This is the first go at a regular feature I’ll try on the blog where, every Sunday, we’ll bypass the gallery ‘insiders’ and set out the political blogosphere’s prospective agenda for the week with some selected links.

Council elections: The rest of the country might be having a little break from elections for a while, but here in the Sunshine State we have to elect our local councils in a couple of weeks. You’ll remember that one of John Howard’s unsuccessful late “wedges” was trying to turn amalgamations into an issue for Kevin Rudd by offering plebiscites, and attacking Peter Beattie as a Rudd proxy. The update is that people are voting in some brand new Local Government areas, and in the resultant game of musical chairs, some long-serving councillors are bound to miss out. The blogosphere up here is doing a great job of covering it.

Indeed, few things have pleased me more in recent weeks than finding out about hyperlocal bloggers in regional Queensland like Cairnsblog (covering Cairns and surrounds) and Strewth! (Covering Hervey Bay and the Fraser Coast). These are providing alternative news sources in some areas that are under-serviced by the mainstream media. They’re both also in the best tabloid traditions of pugnacious, colourful muckraking. Go, now, and add them to your RSS subscriptions. This is what I’d hope that one possible future direction for the political blogosphere could look like.

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Outsiders, Queensland, blogging, elections, gaming, journalism, law, media

1. It’s very difficult to stop people watching a television programme that’s been broadcast in another State, even if you’ve banned it, and even if it might prejudice court proceedings. (Bloody Internet.)

2. It’s very difficult to keep a Prince’s wherabouts under wraps when the media are globally networked, even if his life depends on it. (Bloody Internet. Bloody New Idea.)

3. It’s very difficult for Attorneys-General to back away from regulation that frames gamers as children, even if everyone knows that it’s in large part an adult market, and even if, in any case, any fourteen-year-old can acquire any game (or movie, or song) they want. (Bloody Internet. Bloody Family First to please. Bloody Senate.)

celebrity, gaming, government, journalism, law, media

Goodness me. There’s a bit of a stoush on the Oz’s website! Janet Albrechtsen wrote a column earlier this week that gave out some advice to Kevin Rudd, and claimed victory in the “Culture Wars”, or argued that they were still going on, or something like that (It’s honestly a little bit hard to tell). Paul Keating has replied today, fairly intemperately, to a side-swipe he recieved in Albrechtsen’s column, and it’s a bit of a companion-piece to his posthumous pot-shot at Paddy McGuinness in the Fin a couple of weeks back (which is still behind the pay-wall, so no link). If it’s less discomfiting for the reader than the McGuinness diatribe, it’s probably because Janet is still very much alive, and able to defend herself.

Anyway, we’ve been in enough trouble for our alleged partisanship lately, so I’ll leave the rights and wrongs well alone, although I will say it’s all pretty entertaining whichever way you slice it. Also, perhaps I’ll risk remarking that there is something to be said for this comment on Albrechtsen’s summoning of the dreaded elites:

Albrechtsen, for her own part, of course, was not part of any elite. The ear of a prime minister and a cabinet for a decade, which finally enjoyed control of both houses of parliament; membership of a clique of journalists, sharing common cause, with unfettered access to the opinion pages of the broadsheet newspapers of the country - nothing elitist about that.

The main reason I’m posting though is to ask a couple of questions. Bear in mind that it’s up there on the Oz website, and that people are commenting furiously, whether they’re supporting PK or JA. The question is: has a current or former Prime Minister ever had an opinion piece published in this manner before, in a “blog-like” format, with the facility for immediate and copious feedback from members of the public? (Be good if people could think of prior examples)

Secondly, does anyone think Keating should start his own snark blog? What could the title be? My nomination is “unrepresentative swill”.

UPDATE: Niall’s take bringeth some more funny.

UPDATE #2: Others take sides in the match of the day. Hangover is barracking for PJK, as (perhaps predictably) are some commenters over on this LP Thread. And justice for all takes a more even-handed approach. I only found one so far that is sticking up for JA, but I’m not going to link to it because the blog as a whole seems excessively concerned with the fate of “the white race” - yowsers!

