gatewatching

Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Youdecide ran during the lead-up and up to the 2007 Australian federal election; it was a practice-based project and the first step in an ARC Linkage project between QUT, SBS, Online Opinion, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. It offered aggregated hyperlocal content, crowdsourced from citizen journalists in local electorates and coordinated by a small team of site staff led by Jason. It gathered some 2000 registered users, and 230 articles from over 50 electorates were submitted to the site during its lifetime. (There was also a weekly YD07 TV show on the Briz31 community television channel.)

Users could submit text, audio, photo, and video content to the site, as well as comment on one another’s stories, and the site demonstrated that there was an appetite for this kind of project in the country - if from some areas and demographics more than others. Obviously, the focus was on original content (departing from the gatewatching and commenting model still very prevalent in citizen journalism), this was fairly successful.

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citizen journalism, government academic, citizen journalism, government, journalism, preditor

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China’s first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose to prominence especially after the events of 11 September 2001). Its rise also contributed to a new debate on the nature of journalism itself, and many initial views argued that news blogging was not journalism due to the narrow subjects explored by most blogs, the reliance on second-hand information, the limited sources and experience of news blogging, and its limited credibility.

In China, citizen journalism emerged with the 2003 SARS crisis, when citizens reported about the effects of the crisis; there are now some 28 million active blogs and 47 million blog writers in China (as of 2007), and citizen journalism provides an important source of uncensored news. Zola Zhou, then an Internet manager, began blogging in 2004, and rose to prominence through investigative reports about a couple who refused to have their house moved to make way for a new development project. By late 2007, the blog carried some 814 articles, 112 were filed in a category called “social news” (and Zola Zhou currently works as a vegetable vendor).

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blogging, citizen journalism, government, media academic, blogging, citizen journalism, government, journalism, media

Brisbane.
I was the first presenter in the next session at AMIC 2008 (and my presentation on citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election is already online here). Hopefully the audio recording worked as well - I’ll add it as soon as possible. The audio from my talk is now online.

Kitty van Vuuren from the University of Queensland is the next speaker; her interest is in local independent newspapers in South-East Queensland - a growing trend in recent years, and driven to some extent by local businesses (grocery stores, bakeries, and other local entrepreneurs). South-East Queensland is a very rapidly growing area, of course, with significant population movements into the area (and associated problems with infrastructure, services, and labour supply).

The state government is spending a great deal of time planning for this growth, and claims to involve and consult the community in these processes, but exactly how communicative capacity in the community is being developed remains somewhat unclear; Kitty’s work has traced communicative practices especially around issues related to water shortages and water management.

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blogging, citizen journalism academic, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism

Brisbane.
The second day of the AMIC conference has now started, and we begin with a keynote from Vipul Kant Upadhay, the CEO and Editor in Chief of Merinews.com in India. This site is now the largest Internet news portal in the country, and builds very significantly on citizen journalism. Vipul begins by noting that he is no journalist by profession, but instead came to this venture through student activism; his initial motivation was the widespread corruption and nepotism in India.

In starting the project, there was a choice between print and online media, and the initial tendency amongst staff was in favour of print; at the same time, there was a clear indication that the competition in print journalism was already fierce and would not have allowed the development of a new news source. The Internet still remained an untapped market, by contrast, and provided an opportunity for new players to make a name for themselves.

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citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, journalism

Brisbane.
We’re now in the opening session of the AMIC conference “Convergence, Citizen Journalism and Social Change“. Today is just a short afternoon with a couple of keynote speeches; tomorrow, the bulk of the papers (including my colleague Jason Wilson’s and mine) will be presented. Pradip Thomas from the University of Queensland is offering some opening remarks - referring to the common trope of the decline of mainstream journalism, and the corresponding rise of citizen journalism and its effect on political developments.

Pradip now hands over to Michael Bromley, also from UQ, who raises the notion of totalisation (total capitalism, total war, the massification of media); perhaps citizen journalism sits in a fissure to the side of this, and questions around it deal largely with questions of inclusion and exclusion. Other key questions relate to modes of expression (in industrial journalism vs. citizen journalism), the role and effects of new technologies in relation to their emerging social uses, and the configuration of identity practices, authority and authenticity as a result of emerging new practices. What new formations, what new languages of communication arise through the diffusion of the journalistic paradigm through the arrival of new citizen-led modes of communication?

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blogging, citizen journalism academic, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism

I thought I’d put up here my first piece that’s come out of digesting the youdecide2007 experience. This is the draft version of a paper I’ve submitted to an academic journal, though I think it’s accessible enough for anyone with an interest to read. 

It’s reflecting on the forms of cultural labour our small team did during the election in facilitating citizen journalism, which mixed more traditional tasks of journalism with new disciplines.

Downloadable below

Preditors - Making citizen journalism work (PDF)

As the paper makes clear, I’ve called the workers who  facilitate citizen journalism preditors - thinking through this new form of cultural labour will, I hope, help us get past some often silly oppositions that get set up between citizen journalism and “teh MSM”. Crowdsourced citizen journalism projects actually need “go-to” people with a certain minimum of journalism training; mainstream media organisations are increasingly looking to harness user-generated content. This has implications for journalism training, established media and independent journalism initiatives.

