The key point I ended up on, and one very much worth exploring further, is what to do with a network like Obama’s now that the election is over. (Labor’s campaign managers have just answered [?] this by rebranding Kevin07 as KevinPM - we’ll see how that works out.) For the Obama machine, this will be interesting to follow - after all, what exactly is his my.barackobama.com network? Is it part of the Democrat campaigning system, part of Democrat party structures, or even an element of the incoming administration? Is it a quasi-party in its own right, a political movement, a non-profit lobby group, or even a commercial enterprise (it is a dot.com, after all)?

I think I agree with Noam Scheiber at The New Republic (and the authors he cites in this piece) that it would be a mistake to let the Democratic Party get its hands on the network itself, thus inevitably watering down its impact and alienating at least those of Obama’s supporters who are not automatically also staunch Democrat voters. At the same time, keeping the network as Obama’s personal support base would also further cement a style of politics that is almost entirely focussed on the candidate/office-holder and his politics, rather than on the political movement he belongs to - in essence eventually turning the Obama brand into a party in its own right, virtually independent of the Democrat machine. To do so may be beneficial in the short term (assuming Obama is all he’s cracked up to be, he may be able to accomplish more without needing to rely on Democrat party machinations), but also dangerous in the longer term (a future candidate following the Obama playbook may build a strong, personalised support network using fear and demagoguery rather than hope and the promise of change).

Obama’s personalised support network represents a great deal of power, unchecked by party organisation or oversight. Perhaps he’ll need this extra power to undo eight years of Bush/Cheney-style fundamentalism; perhaps he deserves this grassroots backup to deliver the change he’s promised. But what if the next leader to galvanise such fanatical levels of grassroots support doesn’t?

Technorati : 2SER, Barack Obama, Fourth Estate, KevinPM, election, power, social networking
Del.icio.us : 2SER, Barack Obama, Fourth Estate, KevinPM, election, power, social networking

So, last Saturday I went to the Future of Journalism event in Brisbane (and spoke on one of the panels). Contrary to my usual practice, I didn’t live-blog the event - panel-based events are notoriously difficult to blog. Here, then, are some reflections on what I saw - adding to comments already posted by Mark Bahnisch, Marian Edmunds, Cameron Reilly, and Bronwen Clune, among others.

The event began well, with Margaret Simons setting the theme with her usual insightful comments. Her observations about the troubled economic future for the journalism industry (and here, especially newspapers) are perhaps nothing new to most of us (though still not necessarily fully appreciated by many journalists themselves), and the bleak future that this malaise points to especially for in-depth, costly, quality investigative journalism has been discussed in some detail already (including by Jason, Barry and me in the Club Bloggery series), but it was a useful framing for the panels to follow.

Two key points Margaret made bear repeating, however. On the one hand, that the link between the business of media and the practice of journalism is gradually being severed - it is increasingly possible for some forms of journalism to take place outside of the business environment (indeed, the best future for investigative journalism may now lie in funding by taxpayers, NGOs, or philanthropists, while quality political commentary in Australia is now found in citizen journalism sites more so than newspapers), while there is also a chance for journalists to extract themselves from employment by mainstream media organisations and set up shop on their own (something Margaret herself is currently attempting to do, of course).

On the other hand, then, this also requires journalists (and especially journalism students), to develop skills well beyond the standard journalistic craft. Margaret stressed quite strongly that journalism students would be well advised to learn about business plans, and to seek a possible professional future in alternative ventures rather than relying on the availability of employment in the mainstream industry.

Such views contrasted in interesting (and sometimes frustrating) ways with the panels of Griffith University journalism students and mainstream newspaper editors which followed. One of the students represented has already objected to the characterisation of their statements on the panel which I made at the conference, but I’ll say it again - I didn’t see a great deal of thinking outside of the box, that is, outside of the conventions of mainstream journalism, from the students’ panel.

Perhaps it’s unfair to expect too much here - the students had clearly been briefed by conference organisers to spend some time discussing their personal news usage, which wasn’t all that interesting -, but the perspectives they represented struck me as rather insular, and I didn’t get the sense that they were particularly well prepared for the significant industry upheaval which has been foreshadowed (and, in the case of Fairfax, may already been underway). I don’t mean to overly criticise the students themselves in this context - rather, I’d suggest that for the most part, journalism courses in Australia and many other countries tend to prepare their graduates for the present rather than the future of journalism. Learning from the wise old heads (at university, and later during cadetships in news organisations) is fine as far as it goes, but their perspectives, honed in years and decades of newsroom socialisation, are limited.

Just how limited, in fact, became apparent in the following panel with editors of the Courier-Mail and Sunday Mail. Titled ‘adapt or die’, and recast as ‘innovate or die’ by moderator Hugh Martin from APN, based on what the editors of these commercial newspapers had to say the odds seem stacked in favour of the latter possibility. Courier-Mail editor David Fagan’s response to the structural challenges before him was mainly to point to the paper’s use of more engaging graphics; he also noted its continuing expansion into Brisbane’s outer suburbs, addressing especially recent new Queenslanders moving up here from the southern states, and the simultaneous switch to the tabloid format more favoured by former readers of, say, the Daily Telegraph. (Fagan himself studiously avoided the T-word, of course, referring to the new format as a ‘compact’ instead.)

