It’s been a tumultuous week in Australian politics - at times for all the wrong reasons -, and social media have played an important role in the events. My take on the impact of Twitter on the Liberal leadership crisis and political reporting has now been published at ABC Unleashed , and I’m reposting it here. I think I like my original title better…

Coalition All Atwitter over Climate Change

The extraordinary events in the Liberal party room over the past few days are destined to enter the annals of Australian politics for a number of reasons - not least because of the unprecedented flow of up-to-the-minute, first-hand, indeed first-person information through the short messaging service Twitter to the waiting journalists and the wider public beyond.

News about the latest statements for and against the CPRS from individual MPs, and updates on the numbers supporting or opposing Malcolm Turnbull were received and retweeted within seconds of their arrival, and at times one could form the impression that those waiting for a resolution had a better sense of Turnbull’s numbers than the Opposition Leader himself.

Finally, Turnbull’s antics at his press conferences, and the statements of politicians and pundits during various subsequent interviews, also found an instant audience of commentators, often responding to blatant inaccuracies and naked spin in the way they wished journalists would.

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Liberal Party, journalism, politics ABC Unleashed, Australia, climate change, Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, politics, Twitter

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks about the continuing struggle between NewsCorp chairman Rupert Murdoch’s defensive and protectionist approach to online news, and ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s ambitious ABC Open strategy to increase dissemination of its news content and incorporate user-generated content more strongly. Some of that discussion has been insightful, some, not unexpectedly, much less so.

I’m already on record as saying that I think that - outside niche markets - Murdoch’s paywall plans are doomed to fail, and fail miserably; most news users simply don’t care enough about NewsCorp’s specific flavour of news to prefer it so much that they’d be willing to pay money for it, if much the same material is also available for free elsewhere. (If this report from Forrester is right, Murdoch should certainly think twice about what he’s proposing to do.) I’ve also been less than convinced by those commentators who say that the ABC’s plans for a stronger embrace of user-generated content, and the gradual or not-so-gradual decline of commercial news organisations, are ‘bad for journalism’, for two reasons:

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journalism, media abc, ABC Open, online news, paywall, Rupert Murdoch, social media

I’ve been invited to speak at Media 140 in Sydney tomorrow. It’s now sold out so I can’t encourage readers to come along, though the ABC will be streaming it. This is an international event, which is focussed on exploring

the disruptive nature of ‘real-time’ social media looking at tools such as Twitter, live-blogging, facebook and other social networking tools as they rapidly transform the media in real-time.

I’ve been invited by way of the good people at newmatilda.com, where I occasionally pass comment on such topics.

Each speaker gets five minutes, and below the fold I’ve reproduced the text of something like what I’ll say tomorrow. Actually, this is more like what I would say I had the chance - there’s another couple of hundred words that need to come out of there by my calculations.

Comments and feedback most welcome - I was asked to speak on the Iranian elections and social media, and I’ve tried to address myself to what I saw as an overemphasis in some assessments on the specific role of Twitter in those events.

For those who are going - I’ll see you there.

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journalism abc, media140, Sydney, Twitter