gatewatching

A bit of overdue housekeeping on some research progress in the project. Even though I’m now at GetUp! almost full time, I’m still engaged with research collaboration at QUT, and I hope to publish something on the experience of building an e-democracy project in the not-too-distant future.

For now, the news is that a few weeks back, Professor Terry Flew and I submitted a paper to an international journalism journal, based on the youdecide2007 experience. It’s called “Journalism as Social Networking: The Australian youdecide project and the 2007 Federal election.” (Obligatory colon ahoy!) You can go to the QUT eprints archive to download it. Academic publishing being what it is, it may be awhile before it appears in a published form, but everyone should feel free to read and discuss this preprint version.

We’re pretty happy with it at this point - basically it combines the stuff I’ve banged on about concerning the four dimensions of the work of the “preditor” - the emerging professional role of facilitating citizen journalism - with a whole lot of context concerning the state of journalism, the state of news media in Australia, and the changing role of journalism education.

The paper feels well-timed, given the consternation and discussion around the future of media careers and institutions in Australia at the moment. (I heard some fascinating versions of this at the “Media in the Pub” event last week in Sydney.)

Anyway, let’s see what the peer reviewers say! Enjoy.