Not a great deal of innovation or even adaptation in the face of new challenges especially from online news sites was evident here - just the intention to keep fighting for every reader by aggressively marketing the established brand and product. And yes, that’s a strategy which is likely to work for the Courier-Mail for some time to come, as any loss of existing readers may be counterbalanced by the significant influx in new arrivals to the state - but that doesn’t make it sustainable in the long run.

Real innovation in journalism in Australia is probably going to happen around the edges rather than at the core of the journalism industry, then - in Crikey, if we’re lucky, and in the wilderness beyond, more likely. The highly concentrated media ownership structures of the Australian media industry are partly responsible for this, of course - in an environment where most Australian cities are journalistic one horse towns at best, there has historically been little incentive to engage in content and format innovation.

I would have liked to spend more of the time allotted to my own panel - with Mark Bahnisch and Marian Edmunds, and moderated by Cristen Tilley - on a discussion of such innovation where it has already begun, but I think we did get stuck a little too much on the ‘amateurs vs. professionals’ debate which I had hoped to avoid. I’ll take some of the blame for this - I think I got the point across that this debate is stupidly reductive, and that the haughty petulance towards citizen journalism expressed in a number of recent editorials is laughably ill-informed, but not so much the point that there are better opportunities for exploring the future of journalism if we’re prepared to examine projects that do already engage in Pro-Am journalistic processes. Ah well.

Overall, though, what also struck me during the event was the very blinkered vision of many in the mainstream industry. I got the sense that there’s something not unlike Stockholm syndrome at work here - the longer you work in the industry, the harder is it to imagine any other way of working than by following the routines established long ago. (A recent post by Bronwen Clune about the troubles at Fairfax seems to echo that sentiment.) This, I’m sorry to say, seems doubly so not for journalists, but for many journalism educators, who continue to churn out industry-ready cadets for an industry that’s increasingly less ready to take them on. I can’t think of many journalism courses which have already responded to Margaret Simons’s challenge to incorporate the entrepreneurial skills required for journalism graduates to set up their own operations rather than rely on employment in the mainstream industry.

Many if not most other information and knowledge industries have already moved to put much more emphasis on such independent entrepreneurship, in order to weather the challenges of portfolio employment and precarious labour environments which Mark Deuze has outlined so clearly in his recent book Media Work. (Other than journalism, off the top of my head I can think of only one clear example which similarly has yet to come to terms with its emerging new environment: academia. Here, too, we all too often take for granted a future of employment and prosperity, even in spite of some very clear challenges on the horizon, and real innovation remains limited to a few leading lights in the sector.)

So, overall, some interesting insights into the present state of journalism in Australia. The future of journalism, however, remains very much unclear.

Technorati : Courier-Mail, Future of Journalism, Margaret Simons, citizen journalism, journalism, journalism industry
Del.icio.us : Courier-Mail, Future of Journalism, Margaret Simons, citizen journalism, journalism, journalism industry

The Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance (the key union for Australian media workers) has recently begun to organise a series of events titled “The Future of Journalism”, bringing together industry and citizen journalists, academics, and other media experts to explore future developments in the news media. The first of these was held in Sydney in May, covered by Jason Wilson at Gatewatching and Rachel Hills at New Matilda, and now it’s Brisbane’s turn - at QUT’s Gardens Theatre on 13 September 2008.

For more information, and to register, see the MEAA’s Future of Journalism site. In the afternoon, I’ll be part of a panel titled “Bloggers: Amateur Netizens or Professionals of the Future?” alongside Mark Bahnisch and Marian Edmunds, and I think the first point I’m going to make is that the amateur/professional dichotomy (usually mapped on a parallel blogger/journalist dichotomy) is of course no longer sustainable today. In fact, it’s nothing more than the result of the classic approach in journalistic writing which reduces any conflict ultimately to a struggle between two opposite stereotypes - amateurs vs. professionals, youth vs. establishment, poor vs. rich, left vs. right, good vs. evil.

Reality, of course, is substantially more nuanced. As I’ve noted in a recent conference paper, for example, everyone’s favourite stats nerd, the psephologist blogger Possum Comitatus, is both an amateur journalist and a professional electoral opinion analyst, while the Australian political blogosphere’s preferred punching bag, The Australian’s political editor Dennis Shanahan, is both a professional journalist and pundit and an absolute disgrace as an interpreter of opinion polls.

Expertise, and lack thereof, can be found in the strangest of places, and sticking to an amateur/professional divide isn’t helpful here (nor has it ever been). What I’m more interested in is what models may be available to highlight and harness the best expert contributions wherever they may originate, and get as many people as possible to see and debate them. Our work with Youdecide2007 (in collaboration with professional media outlets SBS and On Line Opinion) explored this question, the German myHeimat that I mentioned a little while ago tries the same from a very different perspective, and of course there are many more international attempts to find new Pro-Am models for journalistic coverage as well. These developments will be interesting to watch for years to come.

Speaking of The Australian, by the way: while its become a popular sport amongst bloggers to point out shortcomings in its political analysis, let’s also give credit where it’s due - kudos the paper’s parent company News Ltd. for supporting the Future of Journalism event through the sponsorship provided by Sky News.

