Just posting an author copy of the latest paper I’ve submitted for a journal special issue. In it I discuss the looming NBN investment in the context of the decline of regional public spheres.

I use Townsville as a case-study, and argue that the regional public sphere there has declined over many years, to the detriment (and chagrin) of citizens there, and yet despite a level of Internet service provision that’s often comparable with the capitals, people haven’t engaged with the opportunities of public sphere blogging. This is a problem, then, that big fat cables alone won’t fix. I suggest we need to think about the role of creative clusters and intermediary institutions, and think about ABC Open in that light.

This will be the first in a series of articles that talk about the regional uptake of tools for public sphere engagement. I think that we are too often technologically-determinist when we think about things like the NBN investment, and we too seldom think about who’s excluded from online public spheres. I think there are systematic silences generated by our “networked public sphere” in Australia - future pieces will use empirical tools to investigate this.

Anyway, it’s embedded as a Scribd document below the fold. Comments welcome, and I’ll let you know whether it gets through peer review.

Oh, but please don’t quote it at this point without letting me know.

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broadband, journalism, regional bloggers blogging, broadband, journalism, public sphere, Queensland, townsville

It’s been a tumultuous week in Australian politics - at times for all the wrong reasons -, and social media have played an important role in the events. My take on the impact of Twitter on the Liberal leadership crisis and political reporting has now been published at ABC Unleashed , and I’m reposting it here. I think I like my original title better…

Coalition All Atwitter over Climate Change

The extraordinary events in the Liberal party room over the past few days are destined to enter the annals of Australian politics for a number of reasons - not least because of the unprecedented flow of up-to-the-minute, first-hand, indeed first-person information through the short messaging service Twitter to the waiting journalists and the wider public beyond.

News about the latest statements for and against the CPRS from individual MPs, and updates on the numbers supporting or opposing Malcolm Turnbull were received and retweeted within seconds of their arrival, and at times one could form the impression that those waiting for a resolution had a better sense of Turnbull’s numbers than the Opposition Leader himself.

Finally, Turnbull’s antics at his press conferences, and the statements of politicians and pundits during various subsequent interviews, also found an instant audience of commentators, often responding to blatant inaccuracies and naked spin in the way they wished journalists would.

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Liberal Party, journalism, politics ABC Unleashed, Australia, climate change, Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull, politics, Twitter

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks about the continuing struggle between NewsCorp chairman Rupert Murdoch’s defensive and protectionist approach to online news, and ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s ambitious ABC Open strategy to increase dissemination of its news content and incorporate user-generated content more strongly. Some of that discussion has been insightful, some, not unexpectedly, much less so.

I’m already on record as saying that I think that - outside niche markets - Murdoch’s paywall plans are doomed to fail, and fail miserably; most news users simply don’t care enough about NewsCorp’s specific flavour of news to prefer it so much that they’d be willing to pay money for it, if much the same material is also available for free elsewhere. (If this report from Forrester is right, Murdoch should certainly think twice about what he’s proposing to do.) I’ve also been less than convinced by those commentators who say that the ABC’s plans for a stronger embrace of user-generated content, and the gradual or not-so-gradual decline of commercial news organisations, are ‘bad for journalism’, for two reasons:

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journalism, media abc, ABC Open, online news, paywall, Rupert Murdoch, social media

I’ve been invited to speak at Media 140 in Sydney tomorrow. It’s now sold out so I can’t encourage readers to come along, though the ABC will be streaming it. This is an international event, which is focussed on exploring

the disruptive nature of ‘real-time’ social media looking at tools such as Twitter, live-blogging, facebook and other social networking tools as they rapidly transform the media in real-time.

I’ve been invited by way of the good people at newmatilda.com, where I occasionally pass comment on such topics.

Each speaker gets five minutes, and below the fold I’ve reproduced the text of something like what I’ll say tomorrow. Actually, this is more like what I would say I had the chance - there’s another couple of hundred words that need to come out of there by my calculations.

Comments and feedback most welcome - I was asked to speak on the Iranian elections and social media, and I’ve tried to address myself to what I saw as an overemphasis in some assessments on the specific role of Twitter in those events.

For those who are going - I’ll see you there.

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journalism abc, media140, Sydney, Twitter

You’ll remember that at the time I had a few things to say on Gatewatching.org about last December’s government consultation blog trial by the Department of Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy (DBCDE) last year - and a quote from my blog post back then even made it into the federal government’s report discussing the “Digital Economy” blog and other participatory initiatives - while a little earlier and before taking on his current position at the University of Wollongong, Jason was involved in developing GetUp!’s Project Democracy site which provides a social media platform enabling users to track the work of Australia’s federal senators.

Jason and I have now joined forces for a paper I’ll present at the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy in Vienna; titled “Citizen Consultation from Above and Below: The Australian Perspective”, we’re discussing the various approaches (top-down, bottom-up) to citizen consultation which are evident in these examples as well as in more general attempts by politicians to use the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies to engage with constituents. In advance of the conference, I’ve now posted up the paper and Powerpoint over at snurb.info.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism citizen journalism, consultation, Digital Economy blog, EDEM 2009, Future of Journalism 2009, government, myHeimat, Project Democracy

Long-term followers of Gatewatching.org may remember that we started the blog in part as a vehicle for discussing our Youdecide2007 citizen journalism project for the 2007 Australian federal election. I’m happy to report that this project has now been featured as a case study in the Australian federal Department for Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy’s newly-released report “Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions“. For the Youdecide2007 case study, which is described a little misleadingly as an interview with project leader Terry Flew on the DBCDE Website, I drafted a concluding section with a few ideas on likely future developments in professional and citizen journalism, but because of the overall word limit we could only use a few bits from it - so I thought I’d republish the whole piece here:

The Future of Journalism and Citizen Journalism

The journalism industry is currently facing a number of substantial challenges, further exacerbated by the global financial crisis which is severely affecting the commercial media organisations operating newspapers and broadcasters. Newspaper readership, especially among younger age groups, is continuing to decline in most developed nations, and income from advertising is diminishing. Meanwhile, an increasing number of users are getting their news from a variety of online sources - but here, brand loyalty is often substantially less developed than it was for print and broadcast news. Further, new news aggregators - for example, Google News - track and collate reports from news sources around the world, leading to a more random access model for news. This may be beneficial for smaller news operators (whose news reports are now placed alongside reports on the same topic from major newspapers), but further reduces the special position of leading news brands such as The New York Times or The Australian.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism, policy Australia, citizen journalism, DBCDE, digital economy, journalism, youdecide2007

The CPD has just launched a new publication called Thinking Points: talking points for thinking people, providing rapid-fire responses to the debates of the day with an eye to the big picture and the decades to come.

I have a short policy piece up here.

Senator John Faulkner’s announcement of changes to Australia’s Freedom of Information (FOI) laws is long overdue, and his approach promises to address a number of concerns about FOI in Australia.

First, addressing the egregious abuse of the ‘cabinet in confidence’ provision, exemplified by the wheeling of trolleys of documents in and out of the cabinet room, is a major step forward, as is the removal of conclusive certificates. However, simply reducing the legal loopholes available for abuse by government and the public service is only part of the solution.

citizen journalism, foi, journalism, policy, public sphere