gatewatching

A bit of overdue housekeeping on some research progress in the project. Even though I’m now at GetUp! almost full time, I’m still engaged with research collaboration at QUT, and I hope to publish something on the experience of building an e-democracy project in the not-too-distant future.

For now, the news is that a few weeks back, Professor Terry Flew and I submitted a paper to an international journalism journal, based on the youdecide2007 experience. It’s called “Journalism as Social Networking: The Australian youdecide project and the 2007 Federal election.” (Obligatory colon ahoy!) You can go to the QUT eprints archive to download it. Academic publishing being what it is, it may be awhile before it appears in a published form, but everyone should feel free to read and discuss this preprint version.

We’re pretty happy with it at this point - basically it combines the stuff I’ve banged on about concerning the four dimensions of the work of the “preditor” - the emerging professional role of facilitating citizen journalism - with a whole lot of context concerning the state of journalism, the state of news media in Australia, and the changing role of journalism education.

The paper feels well-timed, given the consternation and discussion around the future of media careers and institutions in Australia at the moment. (I heard some fascinating versions of this at the “Media in the Pub” event last week in Sydney.)

Anyway, let’s see what the peer reviewers say! Enjoy.

citizen journalism, media citizen journalism, journalism, media, Terry Flew, youdecide2007

One citizen journalism project that I’ve been meaning to post about for some time now is the German-based myHeimat.de - a hyperlocal citizen journalism portal with some 14,000 contributors from all around the country. The problem with writing about it is that so far there’s precious little information available that will be accessible to what I presume is a mostly English-speaking readership here at Gatewatching - but happily, IFRA Magazine has now published an English interview with myHeimat’s CEO Martin Huber.

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.

Read more…

citizen journalism citizen journalism, hyperlocal, preditor, youdecide2007

(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)

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.)

Read more…

Graham Young, citizen journalism academic, blogosphere, citizen journalism, conferences, Graham Young, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, youdecide2007

(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)

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?

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism, Margaret Simons

(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)

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.

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism, youdecide2007

(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)

Brisbane.
The next session I’m attending at the CCi conference is also (broadly) on citizen journalism. Andrew Kenyon from the University of Melbourne is the first speaker, and his focus is especially on the legal perspective on journalism as public speech, building on interviews with editors, journalists, and other media workers. Legal frameworks enable in particular the search for truth, the maintenance of democracy, and (especially in the US) a critique of government, but public speech is often positioned as fulfilling a more generic function (such as consensus formation). Public speech often critiques, and limited protections for public speech is often seen as having a chilling effect on the diversity of public speech that is possible.

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism

(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)

Brisbane.
We’re now starting the first panel session of the CCi conference, and this is the panel on citizen journalism that my paper is in as well, so I’m including the Powerpoint below (audio to be added later available now).

The first speaker is David McKnight from UNSW, whose focus is on the future of quality journalism in the emerging media environment. He points to a perspective that newspapers are now an ‘endangered species’; The Australian passionately rejected this in a September 2006 editorial. It suggested a commitment to quality journalism as an important continuing strategy for newspapers. Nonetheless, the economic case for newspaper publishing is becoming increasingly difficult; circulations are falling and especially classified advertising is moving away from print.

The problem is that newspapers are still by far the major source of news and key agenda setters for public discussion. Will electronic and online media be able to pick up the slack if newspapers do decline and disappear, and how does this affect the quality of democratic engagement in the public sphere?

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism

Gary Sauer-Thompson alerts us today to a very, very peculiar piece by David Burchell on something he calls the “political blogosphere”. Burchell’s version doesn’t much resemble the one I know. I’ll quote a little:

At other times it seems the wheels of the political blogosphere are greased with the oil of personal vitriol.

Indeed, on one view the chief purpose of the political blog isn’t the production of argument, but rather the staging of ceremonies of degradation and purification. The blogger’s goal is to solidify a tribe of acolytes around them, and to ritually degrade those who are seen as renegades from the cause.

Now, some of Burchell’s past work I’ve enjoyed, including his book Western Horizon, but this is pretty glib, to say the least. It’s an utterly sweeping comment to make about political bloggers, and anyone who reads political blogs regularly knows that right across the political spectrum, there are bloggers who do much more than engage in flame-baiting. Even those who do specialise in snark will usually have more interesting and considered things to say from time to time.

It’s hard to know who he means. Is Burchell including his colleagues at the Australian in this (whose work is often now presented online in “blog” form)? What about News Limited colleagues who are active bloggers, like Tim Blair, Andrew Bolt, Tim Dunlop and Jack Marx? Is he saying that they are all just “staging ceremonies of degradation and purification”? Or does he just mean independent bloggers? If so, is it really the case that blogs from Ambit Gambit to Club Troppo to LP to the psephs are all just engaging in personal abuse? These don’t seem to me to be sustainable claims. Also, whose “view” is he quoting here? None of it makes a lot of sense, or rather, it’s hard to make sense of because it’s at such a high level of generality.

One of Sauer-Thompson’s commenters suggests that Burchell’s really just “trolling in a column”, and the lack of specificity or generosity in his comments makes that conclusion tempting. P’raps he needs someone to offer him a guided tour of Australia’s blogosphere - from left to right, and from MSM to independent bloggers - in order that he might come to appreciate the diversity that’s out there.

More on this from Kim at LP.

citizen journalism blogophobia, blogosphere, citizen journalism, David Burchell

There’s not a lot of detail on the programme at this stage, but the MEAA and the Walkley Awards are co-hosting a conference, “Public Affairs in the Age of Rudd“, in Canberra on the 19th and 20th of August. If it’s anywhere near as stimulating as the the “Future of Journalism”, it’s bound to be worth attending. There are a number of panels on new media and public engagement, and some assessments of the demographic, institutional and personnel changes that will frame the Rudd era.

I’m going to try to attend, but I’m hoping I won’t be wasting my money - Andrew Bolt only gives 80-1 odds on Rudd surviving his first term!

citizen journalism citizen journalism

For those of our readers following the US Presidential campaign and wanting to look beyond mainstream coverage, Henry Jenkins has a nice overview of a few citizen journalism projects which aim to provide alternative perspectives on the election race.

It’s nice to see the emphasis on first-hand reporting here (which was also a key aspect of our Australian citizen journalism projects, of course) - this works against the perception that citizen journalism is mainly the domain of “armchair journalists” (as Dennis Shanahan would have it), or simply acts as a parasite feeding on mainstream journalism content (as Jürgen Habermas appears to believe).

Also interesting is the cautious support from mainstream media organisations for such projects (in the cases Henry lists, this includes MTV and the Christian Science Monitor, for example). Next week, I’m presenting a paper at the CCi conference in Brisbane on ways for journalism to move beyond the pro-am (industry/citizen) schism, so these examples are very timely.

Read more…

citizen journalism citizen journalism, conferences, elections, journalism