Technorati : Brisbane, Future of Journalism, citizen journalism, conference, journalism
Del.icio.us : Brisbane, Future of Journalism, citizen journalism, conference, journalism

myHeimat (whom I’ll visit in Hannover and Augsburg on my Europe trip in October) is interesting because of its distributed setup and its emerging partnerships with print publishers which re-publish the best citizen journalism content in weekly or monthly print editions which are variously included as supplementary pages or sections in local newspapers, or distributed as free household magazines (similar to, say, the Brisbane News here in Brisbane). In keeping with this, its focus is on community news more than on ‘hard’ political coverage (though some political discussion does take place on the site, too), but of course that doesn’t disqualify it from being regarded as citizen journalism - and it remains to be seen how the site dynamics will change, say, around the time of the next federal election in Germany.

Some notable points from the interview: Huber’s comments about the need for some staff guidance and rolemodelling especially in the early stages of the project seem pretty well aligned with Jason’s reflections on his ‘preditor’ role in our own Youdecide2007 project. Limited by available funding and the election timeframe, ours was necessarily a much smaller project and more temporary than myHeimat, so it’s interesting to see that according to Huber, today it’s his “citizen reporters who show newcomers what can be done with such a portal” and that “in this way, within a very short time it is possible to integrate, qualify [i.e., train] and motivate the large number of new citizen reporters so that they are able to ideally use the network for sub local reporting”.

I’d like to think that, had our project continued past the election, we might also have reached that point where existing users would have trained newcomers and Jason and others could have stepped back from that task - and in fact, managing that transition seems to me to be a crucial make-or-break point for any citizen journalism start-up (and especially one backed by public or private funding). Seeding the site with staff content is clearly necessary especially in the early stages, but if the user community gets too used to relying on staff to contribute the big stories, and restricts itself to making only comments or other minor contributions, a site won’t reach sustainability; at the same time, if staff-contributed content doesn’t manage to set the tone and tenor of the site, user contributions may turn out to be too varied and erratic to allow the site to establish a reliable profile.

It’s interesting in this regard that Huber also highlights the possibility of seeing one’s contribution published in print as an organising factor:

The connection with print causes very many users to pay a lot more attention to quality. People write a lot differently when they know that their text could appear also in print. In addition, 80 to 90 percent of our users are registered under their real name, many also with a photo. Therefore, they stand up for their content with both their name and their face. That leads to wholly different dynamics as well as a greater quality consciousness.

Something similar may be at play in a project like Current.tv (with its promise to have your video screened on a cable TV channel in the US and/or UK). Seems to me as if finding a model that allows myHeimat to bring such external motivating factors to bear as a way of focussing their user community is one of the most promising innovations myHeimat has made.

There are a few more interviews with other hyperlocal journalism projects in the same issue of IFRA Magazine, by the way - if you can find your way through the suboptimal navigation system on the site. The best way to access them directly is through this link. And there’s more information about myHeimat on the site blog - including a number of links to other stories (mostly in German) about the project.

Technorati : Germany, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, hyperlocal, myHeimat, preditor
Del.icio.us : Germany, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, hyperlocal, myHeimat, preditor

Singapore.
The first full day at ISEA 2008 starts with a number of parallel paper sessions - and the first paper in one of these sessions is mine (that is, the paper I’ve co-authored with Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai). I’ve posted the slides below, and will try to record the audio as well the audio is up now, too.

The next paper is by Atteqa Malik, who begins with a political rock video from Pakistan that has now been parodied by the Pakistani lawyers’ movement (replacing rock musicians with lawyers, etc.). That movement, and other online and offline protests, is in response to the takeover of mainstream Pakistani media during the Musharraf regime, of course - indeed, there has been an explosion of media channels in Pakistan in recent years. One further catalyst for such developments was the 2005 earthquake, which created a strong response from younger generations.

On 3 November 2007 there was a media blackout - all TV and radio channels were shut down, but this did not extend effectively to the Internet, and so protest against this shutdown was reported here in particular. Forms of expression included poetry, online fora and blogs, mailing-lists, (photos of) street graffiti, and Webcasts. The backlash ultimately led to the defeat of Musharraf’s allies in the recent Pakistani elections - and the new government has taken a much more hands-off approach to media regulation (at least for now). More political sites (including blogs such as PK Long March) have now popped up - interestingly, not least also supported by the private owners of newspapers who are currently strongly supportive of new forms of public political engagement.

Next up is Nicholas Knouf, whose interest is in a reinterpretation of networks as fluid. He highlights the vast range of uses of the term ‘network’ in a variety of contexts, and notes the fluidity of networks. He also points to network visualisations with people as ‘nodes’ and connections between them as ‘edges’. But how are such networks instantiated or individuated? When is it individuated, how is access controlled, how do individuals become nodes, and what connections are represented in network graphs? Visualisation necessarily flattens details and often introduces a false sense of stability into the representation.

Networks can be active agents, however, creating particular views of reality. Use that way, they do not fix what already exists, but can open up new possibilities - at the same time, who, what, when, and why to represent remain key questions. Such questions have also been marshalled in the critique of actor-network theory (ANT), of course. A standardised network often involves the private suffering of those who are not involved, due to the uneven distribution of enabling and disenabling effects and the uneven distribution of the ability to switch between networks.

Nicholas and his colleagues have developed a project called Fluid Nexus which enables Bluetooth-based, clandestine mobile communication in the absence of standard network infrastructure - a ’sneaker-net’ that is fluid, temporary, and ad hoc (and can exist for example in times of crisis when mainstream networks are shut down). The project builds on the open source Python platform, running on Nokia phones, and Nicholas now plays a demonstration video.

