Building New Media Organisations
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
Brisbane.
The third and last day of the CCi conference starts with a keynote by the fabulous Mark Deuze, author of Media Work. He begins by pointing to Henry Jenkins’s work on convergence culture, and reminds us of the magnitude of that trend. Why is this happening, what is the context for this - how do media professionals work in this environment?
Media organisations are very well positioned to make sense of this from a production perspective - they are well placed to find new ways to tell stories across multiple (new) platforms, but in doing so reproduce mainly what they did before. We need to move forward beyond this approach, though: how do we start from scratch in developing new content forms and forms of participation which are native to the new (media) environment, characterised as it is by niche communities and diverse interests? (Mark’s upcoming book Beyond Journalism tells this story for the journalistic environment.)
Reflections on impermanance: packing the office
I’m packing up my cubicle at Gatewatching HQ today, getting ready for the big move to Sydney for the new job at GetUp!
I’m excited about the new challenge, but it’s a sad moment, and the conference that Axel’s been liveblogging here has been, for me, an occasion to catch up with the colleagues who have made this job such a valuable and fascinating experience. My Gatewatching comrades Axel and Barry are included in this, but there’s also Terry Flew (who’s been a valued mentor and friend for many years), and OLO’s Graham Young who’s also become a good mate as a result of this job. I have active collaborations with all these folks that I’m looking forward to delivering over coming months.
Perhaps it’s ironic that my last act in the job before coming onto campus to pack up was attending an excellent plenary by Mark Deuze on the accelerating impermanence of life and work in contemporary culture. Mark’s presentation is part of ongoing research that extends the arguments offered in his book, Media Work. In the presentation, he was thinking through the mobility and liquidity of modern life. It was food for thought for me personally - after less than a year here, and a little over two years in a previous job in the UK, I’ll now have had more employers in half a decade than my father has in his whole career, which he’s spent happily in the city he was born in. What’s gained and lost in the move towards contant mobility?
Other people will be packing their offices today, and thinking about impermanence, including the outgoing Senators of the Australian Democrats. The Democrats have been an important part of Australian political history, but in particular bloggers and blog-watchers will be wishing Andrew Bartlett all the best in post-political life. It’s a great shame that the boldest experiment in Australian political blogging is now coming to an end. Lots of stuff about this around the blogs - I’ll leave it at linking to Andrew’s own post detailing the last question asked by a Democrat in the Senate, on child protection.
It’s also worth noting that Andrew was representing Queensland in the senate, the state in which I’ve lived my entire life (apart from the sojourn in Britain). Suddenly, there is a brace of Queenslanders at the highest echelons of public life, but people like Andrew have been central in incrementally changing the image of the State in the minds of other Australians. I think many of my friends and colleagues have been helping out there, too. I’ll be leaving the State for an extended period now, and I’ll miss it terribly, but I expect to be amazed each time I return at the rapidity of the changes happening Statewide, not least to the landscape of Brisbane.
I guess nothing lasts forever any more.
Thinking through Citizen Journalism
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at the CCi conference starts for me with a panel on citizen journalism which involves my colleague Jason Wilson from Youdecide2007 (and Gatewatching.org), Larvatus Prodeo’s Mark Bahnisch, and Graham Young from Online Opinion. Their theme is the role of citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election.
Mark Bahnisch speaks first, and highlights the fact that news blogging and citizen journalism is a form of work, and in the longer term cannot be sustained simply by opposition to government and mainstream media. The latter perception persists both amongst detractors and proponents of citizen journalism, however, even in spite of evidence to the contrary. Mark points to his own experience in the 2007 election campaign, running and contributing to LP as well as New Matilda, Crikey, and various other news and commentary outlets - this is a significant workload which in most cannot be sustained on a purely voluntary basis. (Indeed, Mark did receive pay for some of these activities.)
Futures for Journalism?
