Andrews, Kenneth & Caren, Neal. (2010) Making the News: Movement Organisations, Media Attention, and the Public Agenda. Accessed March 24, 2012 from http://proquest.umi.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/pqdweb?index=0&sid=1&srchmode=1&vinst=PROD&fmt=6&startpage=-1&clientid=22212&vname=PQD&RQT=309&did=2527572391&scaling=FULL&ts=1332663616&vtype=PQD&rqt=309&TS=1332663623&clientId=22212

According to the article, scholars have come to see the news media as playing a pivotal role in shaping whether social movements are able to bring about broader social change. And by drawing attention to movements` issues, claims, and supporters, the news media can shape the public agenda by influencing public opinion, authorities, and elites.
The article asks why some social movement organisations are more successful than others at gaining media coverage, and what organisational, tactical and issue characteristics enhance media attention.
The article states that media attention flows through a variety of channels, including television, the Internet, radio, and movement-generated and other specialised sources. Mainstream media sources are important because of their wide distribution and status.
The article goes on to talk about what it is that drives media attention, and protest and collective action in the news.
The article contains a detailed analysis of local environmental organisations in North Carolina, which I did not find that interesting, but other parts of the article were good.

Fisher Liu, B. & Sora, K. (2011) How organizations framed the 2009 H1N1 pandemic via social and traditional media: Implications for U.S. health communicators. Accessed March 23, 2012 from http://www.sciencedirect.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/science/article/pii/S0363811111000397

This article evaluates how 13 organisations addressed the challenge when the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the first global flu epidemic in 41 years in 2009. It states that, at first, the media extensively covered the outbreak with 60 articles published in the New York Times during the first two weeks of the crisis, but weeks into the crisis both media and public attention subsided.
The article suggests that actively incorporating new media into crisis responses has tangible benefits for organizations, and that it is necessary for organisations to incorporate social media into their issues management. Organisations can enhance their relationship with key publics during crises, through fostering emotional support.
According to the article crisis communication scholars have identified a wide range of emotions organisations can incorporate into their crisis responses depending upon the crisis situations: alert, anger, confusion, relief, sadness, shame. However, researches have not explored how these emotions are employed differently via traditional and social media.
The study found significant differences between organisations representing government and corporate interests in responding to the pandemic flu. Regarding media channels used for distributing crisis responses, about 28% of the crisis responses were distributed via traditional media, while 72% were distributed via social media.
The findings in the article provided several insights for future studies, and stated that more research is needed to examine crises to help communicators determine how to adapt their response strategies and tactics over time.
I found this article interesting, because it focused on how organisations communicate with people, and implement the use of both traditional and social media to inform people about what is going on. In one way I could relate to what the article was talking about, because when the massacre happened in Norway I noticed how broadly it was covered, with both traditional media and social media being full of information about every detail from that day. But now there is hardly anything published about it, which is similar to the covering of the flu.

Reips, U-D., and Garaizar, P. 2011. Mining Twitter: A source for psychological wisdom of the crowds. Accessed March 23, 2012 from http://www.springerlink.com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/content/v7633x228u842kt2/fulltext.pdf

This article talks about Twitter, and how researchers can assess via Twitter the effect of specific events in different places as they are happening and to make comparisons between cities, regions, or countries regarding psychological states and their evolution in the course of an event.
The article focuses on a Web application called iScience Maps, which is designed to help researchers interested in social media analysis - specifically, mining the billions of 'tweets' on Twitter for scientific research. It talks about how information created by the behaviour of the masses, is leading to the emerging of 'wisdom of the crowds'. The application is targeted to researchers interested in mining Twitter, and it provides temporal and geospatial content analysis and a set of features for comparative search options.
It also mentions one example, about a guy named David Crandall and his colleagues from Cornell University, and how they created maps of world regions from ca. 35 million geotagged photos that had been uploaded to Flickr. These maps show relative interest in motifs and places and may lead to applications in tourism, city planning, ecology, and economics.

I found this article interesting, because it highlights different tools that will help to get more out of online services such as Twitter, and how it can benefit both people and organisations.