Messages do not pass through centralised networks and are not stored permanently on central servers, protecting such communications more effectively from government surveillance. The system does not require a representation of the network to function; the network is inherently fluid and ad hoc. Nicholas describes this as a question of ontological politics.

Technorati : Australia, ISEA 2008, Pakistan, blogs, mapping, mobile, network, politics, protest
Del.icio.us : Australia, ISEA 2008, Pakistan, blogs, mapping, mobile, network, politics, protest

Brisbane.
The third and last day of the CCi conference starts with a keynote by the fabulous Mark Deuze, author of Media Work. He begins by pointing to Henry Jenkins’s work on convergence culture, and reminds us of the magnitude of that trend. Why is this happening, what is the context for this - how do media professionals work in this environment?

Media organisations are very well positioned to make sense of this from a production perspective - they are well placed to find new ways to tell stories across multiple (new) platforms, but in doing so reproduce mainly what they did before. We need to move forward beyond this approach, though: how do we start from scratch in developing new content forms and forms of participation which are native to the new (media) environment, characterised as it is by niche communities and diverse interests? (Mark’s upcoming book Beyond Journalism tells this story for the journalistic environment.)

We experience society today as a series of temporary but intense experiences and engagements. This happens in the context of relationships we build with people, brands, institutions - intense but immensely changeable. Mark points to a few examples in this context - such as the Cubic Club, a set of containers in on a beach in Barcelona which are used as the temporary venue for dance clubs, events, and other very temporary happenings; the SoCo Cargo Experiment in Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne which created temporary entertainment zones (again in cargo containers) aimed at selling Southern Comfort. Another example is Hotel Móvil, a mobile ‘hotel on a truck’, the V-Box mobile temporary shop, the Stoli Hotel, a temporary Stolichnaya-themed hotel, and other forms of guerilla-style shops and entertainment settings.

Each of these examples is characterised by qualities such as impermanence, intensity, solipsism (that is, not simply individualised or personalised, but even more focussed on individual experience and worldview than these terms woud suggest), but also (at the very same time) participation in DIY media - there is no contradiction between solipsism and participation in this new environment. Key examples for these tendencies can be found in journalism (and new media work more generally). We make sense of new media as artefacts (now characterised by mobility and interoperability), and through our activities (and Mark points for example to Bliin, which streams a user’s GPS location and Web- or mobile camera feed to their friends and makes their position visible on a Google map).

At the same time, these practices have a significant effect on established media institutions - one in four jobs in the American media industries has disappeared in the last few years; one in three journalists has seen one of their colleagues lose their job as a result of these changes, and they are now intensely worried about the security of their own job. (Media workers sometimes see themselves be described as ‘people who cost their employer money’.) There is a general shift towards ‘atypical’, that is, non-contract-based, labour in the media industries - such work is intrinsically impermanent, and in a sense workers’ jobs exist now only in their own heads (again, solipsistically).

Mark now points to the example of being on stage at a Barack Obama campaign event, which he - and many others in the crowd - experienced in good part through their cameras and other recording devices. In doing so, they construct their own (intense and solipsistic) recording of the world for later use and sharing. Journalism has traditionally dealt with this through letters through the editor, and now also does so through other forms of user contributions, discussion fora, blogs, or even to wholesale outsourcing to users (as in Scoopt or YouNewsTV).

Does this mean that journalism is dead? Commitment to media organisation has traditionally be permanent (subscriptions, commitment to watch the evening news at a set time, etc.) - but we now expect on-demand, personalised media experiences, which can be seen as undermining consensus and wide social engagement. Media organisations are historically very well positioned to let us not participate - nobody becomes a journalist with the intention to let others tell the stories. So, there is a great need to start from scratch, to build new media organisations which inherently embody the key characteristics of new media (impermanence, intensity, solipsism, participation); despite some of the problems associated with these characteristics, such new media organisations have a significant contribution to make.

Technorati : CCi 2008, Mark Deuze, Media Work, new media, produsage
Del.icio.us : CCi 2008, Mark Deuze, Media Work, new media, produsage

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at the CCi conference starts for me with a panel on citizen journalism which involves my colleague Jason Wilson from Youdecide2007 (and Gatewatching.org), Larvatus Prodeo’s Mark Bahnisch, and Graham Young from Online Opinion. Their theme is the role of citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election.

Mark Bahnisch speaks first, and highlights the fact that news blogging and citizen journalism is a form of work, and in the longer term cannot be sustained simply by opposition to government and mainstream media. The latter perception persists both amongst detractors and proponents of citizen journalism, however, even in spite of evidence to the contrary. Mark points to his own experience in the 2007 election campaign, running and contributing to LP as well as New Matilda, Crikey, and various other news and commentary outlets - this is a significant workload which in most cannot be sustained on a purely voluntary basis. (Indeed, Mark did receive pay for some of these activities.)

This kind of work generated some very diverse media content and was able to uncover stories and ideas which would not have been addressed in the mainstream media; it relied on significant existing networks both held privately by Mark and established through online social networking and crowdsourcing processes (and the establishment and maintenance of these also requires significant energy). Some of this work is not that far removed from journalistic practice or activities on which now well-established mainstream journalists and journalism educators first cut their teeth, but oddly enough, there continues to come some severe hostility to the new kids on the block from that direction - partly also because they are experiencing substantial change in their own media work environments.

