With the US election likely to be decided today, it’s a good time to have a look at the way social media’s been used in this campaign. From the massive fundraising of Obama’s microdonors, to the fact checking of candidates, to the raving lunacy of the wingnut fringe, this election has really brought social media’s promises and pitfalls to the fore.

The exemplar of a successful political campaign’s use of social media is, barring a sudden upset, Obama’s campaign. Foregoing public funding and the big money of lobbyists, Obama has raised enormous amounts of money from primarily small donors, at last count over $US390 million. Obama claims this will allow him to reduce lobbyist influence in government, though inevitably, the truth is somewhat more complex than that.

Obama’s campaign has also make powerful use of social networking tools such as Twitter, MySpace-style social networking sites and even an iPhone application. This commitment to using tools to engage with a primarily younger, tech savvy audience, combined with an commitment to Network Neutrality and a progressive tech policy (Barack Obama on technology and innovation - PDF) has certainly helped his support amongst younger voters. McCain’s admission that he doesn’t know how to use a computer hasn’t helped his regain any of that support.

This election has also seen a massive increase in the use of social media by voters (and non-voters) to have an effect on the political coverage. From picking up on stray gaffes such as McCain’s “Bomb Bomb, Bomb Bomb Iran” and amplifying them to a much larger audience, to professionally polished unofficial campaign ads that riff on 1984 to our own HMatkin’s witty remixes (warning, contains Rick Astley). Social media, of course, has also seen its share of absolute garbage and wingnuttery, such as this hyperventilating meltdown about Obama’s citizenship from conservative blogger Atlas Shrugs.

Obama’s commitment to transparency with his Fight the Smears doesn’t seem to have helped here but in general, he has helped fight rumours by tackling them head on. (For the best takedowns and summaries of the wingnut fringe, go to Sadly, No).

More clear headed analysis has been available online. Psephologist of the moment Nate Silver has found an audience for his predictive analysis of polls, reflecting a similar occurrence in Australia with the Pollbludger and Possum’s Pollytics (both now under the Crikey banner). The transparency of online journalism and easy access to news archives and campaign video has fueled the rise of independent factchecking organisations such as Factcheck and Open Secrets. The blogs of data crunching computer scientists have also been a source of fascinating visualisations of voter intentions, thoughts and concerns.

The power of ‘crowdsourced’ journalism has also helped the quick fire journalism of Talking Points Memo, who utilise a geographically disparate audience who feed tidbits of on-the-ground information back to the central site, often scooping the larger news networks. The Politico has also done well out of the election, showing that while newspapers might be feeling the pinch, political journalism isn’t going away anytime soon. Dave Neiwart and Sara Robinson’s blog, Orcinus, has been indispensible this election - from rooting out Ron Paul’s connections to white supremacists to tracking the various threats against Obama’s life. The Huffington Post has also done well out of this election, reflecting a general interest in opinionated journalism and commentary, and Keith Olbermann’s program has gone from strength to strength, fed in part due to the rampant uploading and dissemination of his incendiary commentary.

The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process - as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.

Barry Saunders is the research coordinator for democratic renewal at the Centre for Policy Development. He is doing a PhD in social media at QUT and blogs at investigativeblog.net. He’ll be spending the day refreshing Sadly, No, 538 and Google News obsessively.

It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it…
Any idiot can bet on a horse and lose. And there’s a word for them. Losers.

While we’ve also been quite critical here about the Australian election coverage and its horse-race narratives, we’re very lucky to have an electoral system that is open to good psephological analysis. As Simon Jackman points out in addressing the lack of an American Antony Green:

The United States doesn’t have an Antony Green. I’m not sure it can. It doesn’t have the ABC (the national broadcaster), it doesn’t have the AEC, nor compulsory voting, nor standardized, nationwide election administration (balloting procedures, registration procedures, etc).

