Over on Fairfax’s National Times opinion site, I’ve now posted a first article examining the use of Twitter during the early election campaign – for the first week of campaigning, excluding the debate last Sunday (which I’ve examined on Mapping Online Publics, my new network mapping blog with Jean Burgess, here and here).

As Jason, Barry and I did with our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online during the 2007 federal election, I’m also posting the full text of the article here, in my original version. For what it’s worth, I much preferred my original title rather than the more anemic ‘All a-Twitter on the Campaign Trail’ that Fairfax’s sub-editors settled on…

Which Political Leader Would You Rather …?

By Axel Bruns

Tweet, that is. Internationally, the short-message social networking service Twitter itself has been used by a number of recent political contenders as a campaigning tool, with varying degrees of success; the Twitterati tend to get frustrated quickly by campaigns that merely use the system to push out PR messages, without any indication that there’s a real human being behind the account.

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Australia, Twitter, election, politics

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

There’s ways to go about implementing a code of ethics for bloggers, and there’s ways not to do it. The Federal Trade Commission in the US is trying a punitive approach aimed at curbing instances of blogger payola (or what in the Australian context might best be called ‘cash for comment‘), with fines for misleading blog posts. The problem I see with this is that it’s simply going to be unenforcible; the blogosphere isn’t as clearly structured as the mainstream media industry, where regulations to prevent misleading conduct may work - and (think ‘cash for comment’ again) even here, regulation tends to be taken about as seriously as Wilson Tuckey, so there’s little chance that blogger regulation is going to be effective in any measurable way.

Which is a roundabout way of saying that I’ve just published an article on this topic at ABC Unleashed (and reproduced over the fold). Comments - and suggestions for more workable approaches to introducing a bloggers’ code of ethics, if you have any - are very welcome, as always.

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USA, blogging, ethics, media, regulation blogs, cash for comment, ethics, FTC, regulation, USA

Readers of Gatewatching may be interested in this: the call for papers for EDEM 2010, the fourth international conference on e-democracy, to be held in Austria next May, has now been released. I attended EDEM 2009 in Vienna a couple of months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it; much of the work presented there (including the paper which Jason and I co-authored, of course) was directly relevant also to the Australian context, especially in light of the explorations currently being undertaken by the Government 2.0 Task Force.

From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

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government, policy, politics, public sphere CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media

Just a quick post to alert our readers to a number of PhD research opportunities in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, in cooperation with various industry partners. There’s a wide range of potential projects here, but personally, I’m particularly interested in applications from potential PhD students wishing to explore future avenues in public broadcasting in collaboration with the Australian ABC. One key question in this context is the connection between traditional public broadcasting models and the embrace of user-generated content, which the ABC and other public broadcasters have engaged in more or less actively, and this is closely connected to my own research interests in produsage and social media as well as the work we’ve done at QUT on the future of public broadcasters.

You can find a full call for applications over at snurb.info - please pass it on to anyone who may be interested. And remember that applications for Australian students close on 30 September, for international students on 9 October…

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media abc, CCi, creative industries, innovation, PhD, produsage, public broadcasting, social media

Cardiff.
Taking time out briefly from the Future of Journalism 2009 conference here in sunny (really!) Cardiff (you can follow my liveblog here), I notice that the ABC has picked up on the developing story around Joe Hockey’s tweeting from the parliament floor. This ties straight into our discussion of political uses of social media in the paper Jason and I wrote for the e-Democracy conference in Vienna earlier this week, of course. For more on this, see the ABC story, which includes some insighful commentary from Jason. But be warned: it also contains a photo of Hockey… Read more…

politics e-democracy, Jason Wilson, Joe Hockey, parliament, politics, Twitter

You’ll remember that at the time I had a few things to say on Gatewatching.org about last December’s government consultation blog trial by the Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) last year - and a quote from my blog post back then even made it into the federal government’s report discussing the “Digital Economy” blog and other participatory initiatives - while a little earlier and before taking on his current position at the University of Wollongong, Jason was involved in developing GetUp!’s Project Democracy site which provides a social media platform enabling users to track the work of Australia’s federal senators.

Jason and I have now joined forces for a paper I’ll present at the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy in Vienna; titled “Citizen Consultation from Above and Below: The Australian Perspective”, we’re discussing the various approaches (top-down, bottom-up) to citizen consultation which are evident in these examples as well as in more general attempts by politicians to use the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies to engage with constituents. In advance of the conference, I’ve now posted up the paper and Powerpoint over at snurb.info.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism citizen journalism, consultation, Digital Economy blog, EDEM 2009, Future of Journalism 2009, government, myHeimat, Project Democracy

Long-term followers of Gatewatching.org may remember that we started the blog in part as a vehicle for discussing our Youdecide2007 citizen journalism project for the 2007 Australian federal election. I’m happy to report that this project has now been featured as a case study in the Australian federal Department for Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy’s newly-released report “Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions“. For the Youdecide2007 case study, which is described a little misleadingly as an interview with project leader Terry Flew on the DBCDE Website, I drafted a concluding section with a few ideas on likely future developments in professional and citizen journalism, but because of the overall word limit we could only use a few bits from it - so I thought I’d republish the whole piece here:

The Future of Journalism and Citizen Journalism

The journalism industry is currently facing a number of substantial challenges, further exacerbated by the global financial crisis which is severely affecting the commercial media organisations operating newspapers and broadcasters. Newspaper readership, especially among younger age groups, is continuing to decline in most developed nations, and income from advertising is diminishing. Meanwhile, an increasing number of users are getting their news from a variety of online sources - but here, brand loyalty is often substantially less developed than it was for print and broadcast news. Further, new news aggregators - for example, Google News - track and collate reports from news sources around the world, leading to a more random access model for news. This may be beneficial for smaller news operators (whose news reports are now placed alongside reports on the same topic from major newspapers), but further reduces the special position of leading news brands such as The New York Times or The Australian.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism, policy Australia, citizen journalism, DBCDE, digital economy, journalism, youdecide2007

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.

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