Gatewatching the Future
Welcome to Gatewatching.org. This site is a group blog run by the three of us - Barry Saunders, Jason Wilson, and me, Axel Bruns. (We may rope in a few more of the usual suspects over the next few months - watch this space…) 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; in fact, the upcoming federal elections in Australia in late 2007, and in the U.S. in late 2008, should produce plenty of interesting developments for us to observe and examine. In the Australian context, we’re also part of the team behind an ARC Linkage research project into citizen journalism which is currently in the process of launching a hyperlocal citizen journalism site for the upcoming election, at youdecide2007.org.
Barry and Jason will introduce themselves here shortly, but for now, here’s a little more about my own background: I was responsible for introducing the idea of ‘gatewatching’ into the citizen journalism debate, and have published a book about it - Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. Gatewatching itself describes the process of identifying and posting about interesting stories which is a core practice in citizen journalism, news blogging, and other related fields; it’s the ‘open news’ alternative to the ‘closed news’ practice of gatekeeping as it’s been a mainstay of conventional, professional, industrial journalism for the past century and more. Gatekeeping was what journalists and editors did: they made strict selections about what stories to cover, what articles to include in the newspaper or broadcast bulletin, and what letters to the editor or calls to the host to share with readers, listeners, and viewers. This was done in part for practical reasons: with column space and air time strictly limited, and with only a handful of papers and stations operating in any one region, it was important to filter the ‘newswhole’ very strictly for the most salient stories. (More recently, of course, gatekeeping has also been abused in a number of cases to filter out stories and views which would contradict a news corporation’s political or commercial agenda.) Possessing the skills to effectively keep the gates, to effectively filter the most important stories from the rest before publication, was one of the characteristics supposedly distinguishing professional journalists from their audiences.
But the increased availability of information, and the shift from a print and broadcast to a network model, both of which were driven in no small part by the rise of the Net and the Web to widespread public use, have changed that logic - we’ve seen a shift from ‘filter, then publish’ to ‘publish, then filter’, as Clay Shirky has famously described it. Gatekeeping no longer makes sense - the gates have multiplied beyond all control, and it’s possible for any of us to bypass the gatekeepers quite easily, to get directly to the sources. And many of us do: citizen journalists, news bloggers, interested enthusiasts, and many others are engaged in a constant process of watching the gates, finding news, information, reports, opinion which they think will be of interest to like-minded people, and share their findings with the communities to belong to. That’s the core of what I’ve described as gatewatching: following developments in an area not because you’re told to, or paid for it, but because you’re interested to do so; collecting and collating relevant news items and combining them in a quick story which includes links to further information, and posting that story on a blog, citizen journalism site, or one of the many other community spaces which have now popped up all over the Web.
Harnessing the collective intelligence of their communities, such spaces follow up on initial stories by adding further information, fleshing out reports, and examining the facts of the stories. Some such communities, like the technology news site Slashdot or the citizen journalism site OhmyNews, now offer a more comprehensive, intelligent, and multiperspectival coverage of the goings-on in their field of interest than their mainstream counterparts at any time of the day; others act less as a replacement and more as a complement to the journalism industry, offering a diverse and often very different view on events in the news. Almost all of them distinguish themselves by providing not simply ‘the news’ as a finished product, but by covering newsworthy events as an ongoing process and offering a space for the continuing discussion, debate, and deliberation of further developments and their implications - a shift from the industrial production to the communal, collaborative produsage of news and opinions.
What’s the future of journalism in this context - how does the rise of citizen journalism affect the established journalistic industry? That’s one of the crucial questions we’re interested to follow on this blog. Some journalistic dinosaurs have been quick to dismiss citizen journalism outright, as a bunch of biased ‘armchair journalists’ without any credibility whatsoever (citizen journalists have been quick to return the compliment, noting the failure of mainstream media to debunk the myths and media spin in the lead-up to the Iraq war, for example). Other, more progressive elements in the industry are actively working towards an embrace of ‘the people formerly known as the audience’ as citizen-participants in journalistic processes, from simply inviting their commentary on published news stories to providing them with access to the processes of news publishing themselves. Even NewsCorp’s Rupert Murdoch has made it quite clear that he sees the future of his empire not in traditional journalistic publications, but in the realm of user-generated content. What happens if he’s right? What happens when (as we expect it will) citizen journalism continues to establish itself as a credible alternative to the industry, and what happens as - more importantly - the boundaries between the two camps grow increasingly blurred, with hybrid, pro-am models popping up all over the place? We invite you to join us in finding out…
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