Brisbane.
The third and last day of the CCi conference starts with a keynote by the fabulous Mark Deuze, author of Media Work. He begins by pointing to Henry Jenkins’s work on convergence culture, and reminds us of the magnitude of that trend. Why is this happening, what is the context for this - how do media professionals work in this environment?

Media organisations are very well positioned to make sense of this from a production perspective - they are well placed to find new ways to tell stories across multiple (new) platforms, but in doing so reproduce mainly what they did before. We need to move forward beyond this approach, though: how do we start from scratch in developing new content forms and forms of participation which are native to the new (media) environment, characterised as it is by niche communities and diverse interests? (Mark’s upcoming book Beyond Journalism tells this story for the journalistic environment.)

We experience society today as a series of temporary but intense experiences and engagements. This happens in the context of relationships we build with people, brands, institutions - intense but immensely changeable. Mark points to a few examples in this context - such as the Cubic Club, a set of containers in on a beach in Barcelona which are used as the temporary venue for dance clubs, events, and other very temporary happenings; the SoCo Cargo Experiment in Sydney, Adelaide, and Melbourne which created temporary entertainment zones (again in cargo containers) aimed at selling Southern Comfort. Another example is Hotel Móvil, a mobile ‘hotel on a truck’, the V-Box mobile temporary shop, the Stoli Hotel, a temporary Stolichnaya-themed hotel, and other forms of guerilla-style shops and entertainment settings.

Each of these examples is characterised by qualities such as impermanence, intensity, solipsism (that is, not simply individualised or personalised, but even more focussed on individual experience and worldview than these terms woud suggest), but also (at the very same time) participation in DIY media - there is no contradiction between solipsism and participation in this new environment. Key examples for these tendencies can be found in journalism (and new media work more generally). We make sense of new media as artefacts (now characterised by mobility and interoperability), and through our activities (and Mark points for example to Bliin, which streams a user’s GPS location and Web- or mobile camera feed to their friends and makes their position visible on a Google map).

At the same time, these practices have a significant effect on established media institutions - one in four jobs in the American media industries has disappeared in the last few years; one in three journalists has seen one of their colleagues lose their job as a result of these changes, and they are now intensely worried about the security of their own job. (Media workers sometimes see themselves be described as ‘people who cost their employer money’.) There is a general shift towards ‘atypical’, that is, non-contract-based, labour in the media industries - such work is intrinsically impermanent, and in a sense workers’ jobs exist now only in their own heads (again, solipsistically).

Mark now points to the example of being on stage at a Barack Obama campaign event, which he - and many others in the crowd - experienced in good part through their cameras and other recording devices. In doing so, they construct their own (intense and solipsistic) recording of the world for later use and sharing. Journalism has traditionally dealt with this through letters through the editor, and now also does so through other forms of user contributions, discussion fora, blogs, or even to wholesale outsourcing to users (as in Scoopt or YouNewsTV).

Does this mean that journalism is dead? Commitment to media organisation has traditionally be permanent (subscriptions, commitment to watch the evening news at a set time, etc.) - but we now expect on-demand, personalised media experiences, which can be seen as undermining consensus and wide social engagement. Media organisations are historically very well positioned to let us not participate - nobody becomes a journalist with the intention to let others tell the stories. So, there is a great need to start from scratch, to build new media organisations which inherently embody the key characteristics of new media (impermanence, intensity, solipsism, participation); despite some of the problems associated with these characteristics, such new media organisations have a significant contribution to make.

Technorati : CCi 2008, Mark Deuze, Media Work, new media, produsage
Del.icio.us : CCi 2008, Mark Deuze, Media Work, new media, produsage

I’m excited about the new challenge, but it’s a sad moment, and the conference that Axel’s been liveblogging here has been, for me, an occasion to catch up with the colleagues who have made this job such a valuable and fascinating experience. My Gatewatching comrades Axel and Barry are included in this, but there’s also Terry Flew (who’s been a valued mentor and friend for many years), and OLO’s Graham Young who’s also become a good mate as a result of this job. I have active collaborations with all these folks that I’m looking forward to delivering over coming months.

Perhaps it’s ironic that my last act in the job before coming onto campus to pack up was attending an excellent plenary by Mark Deuze on the accelerating impermanence of life and work in contemporary culture. Mark’s presentation is part of ongoing research that extends the arguments offered in his book, Media Work. In the presentation, he was thinking through the mobility and liquidity of modern life. It was food for thought for me personally - after less than a year here, and a little over two years in a previous job in the UK, I’ll now have had more employers in half a decade than my father has in his whole career, which he’s spent happily in the city he was born in. What’s gained and lost in the move towards contant mobility?