I’ve nominated four areas of responsibility for preditors: content work, networking, community work and tech work. You’ll see how they blend in the paper.

It’s pretty long - over 8000 words - but if you think it’s hard work reading that much, you should try writing it! My long-form writing muscles got a good work out. Fellow scholar-nerds might care to know that this length might be unacceptable for many Australian journals, but is pretty normal for international journals. I’ve handed this one in to one of them (it’s a secret while its in peer review).

I’m looking for reactions and comments, which you might like to put in the comments below… I will give out minties to anyone who finds typos! I’m giving a version of this paper at this conference on citizen journalism in Brisbane this week, and again in England in April!

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, elections, preditor, research, youdecide2007

This post was triggered in a somewhat roundabout way - Paul Bradshaw over at Online Journalism Blog picks up on a report from the Digital News Affairs conference, covering a speech by Digital Editor Ed Roussel from the Telegraph Media Group in the U.K. The key quote from Roussel’s speech:

“In dismissing the idea (perhaps a myth) that the web was simply about breaking news and the paper about analysis, he said that the strategy for your website was to be about the first and the last word on a story.”

For me, this touches on a key theme in journalism research, and like Paul, I’m worried that this understanding of news reporting leads us exactly into the wrong direction. I agree with the first part of the statement - the days of the newspaper as the premier space for news analysis are numbered, as (for example) the 2007 poll wars and their recent rekindling have shown -, but the positioning (or indeed, posturing) of any one news Website as the authoritative source on the news is a similarly outdated idea.

It’s an idea which betrays a profound, if common, misunderstanding of the nature of news reporting - a view of news which is influenced less by journalists’ and audiences’ everyday experience of the news than by marketing departments’ insistence that their news organisation’s product is the authoritative account of the day’s events, that you can “get the full story here” and nowhere else.

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citizen journalism citizen journalism, journalism

Good news! Our University has purchased a site license for Leximancer, and we’ll be making extensive use of it in our research on the Australian blogosphere.

The blurb from the website gives a pretty neat summary of what Leximancer does:

Leximancer is a software tool that enables users to find meaning from text-based documents. It automatically identifies key themes, concepts and ideas from unstructured text with little or no guidance. The innovative concept map allows users to interact with the analysis – navigating the true meaning of the text.

Of course, there are other ways to find “meaning” in text, but the application for it in studying the blogosphere is in finding out whether particular bloggers have concepts or themes that they return to over time, and whether that’s matched by the comments threads.

I imagine bloggers themselves might be interested in seeing the results of this kind of analysis of their blogs - we might issue a call for dump files soon when we’re more expert users.

Leximancer itself is an interesting example of research commercialisation - it began its life over at UQ as applied IT research, and now its a commercial venture.

Anyway, its bound to be a fun toy to play with - the first thing we’ll do is analyse our own project, youdecide2007, to see which concepts and themes recur most frequently.

blogging blogging, Leximancer, research, youdecide2007

Jeff Jarvis smacks down the American media’s love for (and lack of skill at) horse race politics:

It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it…
Any idiot can bet on a horse and lose. And there’s a word for them. Losers.

While we’ve also been quite critical here about the Australian election coverage and its horse-race narratives, we’re very lucky to have an electoral system that is open to good psephological analysis. As Simon Jackman points out in addressing the lack of an American Antony Green:

The United States doesn’t have an Antony Green. I’m not sure it can. It doesn’t have the ABC (the national broadcaster), it doesn’t have the AEC, nor compulsory voting, nor standardized, nationwide election administration (balloting procedures, registration procedures, etc).

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blogging, citizen journalism abc, blogging, citizen journalism, elections, investigative, journalism, poll wars, psephology

One of the most consistently… bracing political blogs is Andrew Elder’s clearing-house for the foibles of the commentariat, Politically Homeless.

I haven’t had time to have a good solid read of his stuff for a while - a comment from The Doctor on a previous Gatewatching post led me to have a squiz this evening.

His stuff is critical and often hilarious, but it’s beyond snark - Elder’s style involves a close, often line-by-line disassembly of the offerings of the paid-up commentariat, and discussions of their shortcomings that are extended, impassioned and incisive. Usually each post focusses on a single article.

I couldn’t just add a link to the poll wars post of earlier this week, which catalogued the brouhaha on the 21st - I thought passages like this deserved a post of their own:

Dennis Shanahan is an experienced journalist, yet his experience was sidelined by
his yearning for more Howard. He was comprehensively shown up by people going
by names like Possum Comitatus, Poll Bludger and Mumble. People smarter than him,
people who knew more about voting patterns than he did, people who all but stole
the bread and butter out of his mouth.

That’s about the least combative part of that post, by the way.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve all got his feed in your readers already. If you haven’t, and you’d like to see how excoriating intelligent, informed blogospheric voices can be, get over there.

UPDATE THURSDAY: Yesterday’s post about the “renaissance” of moderate Liberalism, which bounces off an article written by Liberal MP Marise Payne, is simply a classic of Elder’s idiosyncratic style.

blogging, media blogging, journalism, media, poll wars, The Australian