gatewatching

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

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

Read more…

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

Amongst the standard-issue ammunition in the journalism industry’s defensive skirmishes against those pesky citizen journalists and news bloggers is the deceptively simple claim that there’s a clear difference between reporting the news, i.e. breaking stories (which is what professional journalists do) and commenting on the news, i.e. “endless talk” (which is what everyone else does).

It’s a line repeated in the latest missive from Christian Kerr in The Australian - a rabid, self-serving rant against all those online commentators from Possum’s Pollytics to Larvatus Prodeo whom he doesn’t like, curiously claiming in its title that “our blogs [are] too analytical”, as if intelligent analysis is somehow a bad thing. Still, if nothing else, it’s got one thing going for it: if ‘real’ journalists are the ones that break stories, then Kerr himself isn’t a journalist.

One problem with that neat definition, though, is that breaking stories isn’t a particularly common trait of mainstream newsroom practice these days: much of the content of our daily newspapers and broadcast bulletins comes from a diminishing number of global wire services, and is simply processed by journalists to fit the local context. Similar to citizen journalists’ common practice of gatewatching - following the news passing through the gates of mainstream news publications, and then commenting on it - this is a kind of industrial gatewatching, where agency feeds are constantly monitored for new items to be inserted into the locally-produced publication. So, news bloggers and citizen journalists don’t tend to break stories - but neither, for the most part, do professional journalists.

Read more…

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

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

Time to catch up with a few publications - our recent work is featured in a number of new collections:

Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, collects some of the best papers from the Mobile Media 2007 conference (which I blogged about at the time) in Sydney. Looks like a fabulous collection, and I’m delighted that an article by former QUT Visiting Scholar Liu Cheng and me about SMS news in China has been included. We’re looking especially at the experience at Yunnan Daily Press, where Cheng led the roll-out of SMS news functionality, and we’re including some staggering statistics about the growth of Internet and mobile use in China as well (I wonder how they’ll be affected by the global financial crisis…).

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism blogging, books, community, mobile, news, politics, youdecide2007

The debate about the ethics of naming Katherine Wilson has spilled over to Troppo, where Don Arthur reflects on his own actions, and responds to my concerns. The new registration thingy at Troppo is taking awhile to give me a password, and my lunchbreak is probably my only window for blogging today, so I’ll reply here rather then there. Sorry Troppo folks.

I’ve tried not to personalise my comments at any stage, except when directly replying to people. I know the way that tends to turn out, and I’m really trying to advance some general principles and have a discussion about ethics, rather than trying to offer free character assessments to anyone in particular.

For what it’s worth, I think by the standards I’ve been trying to advance, Don behaved well. He tried to confirm his hunch with Wilson, and his reporting of what other blogs were saying was fairly unembroidered until he did get some confirmation via Margaret Simons. I have said Don was an exception to what I have been saying about bloggers’ treatment of this information (without directly naming him) from my first post on this topic.

Read more…

blogging, ethics blogging, blogosphere, Club Troppo, ethics, Hoax, KatherineWilson, KeithWindschuttle, Quadrant

I’ve had to be away from my computer since Friday, as I’ve been entertaining visitors. When I came back the last thread had been transformed out of all recognition. I thought that rather than address everything that had been said there with further comments, and in the light of further posts at The Content Makers and LP, it might be good to post anew.

Over the last few days a mysterious piece of woodwork called the “journalists versus bloggers frame” has kicked around a fair bit. What motivated my original post was, in part, a desire to trouble an idea that seemed to be doing the rounds that comparisons between bloggers and journalists were necessarily uninformative, even misleading - “out of court” as I said initially. I elaborated on this in comments in the last thread. While I don’t think it’s the only lens through which practices of blogging ought to be viewed, I think there are times in which it’s perfectly legitimate and relevant to compare the actions of bloggers and journalists. There are circumstances in which the actions of bloggers and journalists overlap sufficiently for the comparison to be informative. This is one of them.

What’s at issue is a very specific question: when is it right to publish details of someone’s identity, knowing that revealing this information may have damaging effects on the the reputation of the person concerned? This is an ethical question with implications for the practice of anyone engaged in publishing information. My answer to the question is: the appropriate time to name someone publicly is after you’ve had some solid confirmation of the person’s identity, and ideally this should be first-hand confirmation.

Read more…

blogging, ethics, media blogging, blogosphere, Club Troppo, ethics, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, media

This is my first post upon re-entry to academic life - I am now lecturing at the University of Wollongong and I am based in the beautiful Illawarra region. I’ll have more time and capacity to devote to my participation in this blog from now on, and I’m able to have a broader view of the issues Gatewatching has always dealt with, now that I’m no longer neck deep in the business of being a full-time practitioner.

The occasion for this post is the wash-up from Katherine Wilson’s hoaxing of Keith Windschuttle. I’m a little late on this, and my only excuse is the trauma of moving cities for the sixth time in five years. Most readers who are familiar with the Australian media and blogosphere will be across the details, so I won’t rehearse them here. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, and want a blow-by-blow account from near the centre of the action, check out the archive over at Margaret Simons’ place. There are also many astute analyses of the situation online.  For mine, Graham Young’s at On Line Opinion is the most sustained and productive reflection on the incident to date, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions.

First, a disclaimer: I enjoyed the hoax immensely, I think it worked, I think Windschuttle had it coming, and I think his excuses exceeded even the hoax itself for entertainment value. Among other things, his explanations show him appealing for slack that he has never been prepared to cut for other scholars. I think Margaret Simons behaved ethically throughout, and in my view most suggestions that the hoax wasn’t worth doing proceed largely from political or personal axe-grinding.

Read more…

Graham Young, blogging, citizen journalism academia, blogging, citizen journalism, Crikey, Graham Young, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, newspapers

It’s been less than a fortnight since the federal government’s Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) - perhaps best known at the moment for its attempt to filter the Internet (boo) and its hardline stance against the corporate thugs at Telstra (yay) - launched its Digital Economy consultation blog. Foreshadowed in a number of earlier publications (in particular, a recommendation to trial blogs in the Australian Government Information Management Office’s report on online consultation with citizens, concluding a thought process begun under the previous mob, and Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner’s post on his blog in The Age), the blog was introduced in a guest post by Tanner - and that post alone has generated more than 750 on-site comments to date.

So, as far as community involvement and consultation is concerned, the DBCDE blog can be seen as a success - it constitutes a new venue for the still all-too-rare direct online citizen feedback to a sitting government. That said, a majority of comments on the initial blog posts appeared to deal with those two hot-button issues - Internet filtering and Telstra’s exclusion from the broadband tendering process -, quite regardless of the blog posts’ topics themselves, and that’s a significant problem. If the point of this blog is to engage in a bit of crowdsourcing, harvesting some of the better ideas put forward by commenters on the blog, and in return perhaps also harnessing satisfied participants as virtual marketers for the government’s policies, then so far it’s not yet achieving its purpose.

Read more…

Steven Conroy, blogging, broadband, government Australia, blogging, broadband, community, consultation, DBCDE, e-democracy, government, Stephen Conroy, Steven Conroy

(Cross-posted from snurb.info.)

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.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism blogging, Brisbane, citizen journalism, conferences, futures, journalism, MEAA, newspapers

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

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.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism blogging, Brisbane, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism, MEAA

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

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.

Read more…

blogging academic, blogging, conferences, mapping