Other people will be packing their offices today, and thinking about impermanence, including the outgoing Senators of the Australian Democrats. The Democrats have been an important part of Australian political history, but in particular bloggers and blog-watchers will be wishing Andrew Bartlett all the best in post-political life. It’s a great shame that the boldest experiment in Australian political blogging is now coming to an end. Lots of stuff about this around the blogs - I’ll leave it at linking to Andrew’s own post detailing the last question asked by a Democrat in the Senate, on child protection.

It’s also worth noting that Andrew was representing Queensland in the senate, the state in which I’ve lived my entire life (apart from the sojourn in Britain). Suddenly, there is a brace of Queenslanders at the highest echelons of public life, but people like Andrew have been central in incrementally changing the image of the State in the minds of other Australians. I think many of my friends and colleagues have been helping out there, too. I’ll be leaving the State for an extended period now, and I’ll miss it terribly, but I expect to be amazed each time I return at the rapidity of the changes happening Statewide, not least to the landscape of Brisbane.

I guess nothing lasts forever any more.

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.)

This kind of work generated some very diverse media content and was able to uncover stories and ideas which would not have been addressed in the mainstream media; it relied on significant existing networks both held privately by Mark and established through online social networking and crowdsourcing processes (and the establishment and maintenance of these also requires significant energy). Some of this work is not that far removed from journalistic practice or activities on which now well-established mainstream journalists and journalism educators first cut their teeth, but oddly enough, there continues to come some severe hostility to the new kids on the block from that direction - partly also because they are experiencing substantial change in their own media work environments.

The next speaker is Jason Wilson, who notes especially the rise of specialist, expert bloggers (such as the psephologists) during the election campaign. Jason interviewed the now famous Possum Comitatus as part of his research, who started blogging simply to archive graphs of polling data and found himself gradually becoming a hub in his own social network. Such specialists (also economists, lawyers, and other experts) do not need the mediation of journalists any more to place their material into the public sphere; it may be easier to teach a psephologist to write well than it is to teach a mainstream journalist the finer details of psephological analysis, Jason suggests.

Another key aspect of the 2007 campaign was the complete failure of the Liberal Party to engage with online media, which helped Labor to underscore the differences between the two political brands. This was probably not the sole reason why the Liberals lost, but it would not have helped. Additionally, Jason notes that AES data suggests a growing engagement (off a relatively low base) of the electorate with blogs and other online media, and it will be interesting to see how this will further develop. The Net itself, indeed, became a major campaign issue (with broadband a central element of both parties’ policy releases), also indicating the growing role of online media.

On now to Graham Young, who thinks back to his view that the Net would be where political discussion would move in the near future; against this, however, he suggests that the impact of citizen journalism still remains limited and that there is no real sign that this performance will lift in the immediate future. The relatively limited size of the Australian population (as compared for example with the US) has a role to play here, of course; also, the mainstream media here are on the whole relatively uninterested in interacting visibly with online media.

So, what is citizen journalism and what can it do? There is a somewhat romantic notion of citizen journalists, Graham feels, and takes a somewhat functional view which describes almost anyone who makes online comments as citizen journalists - including especially also sites which are run by the mainstream media. Graham also points to the lessons from Youdecide2007 and Qlddecides as indicating that simple, accessible structures look set to remain more successful for the time being, by providing relatively low barriers to access and participation - the latter project took a much simpler approach and (given the short run-up time) was comparatively more successful. Overall, though, Graham suggests, the news agenda on both sites was much closer to what users wanted to read about than the coverage of the mainstream media.

Mark comments that in the US some of the major news blogs have effectively been mainstreamed, which at the same time has also opened up a space for local and hyperlocal forms of covering state and city politics and electoral races. In a place like Brisbane, there is no critical mass for this as yet, and it may take until the next election in a few years’ for this to emerge.

They’re now responding to questions from the audience. Jason suggests that the audience for Youdecide2007 largely consisted of already strongly politically involved users, and that most of them had already made up their mind about how they would vote. Mark says that for LP, the process of being able to respond and interact on the site in the first place showed users that there were communities in which they could engage, and that they could thereby exercise active citizenship.