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker in this very enjoyable session on day two of the CCi conference is Margaret Simons, asking the question “What are journalists for?” She begins by noting the role of the Australian Press Council, long perceived as a publishers’ poodle, and recounts how she has recently been contacted by a researcher at the APC inquiring about the development of journalistic staff numbers in Australian publishers - publishers themselves were not interested to share these numbers, presumably because there is a strong decline in numbers in the current, distressed context of the journalism industry.
What information is available about such staff figures, then? Margaret would go about this by utilising her personal networks, contacting journalists and middle managers to get at such data, most likely jeopardising their and her own careers in the process. Journalists, at any rate, are under threat, and journalism can be very dirty work, as this anecdote illustrates. What is worth preserving about journalism and journalists, then - especially in a world where anyone inside or outside the industry can publish journalistic content?
Digital Campaigning with Kevin07 and Beyond
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Camilla Cooke. She managed the Australian Labor Party’s digital campaign during the 2007 Australian federal election - “Australia’s first digital election”, as she describes it. Initial ideas for this campaign (even before the arrival of Kevin Rudd as opposition leader) were to engage debate, to use the Web for propagating messages, to utilise it as the key route to youth, and to use it for highly efficient and cost-effective marketing. Ultimately, these goals transformed into components like the Kevin07 Website, the social networking spaces, in Facebook and elsewhere, the YouTube channel, and a variety of other online platforms - and they also enabled the campaign to do some slightly cheeky things which would not have worked in other media works.
Kevin07 had some 2 million page views and some 400,000 unique visitors, and 14,000 “have your say” forms and 18,000 petitions were submitted. User-generated content was key here; most of the content of the on-site blog was drawn from user submissions. The videos had some 1.8 million views (and were cheap and effective); MySpace and Facebook had 24,000 and 20,000 friends and fans, respectively; the mobile Kevin07 site had 34,000 unique visitors; 40,000 T-shirts were sold; 1.2 million people were reached in marginal seats; and there were lots of “emails to Kevin”. What was important here was to reward supporters and maximise viral impact (one-click canvassing), and to engage swinging voters - this latter, indeed, was especially crucial in this election, of course.
Participation and Voice in Citizen Journalism and Transmedia Documentary
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
Brisbane.
We’re now in the final session of the first day at the CCi conference, which I’ll try to chair and blog at the same time - we’ll see how it goes. My colleague Terry Flew is the first presenter, and he begins by outlining the three layers of impact of new media technologies as artefacts or devices (technologies); communication activities and practices using these technologies; and the social arrangements, institutions, and organisational forms which develop around the use and management of such technologies. Journalism has so far responded to the Internet as a new technology mainly in the first sense, no so much in the two latter senses. This also takes place at a time of perceived crisis in journalism, and in the face of the emergence of citizen journalism in responding to that crisis.
Public Speech, Public Spaces, Public Spheres
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
Brisbane.
The next session I’m attending at the CCi conference is also (broadly) on citizen journalism. Andrew Kenyon from the University of Melbourne is the first speaker, and his focus is especially on the legal perspective on journalism as public speech, building on interviews with editors, journalists, and other media workers. Legal frameworks enable in particular the search for truth, the maintenance of democracy, and (especially in the US) a critique of government, but public speech is often positioned as fulfilling a more generic function (such as consensus formation). Public speech often critiques, and limited protections for public speech is often seen as having a chilling effect on the diversity of public speech that is possible.
Futures for News Media in the Face of Citizen Journalism
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
Brisbane.
We’re now starting the first panel session of the CCi conference, and this is the panel on citizen journalism that my paper is in as well, so I’m including the Powerpoint below (audio to be added later available now).
The first speaker is David McKnight from UNSW, whose focus is on the future of quality journalism in the emerging media environment. He points to a perspective that newspapers are now an ‘endangered species’; The Australian passionately rejected this in a September 2006 editorial. It suggested a commitment to quality journalism as an important continuing strategy for newspapers. Nonetheless, the economic case for newspaper publishing is becoming increasingly difficult; circulations are falling and especially classified advertising is moving away from print.
