Conclusions and Future Research
In the last decade, social media applications have become central to a kind of newsgathering that lends itself to more open and social ways of communicating. This report used the case study of the Hong Kong protests to explore two ambitious questions: What do the patterns which emerged during the protests mean in terms of newsgathering in the age of private social networks and chat apps? Could private social networks and mobile chat apps mean the end of social newsgathering and the return of pre-social networking ways of gathering the news?