As part of the overall research project we’re involved in, we’ve set up a hyperlocal citizen journalism site for Queensland’s local government elections.
There are already a lot of contributions there, and we’re looking forward enormously to the next two weeks. If you are from Queensland, and have anything to submit, you can email it directly to me at j5 dot wilson at qut dot edu dot au. (we decided to simplify the submission procedures we used on youdecide2007.)
Maybe the best thing about it for me so far has been discovering some very strong local blogs in regional Queensland, where communities are often desperately short of media diversity. (Trust me on this - I grew up in Townsville)
Come and see our site, but then proceed immediately to Cairnsblog, which keeps an eye on things in the Far North, and Strewth! which does the same on the Fraser Coast. Both blogs have raised the hackles of local media and politicians alike - a sure sign that they’re doing a good job.
We’re briefly going back to bog-standard wordpress in an attempt to stop the craziness with comments going in the wrong spots, etc. Thanks for your patience.
Thanks for your note, and for making your readers aware of our blog and ABC columns.
I’m happy to discuss your questions, but first, it might be useful to clarify a few things.
This could be a good moment to point out that this blog and our ABC column are different from the rest of our work, including the research project you mentioned in your original post. The column and the blog are things we do on our own time. We certainly aren’t “paid to blog”, nor are we paid for our ABC column. So those of your readers who are in a tizz about their tax dollars going on these particular activities can relax. We do these things because of our genuine interest in the ways in which online public affairs is developing, and because we’re keen to test some ideas out in public. We’ve never represented the blog or the columns as the place where we present the formal, final results of our research - it’s much more a way to present hunches, hypotheses or - we have them too - opinions.
To all the visitors from timblair.net, welcome! Apologies for the commenting problems, clearly our funding doesn’t cover a half-decent webdesigner. We wanted to come over and chat with you, but
Reposted below is our latest contribution to the ABC’s Opinion pages on the US election race. It’s looking like there will be a range of citizen -led reporting this time - Super Tuesday was just a taster.
By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns and Barry Saunders
It’s almost a cliché now to assert that the US blogosphere is an election-cycle ahead of what we have in Australia.
We’re not so sure it’s that simple, mostly because it seems that online, independent media are on a slightly different developmental track on this side of the Pacific. But it’s certainly true that the American online mediasphere is flexing some fairly impressive muscles in the presidential primaries.
This year’s election season will be one to watch, and it might just be the one in which online coverage - from bloggers and the MSM - outstrips television and the press in depth and importance.
It should be said at the start that the US political blogosphere is a lot more polarised, various and influential than Australia’s.
As we’ve pointed out before, Australia’s bloggers are overwhelmingly left-of-centre: we might have our equivalents to the left-leaning Daily Kos but it’s hard to pick out our own equivalent to Little Green Footballs or Town Hall, where Australian conservatives can form communities of opinion and respond back (except maybe at Tim Blair’s blog).
Pip Starr was a Melbourne activist filmmaker. He made powerful, intense documentaries about injustice. His documentary, Through the Wire is a heartbreaking account of the Woomera protests and a powerful indictment of Australia’s policy of compulsory detention of asylum seekers.
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?”:
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.
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.
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!
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.
Hi all - here’s the latest Club Bloggery posted over at the ABC on Friday. The topic seems to have excited a fair amount of interest - feel free to comment here.
Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, and Barry Saunders
Collectively, the writers here at Club Bloggery have been watching the Australian political blogosphere for years. We know that the bloggers who have perhaps been most important and prominent down under are psephologists – specialist electoral statisticians who try to understand and analyse polls, and consider the interlocking numbers games of electoral politics.
Head counters like the anonymous Possum Comitatus, Simon Jackman, William Bowe, and Peter Brent produce accessible, incisive, original takes on polling, and engage in prolonged discussion with their readers about the meaning and import of their analysis. Week after week, free of charge, they offer in-depth analysis on polling that improves our understanding of the political process and of how party strategists think. That’s why we were surprised this week when a journalist in The Australian, Samantha Maiden, attacked a few psephs by name, implying that their sites amounted to little more than left-wing wish-fulfilment.
This site is a group blog run by the three of us - Barry Saunders, Jason Wilson, and Axel Bruns. What we’re looking to do here is to track and analyse the further development of the phenomenon of citizen journalism, in Australia - where we’re all based - and elsewhere; in fact, the recent federal elections in Australia in late 2007, and in the U.S. in late 2008, produced plenty of interesting developments for us to observe and examine. In the Australian context, we were also part of the team behind an ARC Linkage research project into citizen journalism which operated a hyperlocal citizen journalism site for the 2007 election, at youdecide2007.org.
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