The next speaker is Jason Wilson, who notes especially the rise of specialist, expert bloggers (such as the psephologists) during the election campaign. Jason interviewed the now famous Possum Comitatus as part of his research, who started blogging simply to archive graphs of polling data and found himself gradually becoming a hub in his own social network. Such specialists (also economists, lawyers, and other experts) do not need the mediation of journalists any more to place their material into the public sphere; it may be easier to teach a psephologist to write well than it is to teach a mainstream journalist the finer details of psephological analysis, Jason suggests.

Another key aspect of the 2007 campaign was the complete failure of the Liberal Party to engage with online media, which helped Labor to underscore the differences between the two political brands. This was probably not the sole reason why the Liberals lost, but it would not have helped. Additionally, Jason notes that AES data suggests a growing engagement (off a relatively low base) of the electorate with blogs and other online media, and it will be interesting to see how this will further develop. The Net itself, indeed, became a major campaign issue (with broadband a central element of both parties’ policy releases), also indicating the growing role of online media.

On now to Graham Young, who thinks back to his view that the Net would be where political discussion would move in the near future; against this, however, he suggests that the impact of citizen journalism still remains limited and that there is no real sign that this performance will lift in the immediate future. The relatively limited size of the Australian population (as compared for example with the US) has a role to play here, of course; also, the mainstream media here are on the whole relatively uninterested in interacting visibly with online media.

So, what is citizen journalism and what can it do? There is a somewhat romantic notion of citizen journalists, Graham feels, and takes a somewhat functional view which describes almost anyone who makes online comments as citizen journalists - including especially also sites which are run by the mainstream media. Graham also points to the lessons from Youdecide2007 and Qlddecides as indicating that simple, accessible structures look set to remain more successful for the time being, by providing relatively low barriers to access and participation - the latter project took a much simpler approach and (given the short run-up time) was comparatively more successful. Overall, though, Graham suggests, the news agenda on both sites was much closer to what users wanted to read about than the coverage of the mainstream media.

Mark comments that in the US some of the major news blogs have effectively been mainstreamed, which at the same time has also opened up a space for local and hyperlocal forms of covering state and city politics and electoral races. In a place like Brisbane, there is no critical mass for this as yet, and it may take until the next election in a few years’ for this to emerge.

They’re now responding to questions from the audience. Jason suggests that the audience for Youdecide2007 largely consisted of already strongly politically involved users, and that most of them had already made up their mind about how they would vote. Mark says that for LP, the process of being able to respond and interact on the site in the first place showed users that there were communities in which they could engage, and that they could thereby exercise active citizenship.

Peter Black now shares his experience of the Microsoft Forum on Politics and Technology in Canberra yesterday, where he was collared by journalist Annabel Crabb who suggested that the blogosphere was superfluous because it did not break original news stories. Mark responds (to Annabel’s views) by saying that the idea that the blogosphere must break news is nonsense; that said, during the federal election, for example, the Queensland election race was covered in the national media largely by journalists based in Sydney and Melbourne who in part relied on local coverage in news blogs and citizen journalism publications, so in a more indirect way, these outlets did create original journalistic content. He feels that there has been a fairly deliberate decision for news media to colonise the online space through their commentary ‘blogs’.

Georgie McClean from SBS wonders how such tension between industry and citizen journalists may be able to be resolved in practice. Jason suggests that that dichotomy itself is one which has been built up deliberately by both sides (especially perhaps by the industry) to create strong distinctions between the camps, but that in practice there is a significant overlap between the two in personnel and practices. The oppositional paradigm is increasingly pointless.

Graham adds that he thinks of himself as a prospector looking for news, but requires the services of someone else to bring it to wider attention. What he does not understand is why the mainstream media do not have more people working this way for themselves - crowdsourcing additional information on stories, for example. Terry Flew adds that in the US it is increasingly common for news bloggers and citizen journalists to be featured on mainstream US news shows and channels; there is much less demarcation between media forms there.

John Quiggin notes that news during election campaigns is largely generated by the various parties’ campaigns anyway, and that this material at least is equally accessible to industrial and citizen journalists. There is some independent fact-finding, but this remains limited. He also notes the propensity of cross-linking in blogs, which is largely absent in the walled gardens of mainstream media Web content, and thereby establishes limits to the ability of media organisations to effectively colonise this space.

Mark responds by saying that there is a distinction between political bloggers like himself and citizen journalists (who may be interested in creating more conventional news content) - the former take a clearly partisan stance, which also makes them useful discussion partners for politically aligned actors in the parties and elsewhere. He suggests that he has seen more internal Labor party polling than most industry journalists in Brisbane, for example, because Labor figures have a clear idea of what he might do with that material - discuss it on LP.

Anne Dunn suggests that cultivating contacts in the way Mark has described it is exactly what professional journalists do, and also notes that what the ABC does in training specialist broadcasters is exactly what Jason has described - providing domain experts with journalistic skills. At the same time, Jason says, there is an institutional bottleneck in places like the ABC; there is not the space for the diversity which exists in the open environment of the Web. Anne suggests that some kind of measure of authority remains important - but, as Jason says, that authority may no longer be provided by the institutional imprint of the ABC, but by other forms of recognition. Interestingly, Terry notes that there is now a large number of students who will do some journalism as part of their degree.

