gatewatching

There’s been a bit of discussion amongst political bloggers about a post by PollieGraph’s Rachel Hills which pointed out that Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull had her - and other journalists - on ‘limited profile’ on Facebook, because of her status as a writer for New Matilda (also noted over at Larvatus Prodeo). Some of the discussion about this has been fairly predictable - with the Libs plumbing untold lows in their approval ratings, it’s easy to engage in some gratuitous pollie-bashing - but for once, I have to say that Turnbull’s decision to keep the media at arms’ length from any online discussion with voters seems like a pretty smart move to me.

Rachel cites a Liberal Party source as saying this about Turnbull’s approach:

I don’t think there are many journos on his list at all because he wants people to be able to ask whatever they want, and for it to be natural. Well, as natural as Facebook ever can be.

If politicians are serious about consulting with citizens about their concerns, then at present this is for the most part best conducted directly between them, as an open conversation outside of the glare of the mainstream media. Importantly, real discussion and debate is not just about stating one’s own point of view, but also about changing one’s mind and accepting a superior argument when it is made. Media coverage, though, has an unhealthy tendency to report any such opinion changes - which should be part of politicians’ everyday activity as they are confronted with new information - as ‘embarrassing backflips’, ‘wavering’, and ‘caving in to pressure’ from political opponents; unfortunately, that instils a deep-set stubbornness in our pollies which is very difficult to overcome. (Even now, after a crushing defeat, many Liberals still can’t bring themselves to admit that Howard’s WorkChoices was a deeply unpopular, deeply flawed piece of legislation, for example.)

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e-democracy, facebook, journalism

Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Youdecide ran during the lead-up and up to the 2007 Australian federal election; it was a practice-based project and the first step in an ARC Linkage project between QUT, SBS, Online Opinion, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. It offered aggregated hyperlocal content, crowdsourced from citizen journalists in local electorates and coordinated by a small team of site staff led by Jason. It gathered some 2000 registered users, and 230 articles from over 50 electorates were submitted to the site during its lifetime. (There was also a weekly YD07 TV show on the Briz31 community television channel.)

Users could submit text, audio, photo, and video content to the site, as well as comment on one another’s stories, and the site demonstrated that there was an appetite for this kind of project in the country - if from some areas and demographics more than others. Obviously, the focus was on original content (departing from the gatewatching and commenting model still very prevalent in citizen journalism), this was fairly successful.

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academic, citizen journalism, government, journalism, preditor

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China’s first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose to prominence especially after the events of 11 September 2001). Its rise also contributed to a new debate on the nature of journalism itself, and many initial views argued that news blogging was not journalism due to the narrow subjects explored by most blogs, the reliance on second-hand information, the limited sources and experience of news blogging, and its limited credibility.

In China, citizen journalism emerged with the 2003 SARS crisis, when citizens reported about the effects of the crisis; there are now some 28 million active blogs and 47 million blog writers in China (as of 2007), and citizen journalism provides an important source of uncensored news. Zola Zhou, then an Internet manager, began blogging in 2004, and rose to prominence through investigative reports about a couple who refused to have their house moved to make way for a new development project. By late 2007, the blog carried some 814 articles, 112 were filed in a category called “social news” (and Zola Zhou currently works as a vegetable vendor).

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academic, blogging, citizen journalism, government, journalism, media

Brisbane.
I was the first presenter in the next session at AMIC 2008 (and my presentation on citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election is already online here). Hopefully the audio recording worked as well - I’ll add it as soon as possible. The audio from my talk is now online.

Kitty van Vuuren from the University of Queensland is the next speaker; her interest is in local independent newspapers in South-East Queensland - a growing trend in recent years, and driven to some extent by local businesses (grocery stores, bakeries, and other local entrepreneurs). South-East Queensland is a very rapidly growing area, of course, with significant population movements into the area (and associated problems with infrastructure, services, and labour supply).

The state government is spending a great deal of time planning for this growth, and claims to involve and consult the community in these processes, but exactly how communicative capacity in the community is being developed remains somewhat unclear; Kitty’s work has traced communicative practices especially around issues related to water shortages and water management.

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academic, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism

Brisbane.
The second day of the AMIC conference has now started, and we begin with a keynote from Vipul Kant Upadhay, the CEO and Editor in Chief of Merinews.com in India. This site is now the largest Internet news portal in the country, and builds very significantly on citizen journalism. Vipul begins by noting that he is no journalist by profession, but instead came to this venture through student activism; his initial motivation was the widespread corruption and nepotism in India.

In starting the project, there was a choice between print and online media, and the initial tendency amongst staff was in favour of print; at the same time, there was a clear indication that the competition in print journalism was already fierce and would not have allowed the development of a new news source. The Internet still remained an untapped market, by contrast, and provided an opportunity for new players to make a name for themselves.