Antony is and would be a super-pseph anywhere you put him to work, but the American case is just hard, at least relative to the Australian case. There is not much there, there, at least compared to Australia. For one thing, election administration is a county level function, and in some cases a township level function. There is no XML feed from the AEC to then run through your algorithms etc. The networks themselves form loose and shifting alliances to coordinate data-acquisition (exit polling, and a network of stringers across counties and states etc): i.e., take the AEC out of the picture, and try to imagine what election night TV coverage would look like in Australia. Could/would the ABC fund the effort required to get booth-by-booth data in from the field in some way, in the way that the American networks do? Would we then see more reliance on exit polling, as we see in the USA? Perhaps.

That said, there are a few journalists out there actually doing some straight analysis and not falling for baritone voices and baby-back ribs:
Talkingpointsmemo and sister site TPMMuckraker , the Rolling Stone National Affairs blog and Truthdig’s Ear to the Ground blog.

There’s also been some quality work from Australian bloggers as well: Troppo, Pollbludger, LP and Freedom to Differ, but there’s obviously more out there. What blogs are you reading for your fix of US election news?

The Bulletin magazine, published by ACP, has closed down after almost 130 years of publishing.

Though we often give the print media a hard time here at Club Bloggery, we’re not so sanguine about the end of the iconic magazine, The Bulletin, last month. Despite its virulently racist origins, and its tendency under Kerry Packer to be used now and then as the mogul’s mouthpiece, its end is an alarming symptom of something wider and more serious. The worrying structural problem it reveals is the difficulty of sustaining any venues for the specialised task of investigative journalism in Australian and international media.

Investigative journalism is a notoriously protracted, expensive and difficult business. Complicated stories, stories that must get past deliberate obfuscation by powerful interests, or stories that take a long time to unfold, all require major investment.

‘Proper’ investigative journalists may spend weeks or even months doing little more than following the paper trail and unravelling fact and fiction, and there’s no guarantee of a usable story at the end of their work - but if it comes, the payoff is the kind of reporting that brings down governments, blows open corporate scandals, and brings public figures to account. The Bulletin, at least while Kerry Packer was prepared to subsidise it, was hailed as one of the last refuges for investigative journalists within an otherwise increasingly indifferent commercial media environment.

As Queenslanders, our modern history is overshadowed by the fall of the Bjelke-Petersen government, which was brought about by gutsy investigative reporting by Courier-Mail and ABC journalists. More recently, the AWB scandal was reported in a classic piece of investigative reporting by News Ltd journalist Caroline Overington, at a time when she was shining a light in dark places rather than merely writing colour.

The increasing complexity of the machinations of modern corporate and political institutions means that there an ever greater need for quality investigative journalism, while at the same time such journalism is also ever more expensive - and therefore, ever less likely to happen. And therein lies the problem.

Investigative journalism has always been about prestige rather than value for money, and its funding arrangements have therefore rather resembled feudal patronage more than hard-nosed business decisions.

Much as medieval rulers patronised the leading artisans of their day - certainly in part for the intrinsic worth of their work, but just as much also for the international propaganda value of gathering the best and brightest at their court -, so the media barons of the late 20th century often invested in a handful of quality investigative outfits (not least also in order to paper over some of the less seemly publications in their empires).

For the same reason, the Bulletin ran at a loss for a long, long time essentially because Packer decided that he could afford it: whether motivated by the bragging rights and the political influence, or (less likely) by the warm glow of contributing to Australian public life that his support for quality investigative journalism provided, that support can ultimately be seen as a form of philanthropy.

By and large, however, the age of the media baron now appears to be drawing to a close - the disinterest in his late father’s media operations shown by James Packer, and their eventual sale to a faceless equity firm, clearly demonstrate this shift. Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Stokes, and a few others still cling to the reins of power over their domains, but few of their underlings are old enough to have grown up with the smell of newspaper ink in their nostrils (as Murdoch himself did).

If Rupert Murdoch were to sell his empire to a faceless equity consortium tomorrow, we might wonder whether The Australian’s days as a self-proclaimed quality newspaper would be numbered too - its profit margin is a nice bonus for Murdoch, but would a more “rational” ownership think it was worth the trouble?

So, unless a new golden age of media feudalism is around the corner - unlikely, in the decentralised, distributed, syndicated, and aggregated world of network and online news -, what if any future remains for investigative journalism?