UPDATE #3 Janet comes back. Honestly it’s just like Gladiators.

UPDATE #4 Like Ken in the comments below, Jason Soon over at Catallaxy is not exactly supportive of Janet, but thinks Keating’s ego is the main player in this stoush.

blogging, celebrity, government, journalism, media

For non-Aussies, that’s the ABC’s Sunday Morning serious current affairs show. It’s returned from it’s summer hiatus, and already this morning, Barrie Cassidy has done a sharp interview with erstwhile (and presumably future) Liberal leadership contender Malcolm Turnbull, confronting him with evidence that his colleagues don’t like him very much. All quite entertaining.

I’m enough of a PJ to be very happy to see Barry and the crew back, but already weekly guest Paul Kelly - who’s wheeled in as an eminence grise of political punditry - has exhibited the problems that frustrate so many of us in respect of MSM commentators.

After Andrew Bolt had spent five minutes disputing the existence of the indigenous stolen generation, and the wisdom of offering an apology (I strenuously disagree with Bolt, but at least this is a point of view), Kelly was asked by Barrie Cassidy whether he thought that an apology was “the right thing to do”. Predictably, Kelly avoided the direct question - and few questions in Australian politics could be more important - and just talked about in strategic terms, thinking only about whether it was “smart” politics.

Here’s a theory: reason that the left-of-centre blogosphere has prospered in Australia is that the opinion pages only seem to be open to forthright conservatives, and erstwhile (small-l) liberals like Kelly have retreated to evaluations of political and media strategy.

Update: The show has featured a Hugh Atkin YouTube mashup of Barrie Cassidy and Cory Delaney. Tops.

journalism, media

Hi all - Club Bloggery is back with prognostications about the future of the Australian blogosphere - cross-posted here from our ABC column.

Club Bloggery: Which way in ‘08?

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, Barry Saunders

The blogosphere and online independent media certainly proved themselves capable of offering an outstanding alternative narrative of last year’s federal election.In several pieces during the campaign, we pointed out how the bloggers had led the way in offering participatory election coverage, and how organs like Crikey and New Matilda had managed to present a refreshing range of opinion that differed from the usual suspects in the MSM.

Now that the hoopla and buzz of the big event has died down, though, where to from here? Can the momentum be sustained during the fallow period between elections, and where the end of the Howard Government means that there is suddenly a lot less at stake in politics for a largely left-leaning, opinion-driven media space? And can such outlets move beyond opinion and start generating something like original news?

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activism, blogging, journalism

As Posted on the ABC’s Opinion Website last Friday - we’d welcome further comments.

Many of the dust-ups so far between bloggers and the mainstream media (MSM) in Australia have concerned comment, not news.

The kinds of spats we’ve written about previously have been over who exactly has the mortgage on punditry about established stories, social issues, opinion polls and the like.

Occasionally the MSM’s resistance to the blogger commentariat can be less than rational, but they often get the final word with the accusation - containing more than a grain of truth - that bloggers “don’t break stories”, and are simply parasitic upon the news-gathering activities of established outlets.

The problem with this claim is that when big stories come, parts of the mainstream media can often appear negligent in their pursuit and treatment of a story, and more and more often they’re coming off second best to other, new kinds of news media.

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blogging, celebrity, journalism, media

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?”:

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academic, citizen journalism, journalism

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.

Not Funny

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

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.

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blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, media

Our 8th Club Bloggery is up at the ABC site. We’ve got some recommendations for voters based on the parties online performance. Have a look.

This will be our last Club Bloggery for the election, but keep an eye out for more pieces from the gatewatching crew.

Club Bloggery part 8: Scoring the e-lection

Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, Axel Bruns.

This close to the election, it’s customary for newspapers to recommend a vote one way or the other. We’re not about to do that at Club Bloggery (although we would recommend thinking about the candidate who’s been more responsive and available to your community), but we can do a summary of who has made the best running on the Internet, and understood and used its possibilities best.
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blogging, government, journalism

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!

Election Flops on YouTube

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

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.

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blogging, citizen journalism, journalism, media