gatewatching

Sorry to be absent for a while - the whole teaching thing tends to get in the way of blogging.

I’ve offered my take on Twitter and Iran over at the ABC’s Unleashed site. A sample:

It seems the whole world is talking about the role Twitter has played in the aftermath of the Iranian elections. Although some have claimed that this is the “big one”, and “the first revolution that has been… transformed by social media”, it may be best for the time being to be a little more measured in assessing the difference Twitter is making.

For the rest, head over and join the fray at Unleashed.

politics, social networking ABCUnleashed, Iran, politics, Twitter

Amongst the standard-issue ammunition in the journalism industry’s defensive skirmishes against those pesky citizen journalists and news bloggers is the deceptively simple claim that there’s a clear difference between reporting the news, i.e. breaking stories (which is what professional journalists do) and commenting on the news, i.e. “endless talk” (which is what everyone else does).

It’s a line repeated in the latest missive from Christian Kerr in The Australian - a rabid, self-serving rant against all those online commentators from Possum’s Pollytics to Larvatus Prodeo whom he doesn’t like, curiously claiming in its title that “our blogs [are] too analytical”, as if intelligent analysis is somehow a bad thing. Still, if nothing else, it’s got one thing going for it: if ‘real’ journalists are the ones that break stories, then Kerr himself isn’t a journalist.

One problem with that neat definition, though, is that breaking stories isn’t a particularly common trait of mainstream newsroom practice these days: much of the content of our daily newspapers and broadcast bulletins comes from a diminishing number of global wire services, and is simply processed by journalists to fit the local context. Similar to citizen journalists’ common practice of gatewatching - following the news passing through the gates of mainstream news publications, and then commenting on it - this is a kind of industrial gatewatching, where agency feeds are constantly monitored for new items to be inserted into the locally-produced publication. So, news bloggers and citizen journalists don’t tend to break stories - but neither, for the most part, do professional journalists.

Read more…

blogging analysis, Christian Kerr, citizen journalism, commentary, Die Zeit, journalism, news blogging, paid content, The Australian

There’s so much going on at the moment that it’s difficult to keep up with it all - I’ve been meaning to comment for some time on Rupert Murdoch’s latest bright idea (charging for online news content), but that will have to wait a little longer still. So, in the meantime, just a couple of quick notes about new publications we’re involved in:

Out now is a new collection edited by Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen, covering developments in journalism around the world - Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives. I’ve yet to see the book in physical form as I’m travelling at the moment, but the Website for the book looks very promising. Jason, Barry, and I contributed a chapter discussing the Youdecide2007 experience.

The other new book, also just released, is probably going to appeal to a somewhat smaller number of our regular readers: Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung covers the findings of a major new study of the transformation of journalism in an online context in Germany (and is published in German). Editors and authors Christoph Neuberger, Christian Nuernbergk, and Melanie Rischke kindly invited me to contribute a chapter on gatewatching and citizen journalism, which presents a condensed and updated summary of the key arguments in my 2005 book Gatewatching. Highly recommended if you can read German and want to know what’s happening there in the citizen journalism arena.

Technorati : Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung, Youdecide2007, books, citizen journalism, gatewatching, journalism, publications
Del.icio.us : Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung, Youdecide2007, books, citizen journalism, gatewatching, journalism, publications

Uncategorized books, citizen journalism, Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, gatewatching, journalism, Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung, publications, youdecide2007