Peter Black now shares his experience of the Microsoft Forum on Politics and Technology in Canberra yesterday, where he was collared by journalist Annabel Crabb who suggested that the blogosphere was superfluous because it did not break original news stories. Mark responds (to Annabel’s views) by saying that the idea that the blogosphere must break news is nonsense; that said, during the federal election, for example, the Queensland election race was covered in the national media largely by journalists based in Sydney and Melbourne who in part relied on local coverage in news blogs and citizen journalism publications, so in a more indirect way, these outlets did create original journalistic content. He feels that there has been a fairly deliberate decision for news media to colonise the online space through their commentary ‘blogs’.

Georgie McClean from SBS wonders how such tension between industry and citizen journalists may be able to be resolved in practice. Jason suggests that that dichotomy itself is one which has been built up deliberately by both sides (especially perhaps by the industry) to create strong distinctions between the camps, but that in practice there is a significant overlap between the two in personnel and practices. The oppositional paradigm is increasingly pointless.

Graham adds that he thinks of himself as a prospector looking for news, but requires the services of someone else to bring it to wider attention. What he does not understand is why the mainstream media do not have more people working this way for themselves - crowdsourcing additional information on stories, for example. Terry Flew adds that in the US it is increasingly common for news bloggers and citizen journalists to be featured on mainstream US news shows and channels; there is much less demarcation between media forms there.

John Quiggin notes that news during election campaigns is largely generated by the various parties’ campaigns anyway, and that this material at least is equally accessible to industrial and citizen journalists. There is some independent fact-finding, but this remains limited. He also notes the propensity of cross-linking in blogs, which is largely absent in the walled gardens of mainstream media Web content, and thereby establishes limits to the ability of media organisations to effectively colonise this space.

Mark responds by saying that there is a distinction between political bloggers like himself and citizen journalists (who may be interested in creating more conventional news content) - the former take a clearly partisan stance, which also makes them useful discussion partners for politically aligned actors in the parties and elsewhere. He suggests that he has seen more internal Labor party polling than most industry journalists in Brisbane, for example, because Labor figures have a clear idea of what he might do with that material - discuss it on LP.

Anne Dunn suggests that cultivating contacts in the way Mark has described it is exactly what professional journalists do, and also notes that what the ABC does in training specialist broadcasters is exactly what Jason has described - providing domain experts with journalistic skills. At the same time, Jason says, there is an institutional bottleneck in places like the ABC; there is not the space for the diversity which exists in the open environment of the Web. Anne suggests that some kind of measure of authority remains important - but, as Jason says, that authority may no longer be provided by the institutional imprint of the ABC, but by other forms of recognition. Interestingly, Terry notes that there is now a large number of students who will do some journalism as part of their degree.

David McKnight goes back to the question of hostility between the two camps. Partly this is due to the ignorance of mainstream journalists, he suggests, partly also to the triumphalism of citizen journalists in positioning themselves as an alternative to mainstream media. Jason responds to say again that there is also a lot of interest from some players in the industry in new models - this comes often from specific groups in industrial journalism, however. Mark further notes the importance of commenting on blogs; this generates community loyalty and trust in citizen journalism in a way that does not exist.

My question is how we can define and measure the influence and impact of citizen journalism. Is it a matter of swinging an election, Mark asks, of attracting influential (but elite) readers, or of civic impact? Terry points to the US case of Barack Obama’s controversial pastor, where a two- (or more-) step flow was apparent (from videos to blogs to more mainstream news channels); Jason suggests that some policy bloggers in Australia are having an impact on elite policymaking discources. Graham thinks that providing opportunities for open debate may not be enough if such discussion turns out to be highly polarised (which may undermine rather than strengthen democracy).

Mel Gregg focusses our debate on the citizen part of the term ‘citizen journalism’. How are conceptions of citizenship different, for example, between Australia and the US? What kinds of people are recognised by these processes? Georgie McClean sees one definition of citizenship as engagement with public life, but this continues to privilege mainly those who are already political junkies, perhaps. Terry notes that there is a persistent bifurcation in this context between a civic republican tradition and an understanding that fundamental to citizenship is personal liberty. Mark adds that the notion of citizenship is often approached from an individualised rather than community perspective; we’re only at the start of researching the role of blogging and other online practices in this context. Jason points to the core problem of Australia as having a very unevenly distributed public sphere, which centres around the major cities and has very limited purchase in more sparsely populated areas poorly served by mainstream media. He suggests that hyperlocal projects like Youdecide2007 do fill an important alternative role here. For Graham, ‘citizen journalism’ largely refers to people doing journalistic work without pay; the citizenship aspect does not play such a significant role in his personal practice, or certainly does not exist in the forefront of such practices.