David McKnight goes back to the question of hostility between the two camps. Partly this is due to the ignorance of mainstream journalists, he suggests, partly also to the triumphalism of citizen journalists in positioning themselves as an alternative to mainstream media. Jason responds to say again that there is also a lot of interest from some players in the industry in new models - this comes often from specific groups in industrial journalism, however. Mark further notes the importance of commenting on blogs; this generates community loyalty and trust in citizen journalism in a way that does not exist.

My question is how we can define and measure the influence and impact of citizen journalism. Is it a matter of swinging an election, Mark asks, of attracting influential (but elite) readers, or of civic impact? Terry points to the US case of Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, where a two- (or more-) step flow was apparent (from videos to blogs to more mainstream news channels); Jason suggests that some policy bloggers in Australia are having an impact on elite policymaking discources. Graham thinks that providing opportunities for open debate may not be enough if such discussion turns out to be highly polarised (which may undermine rather than strengthen democracy).

Mel Gregg focusses our debate on the citizen part of the term ‘citizen journalism’. How are conceptions of citizenship different, for example, between Australia and the US? What kinds of people are recognised by these processes? Georgie McClean sees one definition of citizenship as engagement with public life, but this continues to privilege mainly those who are already political junkies, perhaps. Terry notes that there is a persistent bifurcation in this context between a civic republican tradition and an understanding that fundamental to citizenship is personal liberty. Mark adds that the notion of citizenship is often approached from an individualised rather than community perspective; we’re only at the start of researching the role of blogging and other online practices in this context. Jason points to the core problem of Australia as having a very unevenly distributed public sphere, which centres around the major cities and has very limited purchase in more sparsely populated areas poorly served by mainstream media. He suggests that hyperlocal projects like Youdecide2007 do fill an important alternative role here. For Graham, ‘citizen journalism’ largely refers to people doing journalistic work without pay; the citizenship aspect does not play such a significant role in his personal practice, or certainly does not exist in the forefront of such practices.

Technorati : 2007, Australia, CCi 2008, Larvatus Prodeo, Online Opinion, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, election, journalism
Del.icio.us : 2007, Australia, CCi 2008, Larvatus Prodeo, Online Opinion, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, election, journalism

Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker in this very enjoyable session on day two of the CCi conference is Margaret Simons, asking the question “What are journalists for?” She begins by noting the role of the Australian Press Council, long perceived as a publishers’ poodle, and recounts how she has recently been contacted by a researcher at the APC inquiring about the development of journalistic staff numbers in Australian publishers - publishers themselves were not interested to share these numbers, presumably because there is a strong decline in numbers in the current, distressed context of the journalism industry.

What information is available about such staff figures, then? Margaret would go about this by utilising her personal networks, contacting journalists and middle managers to get at such data, most likely jeopardising their and her own careers in the process. Journalists, at any rate, are under threat, and journalism can be very dirty work, as this anecdote illustrates. What is worth preserving about journalism and journalists, then - especially in a world where anyone inside or outside the industry can publish journalistic content?

Journalism’s history traces back to London’s coffeehouses, and early journalists frequented them to scare up news and scandal; today, however, journalists are often strongly embraced by political actors, largely in order to enable them to feed intended tidbits of information to such journalists who now perhaps lack a more critical edge. As all of this moves further towards an online, niche environment, what happens to this - will we enter a more highly fragmented age?

Key elements of journalism remain investigation, storytelling, and conversation, and each of these need to be preserved - as does basic reporting (focussing oin everyday aspects). Conversation has received a major boost in the online environment, even if major media organisations still are very reluctant to engage in such conversation. Blogs and citizen journalists do conversation well, but not necessarily investigation and storytelling (and usually acknowledge this, too). Conversation can be a powerful tool of journalism, but by itself is not sufficient; journalism done well is hard and dirty work for which news bloggers and citizen journalists may not have the time, resources, skills, or contacts.

News bloggers focus on opinion and commentary, and gatewatching is a useful addition to journalism, but cannot replace it altogether (that’s not to say that mainstream journalism necessarily does much better - a significant percentage of industrial journalism also simply repurposes government information and commercial press releases). Interesting experiments combine professional and citizen journalism approaches, Margaret suggests, and she names Youdecide2007 and Assignment Zero as examples here.

Interaction with the audience and the blurring of the line between audience and content maker will continue, as does the shift in writing style from impartial reporting to a more opinionated writing style (as Crikey does it, for example). Audiences are increasingly interested in narrative voice rather than robotic objectivity. Journalists are once again turning to correspondents in the full sense of the word. At the same time, factual accuracy must remain, and disinterested reporting must survive. Journalists will be challenged in their definition of ‘objectivity’ - a term which retains a pre-modern positivist definition in journalism that is rather underproblematised.

What outlooks and business models will support such journalism in the future? Journalists may increasingly start their own sites (as they did, in fact, when newspapers first emerged); nearly all of these remain niche publication, however, and will never be mass media (attempting to transform itself that way it would likely lose its character). But if everyone has their own relationship with their niche publication, how is democracy maintained in the face of this fragmentation? Margaret suggests that the new metaphor for journalism is mapping - journalists provide a map of our world at various levels, and in doing so make choices of what it is necessary to include; in the future, audiences (users) will increasingly be co-creators of this map by contributing their local knowledge.