Perhaps, and just perhaps, the analogy with feudal patronage and philanthropy provides one answer. As modernity stirred, funding for artists and artisans shifted from the aristocracy to the upper and middle classes, either through direct patronage or indirect, taxpayer-funded subsidies. Similarly, it may now be time to look at strong public funding for quality investigative journalism. For too long we have placed ourselves at the mercy of media barons whose interest in supporting quality was mixed up with their own purposes; as their age passes, we must develop more independent systems to support the investigative journalism that we know we need.

It’s in this sense that we’d have to disagree with our ABC Opinion colleague Mark Bahnisch’s implication that the Bulletin died because it was “dull”, or that it could have saved itself with some fresh voices in its opinion pages.

The Bulletin died because no one would pay for the privilege of owning it any more; its demise is the sign of a beginning post-feudal age in journalism, in which broad-based support for investigative journalism must come from the citizenry itself even if a return on investment is not guaranteed.

I’d known Pip since 2000. I met him while covering the S11 protests against the WEF in Melbourne - I’d been working for 4ZzZFM and had heard about this new thing called Indymedia, and he was at the first planning meeting. He struck me as the kind of person I aspired to be - passionate but calm, someone who stood up for his beliefs but was still openminded and caring.

Since then I’d seen Pip around a fair bit. I hung around Indymedia, 3CR and Ska TV while in Melbourne, and continued to run into him at activist conferences and at Woomera. We traded footage at CHOGM, and chatted whenever we caught up.

The last time I saw Pip was late last year. I was talking to him about acquiring footage for an SBS documentary about protest in Australia (currently on hold). We talked about the usual sort of stuff - the industry, dealing with commissioning editors, the war in Iraq. We talked about the recent protests in Melbourne against APEC and how a lot of the older generation of activists had dissipated.

Pip mentioned that he had pitched a doco about his friends in Melbourne - a look at life as a gay activist in Melbourne. I can’t do the project justice, but it sounded like something I would really like to watch - an antidote to the saccharine middle-class representations on TV. The commissioning editor came back to him and said it was good, but he needed to ‘drop all the ferals and make it into something my mother would like to watch.’ That is, ignore your life experience and make me a happy friendly documentary that doesn’t challenge anyone. God forbid anyone portay gay men as anything other than pets for middle class women.

That anecdote, and Pip’s reaction to it, really said a lot about Pip and the challenges of being a committed political filmmaker in Australia. I respected Pip for sticking to his principles, to the detriment of his success. As with many of the friendships I’ve made with activists, I’ve never had enough time to really get to know them and appreciate them. We see each other intermittently, and never for long enough. I wish I’d spent more time with you, Pip. I’ll miss you.

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Some more obits:

SlackBastard

GeekGrrl

Craig Bellamy

Man About Town

Tentative Working Title

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Pip’s website

Some of Pip’s films

Pip’s films on Engagemedia

This form of engagement is something the major parties should be watching. For some years now, observers have noted a trend of voters moving away from traditional party affiliations to multi-faceted political perspectives, shifting from party-political to social activism, and forming fluid allegiances that vary across policy areas.

Blogging and other forms of participatory social media (such as wikis) are well suited to consultative policy development. They allow comments and feedback, and thus open up discussion to a range of voices. This in turn allows political debate to move beyond left-right political point-scoring to a more complex, nuanced, interactive process. While some blogs do tend in practice to become echo chambers – restating and reconfirming the biases of their preachy writers and converted readers –overall, the participatory and interconnected network of the blogosphere nevertheless provides an invaluable space for hosting inclusive policy discussions.

The best political blogs in the Australian blogosphere – whether on the left (Larvatus Prodeo) or the libertarian right (Catallaxy) – show that the key to success in online policy discussion is striking a balance between openness, continuity and civility. This requires careful management. Too many restrictions deter involvement, too few risk a degeneration into unending flame wars. The blogosphere policy discussions that work tend to be moderated with a light touch, and thereby often reach interesting conclusions. But how far have the major parties gone in absorbing the lessons of the public affairs blogosphere?