The problem is that newspapers are still by far the major source of news and key agenda setters for public discussion. Will electronic and online media be able to pick up the slack if newspapers do decline and disappear, and how does this affect the quality of democratic engagement in the public sphere?
Burchell on bloggers, or, blogophobia.
Gary Sauer-Thompson alerts us today to a very, very peculiar piece by David Burchell on something he calls the “political blogosphere”. Burchell’s version doesn’t much resemble the one I know. I’ll quote a little:
At other times it seems the wheels of the political blogosphere are greased with the oil of personal vitriol.
Indeed, on one view the chief purpose of the political blog isn’t the production of argument, but rather the staging of ceremonies of degradation and purification. The blogger’s goal is to solidify a tribe of acolytes around them, and to ritually degrade those who are seen as renegades from the cause.
Now, some of Burchell’s past work I’ve enjoyed, including his book Western Horizon, but this is pretty glib, to say the least. It’s an utterly sweeping comment to make about political bloggers, and anyone who reads political blogs regularly knows that right across the political spectrum, there are bloggers who do much more than engage in flame-baiting. Even those who do specialise in snark will usually have more interesting and considered things to say from time to time.
It’s hard to know who he means. Is Burchell including his colleagues at the Australian in this (whose work is often now presented online in “blog” form)? What about News Limited colleagues who are active bloggers, like Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Tim Dunlop and Jack Marx? Is he saying that they are all just “staging ceremonies of degradation and purification”? Or does he just mean independent bloggers? If so, is it really the case that blogs from Ambit Gambit to Club Troppo to LP to the psephs are all just engaging in personal abuse? These don’t seem to me to be sustainable claims. Also, whose “view” is he quoting here? None of it makes a lot of sense, or rather, it’s hard to make sense of because it’s at such a high level of generality.
One of Sauer-Thompson’s commenters suggests that Burchell’s really just “trolling in a column”, and the lack of specificity or generosity in his comments makes that conclusion tempting. P’raps he needs someone to offer him a guided tour of Australia’s blogosphere - from left to right, and from MSM to independent bloggers - in order that he might come to appreciate the diversity that’s out there.
More on this from Kim at LP.
Gatewatching cracks the ton - this being our 100th post.
I have been posting like a madman today because I saw how close we were to the magic milestone of 100 posts this morning. Yay.
Time to take stock. My favourite moments and biggest retrospective lulz on the way to this landmark include being “Blaired“, “Bolted” and “Parished” all in the space of a week. Awesome. Thanks for the initiation ceremony, guys. Readers’ magic moments can be added in comments.
I guess this is also a good point to make a clear announcement on the blog that next week is my (Jason’s) last one on deck full-time at QUT. From July 1st I’ll be moving to GetUp! to be their eDemocracy Director. I’ll be helping them with a number of things, including developing projects around long-term citizen engagement with the political process. More on this later. Anyway, very exciting, and a chance to achieve some worthwhile things.
I’ll still be blogging here at Gatewatching, though the character and frequency of my posts might change slightly. I’ll also be maintaining a connection with the research project at QUT, so I’ll be around the traps publishing and conferring in this field of research.
It’s been a great year working on the projects, and also helping to establish this blog as an adjunct to the research. The one thing I’ve found this year - and I think I speak for the others as well - is that the best way to learn about blogging and citizen journalism is by doing. This and youdecide2007 have been the most valuable learning experiences in my career to date, and they have been lots of fun, too. Thanks everybody!
Welcome to Gatewatching.org.
This site is a group blog run by the three of us - Barry Saunders, Jason Wilson, and Axel Bruns. What we’re looking to do here is to track and analyse the further development of the phenomenon of citizen journalism, in Australia - where we’re all based - and elsewhere. We’re also part of the team behind an ARC Linkage research project into citizen journalism which operated youdecide2007.org and qlddecides.com.
The term 'gatewatching', which describes the practice of observing and commenting on other sites' news that is common in citizen journalism, originates from Axel's 2005 book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production.
