CHAMPAIGN – Nearly 70 percent of U.S. residents over the age of 12 are using social media, according to this recent analysis.
Overall, Twitter has an estimated 200+ million monthly users. Facebook has well over 1 billion. Instagram has 200 million users. (Source: http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/resource-how-many-people-use-the-top-social-media/)
Here in #chambana, there are thousands – and that’s a lot of conversations.
Following a social media analysis of how racists Tweets surrounding University of Illinois’ Chancellor Phyllis Wise impacted the Champaign-Urbana community, CU-CitizenAccess.org wanted to explore more of these invisible online conversations.
And thanks to a new grant by the Online News Association, we can.
The University of Illinois and its media partner CU-CitizenAccess.org are one of a dozen U.S. universities who each won a $35,000 micro-grant to seed collaborative news experiments in living labs — their communities, the Online News Association announced recently.
CU-CitizenAccess.org focuses on socio-economic and public safety issues in central Illinois and serves as a news lab for student work and provides stories and content to the News-Gazette and Illinois Public Media.
The project, “Intersections”, hopes to answer the question: Will openly mapping a city’s often invisible social media conversations change the nature of journalism in the Champaign-Urbana metropolitan community?
We are now getting started and we need your help.
We want to know your go-to social media channels and lists. Who do you follow? Who should we pay attention to?
Share your top three favorites via Facebook or Twitter or by email: hello@cu-citizenaccess.org
Thanks!