The Labor Party’s outreach via Kevin07 certainly looks like blogging, but the majority of the articles are press releases, and readers seem reluctant to comment. When we checked, entries on healthcare reform had only generated four comments and no back-and-forth between the bloggers and commenters.

Blogging is about arguments and discussion – a robust conversation about healthcare reform might be informative, and would certainly gauge the depth of community feeling around the issue. Such an unfettered discussion might help defuse the electorate’s most common complaint about major party politics: “they just aren’t listening.” As it stands, Kevin07 works as a campaign site, but doesn’t really show much enthusiasm for dialogue with constituents. Whether due to its comments policy or the fact that “pressies” aren’t very open-ended, Kevin07 seems, at the moment, to be a lost opportunity.

While Liberal party politicians’ efforts in participatory media spaces have been similarly disappointing, the Coalition government has shown more interest. Special Minister of the State Gary Nairn has just released a consultation paper on having an Australian Government Consultation blog.

Reaction from the digerati has been somewhat predictable, with TechCrunch’s Duncan Riley saying

now whilst it’s great to see a sovereign nation officially consider a blogging strategy, I want what ever it is the soon-to-be former Government is smoking; the irony of launching a consultation paper on a consultation blog seems lost on them.

This first move might be slightly clumsy, but governments shouldn’t be expected to dive into fully-fledged policy blogging without first dipping a toe to test the water. It’s also fair enough for them to take the trouble to ask citizens whether or not they actually want consultation blogging. We think that it’s commendable that the Australian government is looking into this as a form of outreach, and is thinking critically about how to implement it. One hopes that whichever government is eventually elected will take this proposal forward.

The proposal has clearly been developed by people who’ve actually used blogs – commenting and feedback are highlighted as central parts of the proposed design, and the authors have thought critically about how to manage them. The current proposal isn’t explicit about whether comments would be pre- or post-moderated, but it does include a fairly comprehensive Acceptable Use Policy. There is just one curious aspect of this policy:

do not include internet addresses or links to websites, or any email addresses, in your contribution.

This is evidently an anti-spam measure, but it would prevent contributors from linking back to relevant source material and articles – this gatewatching, however, is a core aspect of almost any blog discussion. It would be nice to see this relaxed, and indeed for the consultation blog to allow (pre-moderated!) image and video embedding.

What is missing from the proposal is a clear explanation of how online consultation in the form of comments and feedback can feed into policy development. The risk for any form of government outreach, and indeed, for any form of political engagement online, is ‘e-consultation fatigue’. As our colleagues Stephen Coleman and Ann Macintosh explain in noting this phenomenon, if citizens’ involvement doesn’t lead directly to a tangible outcome – whether in the form of new policy directions or even simply as feedback – there are few incentives to stay involved.

Whatever process is implemented, it must be transparent and fair, and unpopular perspectives need to be addressed rather than screened out. Drawing on Stephen Coleman again: sites run by independent bodies are more likely to elicit trust and engagement than those run directly by governments. That said, governments need to accord such forums trust and respect if they are to have a meaningful role. Initiatives could benefit from being run under the banner of one of our national broadcasters (along the lines of the BBC Action Network) or by an independent body set up specifically for the task.

Opening up policy development further (for example by using a wiki) would be a step beyond blogging, but also raises more management issues. It’s an experiment which has now begun in earnest in New Zealand, where a draft of the new Policing Act is now open for citizen input, wiki-style. We’re looking forward to the outcomes of this and similar projects – if citizens are invited to develop and propose their own policies through online collaboration, directly feeding into the political process, we could see some exciting (perhaps radical, perhaps innovative) policy proposals that might re-invigorate what we shouldn’t forget is the core business of government: the development and implementation of policy on behalf of citizens.

Anyways… This struck me the other day. I live on the Northside of Brisbane, so I was unsurprised when I got an invite to a Northside related Facebook group.

But when you look at it, the group’s run by Coronis Realty.

Who is, apparently, looking for a relationship. (!)

As well as offering people money for getting their friends to sell their houses.

The group invite came from Cassandra Sands, who also I got a friend request from

who is a member of the Brisbane Northside group, and just seems to be inviting people to that group.

Weird.