and archiving. The development of more advanced 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 their day-to-day workflows can be improved.

In this special issue we are looking for contributions that address a variety of research questions from both theoretical and practical 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?

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

* Newsgathering from social media
** Citizen journalism
** Detection of eyewitnesses and topic experts
** Event detection in social media
** Social media content curation
** Fact-checking and verification of sources and content
** Credibility assessment
** Social media and fake news

* Social media news analytics
** Social media analytics for news
** Analysis of news diffusion in social media
** Visualisation of news and social media
** Social media to measure public opinion on news
** Analysis of the effect of fake news on public opinion

* Data and Computational journalism
** Robot journalism with social media as a source
** Algorithmic accountability and transparency
** Data driven storytelling
** Data driven investigative journalism

* Ethics and digital citizenship
** Ethical issues concerning social media newsgathering and eyewitness media
** Social media news audiences and network gatekeeping
** Social media and censorship

Guest editors
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Arkaitz Zubiaga, University of Warwick, UK
a.zubiaga@warwick.ac.uk

Bahareh Heravi, University College Dublin, Ireland
bahareh.heravi@ucd.ie

Jisun An and Haewoon Kwak, Qatar Computing Research Institute, Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar
jan@hbku.edu.qa and haewoon@acm.org

Submission guidelines
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Submissions should comply with the journal author guidelines which are here. Submissions should be made through ScholarOne Manuscripts, the online submission and peer review system. Registration and access is available at http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/oir

Deadlines
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* First submission papers due: 15 March 2018
* First round decisions made: 15 May 2018
* Revised manuscripts due: 10 July 2018
* Final decisions made: 1 September 2018
* Publication: Late 2018