Margaret plans to launch a hyperlocal news site for her own suburb of Flemington in Victoria; in The Flemington Map, she plans to report on all matters of local relevance, and thereby show the connections of local issues to matters of national importance. This project may fail, but Margaret suggests that we need many of such new projects to work out what is possible and feasible here, and in the process we will learn what elements of journalism are worth preserving and what new elements drawn from other sources will need to be introduced.

Technorati : Australia, CCi 2008, citizen journalism, journalism, politics
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Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Camilla Cooke. She managed the Australian Labor Party’s digital campaign during the 2007 Australian federal election - “Australia’s first digital election”, as she describes it. Initial ideas for this campaign (even before the arrival of Kevin Rudd as opposition leader) were to engage debate, to use the Web for propagating messages, to utilise it as the key route to youth, and to use it for highly efficient and cost-effective marketing. Ultimately, these goals transformed into components like the Kevin07 Website, the social networking spaces, in Facebook and elsewhere, the YouTube channel, and a variety of other online platforms - and they also enabled the campaign to do some slightly cheeky things which would not have worked in other media works.

Kevin07 had some 2 million page views and some 400,000 unique visitors, and 14,000 “have your say” forms and 18,000 petitions were submitted. User-generated content was key here; most of the content of the on-site blog was drawn from user submissions. The videos had some 1.8 million views (and were cheap and effective); MySpace and Facebook had 24,000 and 20,000 friends and fans, respectively; the mobile Kevin07 site had 34,000 unique visitors; 40,000 T-shirts were sold; 1.2 million people were reached in marginal seats; and there were lots of “emails to Kevin”. What was important here was to reward supporters and maximise viral impact (one-click canvassing), and to engage swinging voters - this latter, indeed, was especially crucial in this election, of course.

There was also huge coverage of the campaign offline (including significant exposure on The Chaser’s War on Everything); Kevin07 itself was very well established as a brand. By contrast, the Liberal Party digital campaign was something of a trainwreck - the initial John Howard videos on YouTube were stale and ignorant of the site context, and campaign managers clearly were not even aware of the fact that comments on YouTube could be moderated (allowing for some very confronting comments attached to the first few postings). Overall, then, the digital campaign became symbolic of the major differences between Howard and Rudd.

Australian Labor showed a good deal of courage here in opening up channels of debate, with no more than an obscenity / insanity filter applied. “You have to take the rough with the smooth”, Camilla suggests - but she also notes that this works better for campaigns out of opposition: it favours the new kid on the block (as it does with Barack Obama in the US, but also David Cameron in the UK). The range of comments and submission received ranged from the basic (”you rock!”), to real and deep engagement with topics, to mindless attacks (”go f**k yourselves!). Except for the latter, most of this material was published.

Camilla suggests that there is a clear style of videos in YouTube - a lower level of production values which makes the candidate more real and allows their personality to shine through. What’s important here is also that the key group deciding elections are swinging voters, who do not consume much serious news and have a short attention span; video is very effective in reaching these voters, and can be utilised for viral marketing - but this can also be used against a politician, of course (see for example the vast range of YouTube videos poking fun at George W. Bush), and some such content is able to stop a campaign dead in its tracks. This is entirely unpredictable.

One challenge in a 24/7 campaign is to implement rapid damage limitation; disinformation is a real problem, here, and it is unclear whether the legal system helps deal with slander in time. Also, how can dialogue in one-to-one conversations with an entire nation be maintained? Perhaps forums provide one answer here. At the same time, online fundraising has emerged as a new resource for campaigning (as Obama has shown); automatic blog and community monitoring enables campaigners to go where the debate is happening; and contextual tools may be able to automate some of the one-to-one engagement. The main benefit of such digital campaigning is openness and freedom of expression - but at the same time, this is also its principal drawback.

Technorati : Australia, CCi 2008, Kevin Rudd, Kevin07, Labor, digital campaigning, politics
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Brisbane.
We’re now in the final session of the first day at the CCi conference, which I’ll try to chair and blog at the same time - we’ll see how it goes. My colleague Terry Flew is the first presenter, and he begins by outlining the three layers of impact of new media technologies as artefacts or devices (technologies); communication activities and practices using these technologies; and the social arrangements, institutions, and organisational forms which develop around the use and management of such technologies. Journalism has so far responded to the Internet as a new technology mainly in the first sense, no so much in the two latter senses. This also takes place at a time of perceived crisis in journalism, and in the face of the emergence of citizen journalism in responding to that crisis.

There was a kind of high modernism in (American) journalism, which saw the journalist as hero (cf. the Watergate affair) and responded to the commercial nature of news itself by developing a more independent persona, calling for a journalism that was in stronger dialogue with the wider public - the ‘public journalism’ movement - which rests on a perception of journalism as a powerful profession that is now being questions. Dan Gillmor sees journalism as moving from lecture to conversation; Bowman & Willis see citizens as playing a more active role; Chris Atton sees an inversion of the hierarchy of access which poses the question of who (journalists or others) is the expert.

Terry now points to our Youdecide2007 project during the 2007 Australian federal election as a project which addresses some of these questions and harnesses the potential of the participatory Web. The site was a case study in practice-led research in this field, and chose an event-based (rather than issue-based) approach by focussing on the election; as a practical initiative, this also allowed us to experiment with practical initiatives such as a strongly hyperlocal approach and a collaboration with mainstream media (in the form of project partner SBS). The site was publicised through Facebook, YouTube, letters to journalism and media schools at Australian universities, and other means, attracted some 2000 users and generated coverage for some 56 electorates (plus the Senate election race).