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academic, citizen journalism, journalism

Brisbane.
We’re now in the opening session of the AMIC conference “Convergence, Citizen Journalism and Social Change“. Today is just a short afternoon with a couple of keynote speeches; tomorrow, the bulk of the papers (including my colleague Jason Wilson’s and mine) will be presented. Pradip Thomas from the University of Queensland is offering some opening remarks - referring to the common trope of the decline of mainstream journalism, and the corresponding rise of citizen journalism and its effect on political developments.

Pradip now hands over to Michael Bromley, also from UQ, who raises the notion of totalisation (total capitalism, total war, the massification of media); perhaps citizen journalism sits in a fissure to the side of this, and questions around it deal largely with questions of inclusion and exclusion. Other key questions relate to modes of expression (in industrial journalism vs. citizen journalism), the role and effects of new technologies in relation to their emerging social uses, and the configuration of identity practices, authority and authenticity as a result of emerging new practices. What new formations, what new languages of communication arise through the diffusion of the journalistic paradigm through the arrival of new citizen-led modes of communication?

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academic, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism

This post was triggered in a somewhat roundabout way - Paul Bradshaw over at Online Journalism Blog picks up on a report from the Digital News Affairs conference, covering a speech by Digital Editor Ed Roussel from the Telegraph Media Group in the U.K. The key quote from Roussel’s speech:

“In dismissing the idea (perhaps a myth) that the web was simply about breaking news and the paper about analysis, he said that the strategy for your website was to be about the first and the last word on a story.”

For me, this touches on a key theme in journalism research, and like Paul, I’m worried that this understanding of news reporting leads us exactly into the wrong direction. I agree with the first part of the statement - the days of the newspaper as the premier space for news analysis are numbered, as (for example) the 2007 poll wars and their recent rekindling have shown -, but the positioning (or indeed, posturing) of any one news Website as the authoritative source on the news is a similarly outdated idea.

It’s an idea which betrays a profound, if common, misunderstanding of the nature of news reporting - a view of news which is influenced less by journalists’ and audiences’ everyday experience of the news than by marketing departments’ insistence that their news organisation’s product is the authoritative account of the day’s events, that you can “get the full story here” and nowhere else.

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citizen journalism, journalism

It looks like there are a good half dozen edited collections about citizen journalism that are currently under development; some of them are probably spurred on by the impending U.S. presidential election and the role that news bloggers and citizen journalists will undoubtedly play in it, but I’m also aware of collections being developed as far afield as Australia, Germany, and India (and I’ve written contributions for a few of them). One of them, Megan Boler’s Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times is about to be released, and is already listed on Amazon - as I’ve mentioned elsewhere previously, my chapter deals mainly with the question of what citizen journalism may become, beyond the short-term tactical pleasures of stirring up the mainstream journalism industry.

Meanwhile, the launch of e-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media, edited by Kiran Prasad for the Indian scholarly community, is still a few months away, but I’ve received permission to make a pre-print of my chapter “News Blogs and Citizen Journalism” available at snurb.info. It weaves together a few of the threads that I’ve followed over the past few months - it presents gatewatching as a practice that is fundamental to citizen journalism, outlines citizen-journalistic practices of news produsage beyond gatewatching itself, highlights the role of citizen journalists as providing an important corrective to media bias in covering the 2007 Australian federal election, and sketches potential pathways towards a greater symbiosis of citizen and mainstream approaches to journalism, beyond any initial antagonism, beyond the two-tier mainstream/alternative media structure outlined by Herbert Gans. Towards the end, therefore, I return again to that crucial question of “What next?”:

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academic, citizen journalism, journalism

The election may be over, but our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online continues unabated for now (if perhaps at a pace more commensurate with the impending summer holidays). This week, we take a look back in some degree of anger at the ‘just kidding’ defence for political stunts gone wrong, which was employed several times during the campaign.

Not Funny

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

One of the most prominent recurring features of the long election campaign we’ve just put behind us were our politicians’ and journalists’ usually ill-fated moves to attempt the humour defence whenever some political stunt or statement didn’t pay off.

We saw this first with Labor’s star recruit Peter Garrett, who was reported to have said “once we get in, we’ll just change it all” in what he was later at pains to describe as a “short and jocular” conversation with Channel Nine personality Richard Wilkins and talk radio shock jock Steve Price.

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blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, media

We’ve now posted the seventh instalment of our ABC series Club Bloggery, covering the online dimensions of the Australian election campaign. Just to mix things up a bit, this week we had a look at what’s been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks, and found that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the more interesting developments are in DIY campaign advertising and mash-ups. Plenty of links included in the story below - we encourage you to see for yourselves!

Election Flops on YouTube

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

In an election campaign as drawn out as this, you’d have to have excellent memory to remember the hype around John Howard’s use of YouTube to make policy announcements. Some months ago, the media were all over the story - but unfortunately for the Prime Minister, much like the widely-predicted poll ‘narrowing‘, the YouTube effect has been missing in action.

That’s not to say that YouTube and similar sites haven’t played a role in the campaign - but certainly not to the extent they’ve already featured in the U.S. presidential primaries, where debates between the candidates on either side of the political divide have invited citizens to pose their questions via YouTube, and where some politicians even announced their intention to run for President on the site.

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blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, media