Episode 90: Alfred Hermida, Digital Media Scholar, Author, Journalist, and Professor

Daily Matters: The changing face of the legal industry

As an award-winning digital media scholar, author, and journalist, Alfred Hermida is one of Canada’s foremost experts on social media and digital journalism. In the current media climate, Alfred’s perspective offers fresh insight into why things are the way they are.

In this episode, Alfred and Jack Newton discuss the implications of the ways we communicate and share information in the present—and how this is shaping our future. Specifically, they discuss:

• Two of Alfred’s books, Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News and Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters
• Why people behave the way they do on social media, and what this means for our society
• How Albert’s work with The Conversation Canada is fostering a new type of journalism
• How we can begin to rebuild public trust in the media
• How the legal and journalistic professions are similar, and what lawyers can learn from journalists’ example

You can follow Alfred on Twitter at @Hermida

Bio:
Alfred Hermida is an award-winning online news pioneer, digital media scholar, and journalism educator with two decades of experience in digital journalism. Director and professor at the School of Journalism, Writing, and Media at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, he is at the forefront of research into the digital transformation of media, social media, and data journalism.

In 2017, Alfred co-founded and launched The Conversation Canada with his UBC Journalism colleague, Mary Lynn Young, bringing academics and experienced journalists together to share timely analysis and commentary drawing from research, evidence and insights.

His most recent book, co-authored with Mary Lynn Young, is called Data Journalism and the Regeneration of News. It reveals how the growth of data journalism has been cultivated and sustained by professional identities, tools and technologies, and new forms of collaboration and computational thinking.

His previous book, Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters, charts how our enhanced capacity to share information via social media is shaping our notions of an informed and engaged public, a media ecology of competing ideas, and a responsive political establishment. It won the 2015 National Business Book Award.