Technorati : 2007, Australia, CCi 2008, Larvatus Prodeo, Online Opinion, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, election, journalism
Del.icio.us : 2007, Australia, CCi 2008, Larvatus Prodeo, Online Opinion, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, election, journalism

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?

Journalism’s history traces back to London’s coffeehouses, and early journalists frequented them to scare up news and scandal; today, however, journalists are often strongly embraced by political actors, largely in order to enable them to feed intended tidbits of information to such journalists who now perhaps lack a more critical edge. As all of this moves further towards an online, niche environment, what happens to this - will we enter a more highly fragmented age?

Key elements of journalism remain investigation, storytelling, and conversation, and each of these need to be preserved - as does basic reporting (focussing oin everyday aspects). Conversation has received a major boost in the online environment, even if major media organisations still are very reluctant to engage in such conversation. Blogs and citizen journalists do conversation well, but not necessarily investigation and storytelling (and usually acknowledge this, too). Conversation can be a powerful tool of journalism, but by itself is not sufficient; journalism done well is hard and dirty work for which news bloggers and citizen journalists may not have the time, resources, skills, or contacts.

News bloggers focus on opinion and commentary, and gatewatching is a useful addition to journalism, but cannot replace it altogether (that’s not to say that mainstream journalism necessarily does much better - a significant percentage of industrial journalism also simply repurposes government information and commercial press releases). Interesting experiments combine professional and citizen journalism approaches, Margaret suggests, and she names Youdecide2007 and Assignment Zero as examples here.

Interaction with the audience and the blurring of the line between audience and content maker will continue, as does the shift in writing style from impartial reporting to a more opinionated writing style (as Crikey does it, for example). Audiences are increasingly interested in narrative voice rather than robotic objectivity. Journalists are once again turning to correspondents in the full sense of the word. At the same time, factual accuracy must remain, and disinterested reporting must survive. Journalists will be challenged in their definition of ‘objectivity’ - a term which retains a pre-modern positivist definition in journalism that is rather underproblematised.

What outlooks and business models will support such journalism in the future? Journalists may increasingly start their own sites (as they did, in fact, when newspapers first emerged); nearly all of these remain niche publication, however, and will never be mass media (attempting to transform itself that way it would likely lose its character). But if everyone has their own relationship with their niche publication, how is democracy maintained in the face of this fragmentation? Margaret suggests that the new metaphor for journalism is mapping - journalists provide a map of our world at various levels, and in doing so make choices of what it is necessary to include; in the future, audiences (users) will increasingly be co-creators of this map by contributing their local knowledge.

Margaret plans to launch a hyperlocal news site for her own suburb of Flemington in Victoria; in The Flemington Map, she plans to report on all matters of local relevance, and thereby show the connections of local issues to matters of national importance. This project may fail, but Margaret suggests that we need many of such new projects to work out what is possible and feasible here, and in the process we will learn what elements of journalism are worth preserving and what new elements drawn from other sources will need to be introduced.

Technorati : Australia, CCi 2008, citizen journalism, journalism, politics
Del.icio.us : Australia, CCi 2008, citizen journalism, journalism, politics

Brisbane.
The next plenary speaker here at the CCi conference is Camilla Cooke. She managed the Australian Labor Party’s digital campaign during the 2007 Australian federal election - “Australia’s first digital election”, as she describes it. Initial ideas for this campaign (even before the arrival of Kevin Rudd as opposition leader) were to engage debate, to use the Web for propagating messages, to utilise it as the key route to youth, and to use it for highly efficient and cost-effective marketing. Ultimately, these goals transformed into components like the Kevin07 Website, the social networking spaces, in Facebook and elsewhere, the YouTube channel, and a variety of other online platforms - and they also enabled the campaign to do some slightly cheeky things which would not have worked in other media works.

Kevin07 had some 2 million page views and some 400,000 unique visitors, and 14,000 “have your say” forms and 18,000 petitions were submitted. User-generated content was key here; most of the content of the on-site blog was drawn from user submissions. The videos had some 1.8 million views (and were cheap and effective); MySpace and Facebook had 24,000 and 20,000 friends and fans, respectively; the mobile Kevin07 site had 34,000 unique visitors; 40,000 T-shirts were sold; 1.2 million people were reached in marginal seats; and there were lots of “emails to Kevin”. What was important here was to reward supporters and maximise viral impact (one-click canvassing), and to engage swinging voters - this latter, indeed, was especially crucial in this election, of course.

