gatewatching

I got somethin’ in New Matilda today reporting on my recent travels to conferences at home and abroad. There’s a cross-post over the fold, but you should go there instead and read the other stuff on the site while you’re at it.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance have produced their annual report on Press Freedom in Australia. You can download the Report via Australian Policy Online here. Federal Secretary Chris Warren summarises the findings:
Were this to be a school report card, after years of under achievement this year’s card would still read: “Could do better”, [...]

British journalist and blogger Dave Lee wants Google’s famous workplace innovation of “20% time” to be extended to journalists. Google’s scheme allows employees to take a day a week to use their initiative and creativity in projects that go beyond what they’re assigned. Lee argues
If every reporter at every paper had 20 per cent to [...]

A quick addendum to my last Gatewatching post, which discussed why in the face of a journalistic environment more concerned with scoring points than reporting on the issues of the day it’s not such a bad idea if politicians choose to converse with citizens outside of the media glare: from what I’ve seen so far, [...]

There’s been a bit of discussion amongst political bloggers about a post by PollieGraph’s Rachel Hills which pointed out that Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull had her - and other journalists - on ‘limited profile’ on Facebook, because of her status as a writer for New Matilda (also noted over at Larvatus Prodeo). Some of [...]

Brisbane.The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change [...]

Brisbane.The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China’s first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose [...]

Brisbane.I was the first presenter in the next session at AMIC 2008 (and my presentation on citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election is already online here). Hopefully the audio recording worked as well - I’ll add it as soon as possible. The audio from my talk is now online.
Kitty van Vuuren from the [...]

Brisbane.The second day of the AMIC conference has now started, and we begin with a keynote from Vipul Kant Upadhay, the CEO and Editor in Chief of Merinews.com in India. This site is now the largest Internet news portal in the country, and builds very significantly on citizen journalism. Vipul begins by noting that he [...]

Brisbane. We’re now in the opening session of the AMIC conference “Convergence, Citizen Journalism and Social Change“. Today is just a short afternoon with a couple of keynote speeches; tomorrow, the bulk of the papers (including my colleague Jason Wilson’s and mine) will be presented. Pradip Thomas from the University of Queensland is offering some [...]