“Labor View”: From Broome No Longer
Kevin Rennie is one of the really valuable and interesting voices in the Australian blogosphere. Labor View from Broome has for more than a year given the rest of us a real insight into life in one of the most remote and underreported areas in Australia.
One of my abiding concerns about Australia’s blogosphere is the way that it seems to reproduce the MSM’s “metrocentricity”. At least as far as the “A-list” is concerned, most bloggers are concentrated in the State capitals, with Sydney and Melbourne claiming more than their fare share. There are a lot of reasons for this. Of course, Australia’s telecommunications infrastructure is poor outside the capitals, but beyond that is the fact that metropolitan voices and concerns can count on a larger audience, which builds bloggers’ visibilty through traffic, inlinks and resultant Pagerank.
But Kevin’s blog has become one of the few “must-read” blogs that come out of Northern Australia. He announces his political affiliations up-front, but non-Labor folk will still get a lot of value out of it. That’s because among the commentary (Kevin’s taken a great interest in Federal and US Elections), Kevin’s done a great deal of genuine, multimedia citizen journalism. Most recently, Kevin covered the WA community cabinet and posted video of an announcement on Broadband by Fran Logan, WA Minister for Industry and Enterprise.
I think that people like Kevin have shown that bloggers don’t have to be just metacommentators, or even just specialists arguing their case in the public sphere, but they can use their blogs for genuine community activism, and to provide a voice for their communities. Having grown up in Northern Australia myself, bloggers like Kevin and Mike from Cairnsblog really give me some hope that the blogosphere can make a difference to communities that are poorly served by the MSM, rather than simply providing a reserve force for the op-ed pages.
Kevin was also a great friend of our citizen journalism initiative, youdecide2007. In fact, he was adjudged to be the best citizen journalist on the initiative, and we were able to send him to Canberra to cover events in the tally room for us. He got some great footage on the night, and he may have been the first citizen journalist to cover a tally-room count.
Anyway, I say all this by way of passing on the news that Kevin won’t be blogging from Broome any more - he’s just announced on his blog that he’ll be returning to his own “country” of Melbourne. I’m sure he’ll have a lot to say back there, and probably won’t struggle as much with things like posting his video content. But I’m a little sad the Broome has lost it’s best blogospheric voice - here’s hoping that Kevin can convince someone up there to take up where he left off.
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