It did promote a degree of greater citizen participation in the political process (to the extent that it was able to within its timeframe of operation), especially by Queensland-based participants (largely probably because the site was based in Queensland); unfortunately, it did not receive contributions from key seats like Bennelong (John Howard) or Wentworth (Malcolm Turnbull). A subsequent project, Qlddecides for the Queensland local government elections, generated even stronger local public involvement in spite of its shorter running time.

The site was not necessarily able to deliver on an aim to generate more deliberative engagement in political issues; it remained largely news-driven and site managers were needed to generate seed content (so crowdsourcing by itself did not work). This may be a result of the relatively short lead-up time, however. It may not have been able to broaden participation beyond established ‘political junkies’, either; the most viewed materials were those that conformed to relatively conventional news production values. Also, the election context itself encouraged partisanship rather than reflection. Terry also suggests that the great unasked question in relation to this topic is how citizen journalism relates to citizenship itself, and that this needs to be further investigated.

The next speaker is Trish FitzSimons from Griffith University. Her interest is in cross-media documentary, and she raises the issue of voice as a proxy for a discussion of human creativity (which is able to transcend the boundaries of media platforms). There is a tension in journalism between the voice of professional journalism (linked to objectivity and impartiality) and the voice of user-generated content; the same is true in documentary-making. For Bill Nichols, voice is “something narrower than style: that which conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view”. Nichols’s definition challenges filmmakers to exercise that voice, to avoid hiding behind their subjects and instead establish a hierarchy of voices, and this is a challenge that endures today.

What is required, Trish suggests, is a conception of voice as a process, a typology of different types of interaction between filmmakers, subjects, actors, istitutions, and other stakeholders (such as ontological voice, institutional voice, dialogic voice, ventriloquic voice, and choric voice). The idea of choric voice is related to the role of the chorus in Greek theatre, and (in the context of transmedia documentaries involving a strong Web 2.0 presence) this choric voice takes on a new and extended role.

Trish points to some examples for such transmedia documentaries - An Inconvenient Truth, for example, combines the film, Website, online study guide, blogs, and other elements, and the online components act as a kind of choric counterpart to the authorial voice of Gore and Guggenheim as the film’s major creators. Similarly, at the heart of journalism is a kind of lie that voice can be shared; ultimately, journalists tend to hold on to their authorial voice and push citizen journalists and others into the choric role. Similar, After Maeve (dedicated to a young Noosa girl who was run over and killed) allowed the emergence of such choric voices online, in response to the documentary itself. Finally, the ABC programme The Oasis about homeless youth in Australia also operated in this way, and again enabled the expression of choric elements.

This means that choric voice therefore becomes part of a typology of vocal interrelations, and is useful for thinking about documentary process (rather than merely product). Any particular text may have a range of different vocal relations, and broadly, this is a positive cultural development, along with related developments such as citizen journalism. For filmmakers, however, this is a mixed blessing, as funding structures and other frameworks do not necessarily recognise the significant labour involved in teasing out and managing such choric voices.

Another of my Youdecide2007 (and Gatewatching) colleagues, Jason Wilson, is the last speaker for the session, and will reflect especially on his role as editor of the Youdecide and Qlddecides projects. Both were projects operating under an aggergated, hyperlocal, crowdsourced model involving small teams of staff coordinating citizen reporting on the electoral contests in their own electorates. This was also a test of the audience base for citizen journalism and of relationships between citizen and mainstream media; for Jason in particular, however, a key question was also what the work of facilitating citizen journalism projects would entail, and how it would differ from traditional journalistic practices.

This focusses especially on the limitations of the crowd, and combines their work with the editorial and production expertise of professional journalists. As Howe has suggested, part of the heavy lifting in almost any produsage project is done by a few select individuals who do the thankless tasks behind the scenes; Mark Cooper similarly notes that there is a significant need to train content creators if (quality and legal) standards comparable to mainstream journalism are to be achieved. Mark Deuze has described journalism as “a networked practice of producing, editing, forwarding, sharing, and debating public information”; Toby Miller has introduced the idea of the ‘preditor’: “new media employees who perform both production and editorial roles” rather than focussing simply on “the production of new and original cultural works”.

For Jason, the four overlapping dimensions of such networked journalism are content work, community work, networking, and tech work; each of these need to be addressed to make a site like Youdecide possible. Content work, for example, involves editing user contributions to address legal and quality requirements as well as creating original news content to guarantee content flows, provide models of good practice, and draw users to a site (thus balancing the needs of both contributors and mere readers); networking involves making links with existing news channels, news organisations, and colleagues in the field, and pushing out and pulling in content in the wider networked news environment (i.e., not seeing mainstream news media as the enemy to be avoided, but to utilise them to publicise one’s own news site).

Community work may be the most important aspect: providing users with training, site-specific information, and mediation, and providing both structural and personal solutions for users’ needs. Part of this also means to cultivate ’super-contributors’ - to reward the most active and most invested users. Tech work is relatively self-explanatory, and involves both on-site and off-site elements as well as meta-tech work including site use metrics and analysis. Overall, then, these forms of work combine traditional as well as new forms of journalistic work, and this has implications both for organisations working in this participatory field and for journalism educators. They imply more collegial and community-oriented, less competitive journalistic practices.

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