Pip Starr was a Melbourne activist filmmaker. He made powerful, intense documentaries about injustice. His documentary, Through the Wire is a heartbreaking account of the Woomera protests and a powerful indictment of Australia’s policy of compulsory detention of asylum seekers.
As Posted on the ABC’s Opinion Website last Friday - we’d welcome further comments.
Many of the dust-ups so far between bloggers and the mainstream media (MSM) in Australia have concerned comment, not news.
The kinds of spats we’ve written about previously have been over who exactly has the mortgage on punditry about established stories, social issues, opinion polls and the like.
Occasionally the MSM’s resistance to the blogger commentariat can be less than rational, but they often get the final word with the accusation - containing more than a grain of truth - that bloggers “don’t break stories”, and are simply parasitic upon the news-gathering activities of established outlets.
The problem with this claim is that when big stories come, parts of the mainstream media can often appear negligent in their pursuit and treatment of a story, and more and more often they’re coming off second best to other, new kinds of news media.
It looks like there are a good half dozen edited collections about citizen journalism that are currently under development; some of them are probably spurred on by the impending U.S. presidential election and the role that news bloggers and citizen journalists will undoubtedly play in it, but I’m also aware of collections being developed as far afield as Australia, Germany, and India (and I’ve written contributions for a few of them). One of them, Megan Boler’s Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times is about to be released, and is already listed on Amazon - as I’ve mentioned elsewhere previously, my chapter deals mainly with the question of what citizen journalism may become, beyond the short-term tactical pleasures of stirring up the mainstream journalism industry.
Meanwhile, the launch of e-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media, edited by Kiran Prasad for the Indian scholarly community, is still a few months away, but I’ve received permission to make a pre-print of my chapter “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism” available at snurb.info. It weaves together a few of the threads that I’ve followed over the past few months - it presents gatewatching as a practice that is fundamental to citizen journalism, outlines citizen-journalistic practices of news produsage beyond gatewatching itself, highlights the role of citizen journalists as providing an important corrective to media bias in covering the 2007 Australian federal election, and sketches potential pathways towards a greater symbiosis of citizen and mainstream approaches to journalism, beyond any initial antagonism, beyond the two-tier mainstream/alternative media structure outlined by Herbert Gans. Towards the end, therefore, I return again to that crucial question of “What next?”:
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