There was also huge coverage of the campaign offline (including significant exposure on The Chaser’s War on Everything); Kevin07 itself was very well established as a brand. By contrast, the Liberal Party digital campaign was something of a trainwreck - the initial John Howard videos on YouTube were stale and ignorant of the site context, and campaign managers clearly were not even aware of the fact that comments on YouTube could be moderated (allowing for some very confronting comments attached to the first few postings). Overall, then, the digital campaign became symbolic of the major differences between Howard and Rudd.

Australian Labor showed a good deal of courage here in opening up channels of debate, with no more than an obscenity / insanity filter applied. “You have to take the rough with the smooth”, Camilla suggests - but she also notes that this works better for campaigns out of opposition: it favours the new kid on the block (as it does with Barack Obama in the US, but also David Cameron in the UK). The range of comments and submission received ranged from the basic (”you rock!”), to real and deep engagement with topics, to mindless attacks (”go f**k yourselves!). Except for the latter, most of this material was published.

Camilla suggests that there is a clear style of videos in YouTube - a lower level of production values which makes the candidate more real and allows their personality to shine through. What’s important here is also that the key group deciding elections are swinging voters, who do not consume much serious news and have a short attention span; video is very effective in reaching these voters, and can be utilised for viral marketing - but this can also be used against a politician, of course (see for example the vast range of YouTube videos poking fun at George W. Bush), and some such content is able to stop a campaign dead in its tracks. This is entirely unpredictable.

One challenge in a 24/7 campaign is to implement rapid damage limitation; disinformation is a real problem, here, and it is unclear whether the legal system helps deal with slander in time. Also, how can dialogue in one-to-one conversations with an entire nation be maintained? Perhaps forums provide one answer here. At the same time, online fundraising has emerged as a new resource for campaigning (as Obama has shown); automatic blog and community monitoring enables campaigners to go where the debate is happening; and contextual tools may be able to automate some of the one-to-one engagement. The main benefit of such digital campaigning is openness and freedom of expression - but at the same time, this is also its principal drawback.

Technorati : Australia, CCi 2008, Kevin Rudd, Kevin07, Labor, digital campaigning, politics
Del.icio.us : Australia, CCi 2008, Kevin Rudd, Kevin07, Labor, digital campaigning, politics

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.

There was a kind of high modernism in (American) journalism, which saw the journalist as hero (cf. the Watergate affair) and responded to the commercial nature of news itself by developing a more independent persona, calling for a journalism that was in stronger dialogue with the wider public - the ‘public journalism’ movement - which rests on a perception of journalism as a powerful profession that is now being questions. Dan Gillmor sees journalism as moving from lecture to conversation; Bowman & Willis see citizens as playing a more active role; Chris Atton sees an inversion of the hierarchy of access which poses the question of who (journalists or others) is the expert.

Terry now points to our Youdecide2007 project during the 2007 Australian federal election as a project which addresses some of these questions and harnesses the potential of the participatory Web. The site was a case study in practice-led research in this field, and chose an event-based (rather than issue-based) approach by focussing on the election; as a practical initiative, this also allowed us to experiment with practical initiatives such as a strongly hyperlocal approach and a collaboration with mainstream media (in the form of project partner SBS). The site was publicised through Facebook, YouTube, letters to journalism and media schools at Australian universities, and other means, attracted some 2000 users and generated coverage for some 56 electorates (plus the Senate election race).

It did promote a degree of greater citizen participation in the political process (to the extent that it was able to within its timeframe of operation), especially by Queensland-based participants (largely probably because the site was based in Queensland); unfortunately, it did not receive contributions from key seats like Bennelong (John Howard) or Wentworth (Malcolm Turnbull). A subsequent project, Qlddecides for the Queensland local government elections, generated even stronger local public involvement in spite of its shorter running time.

The site was not necessarily able to deliver on an aim to generate more deliberative engagement in political issues; it remained largely news-driven and site managers were needed to generate seed content (so crowdsourcing by itself did not work). This may be a result of the relatively short lead-up time, however. It may not have been able to broaden participation beyond established ‘political junkies’, either; the most viewed materials were those that conformed to relatively conventional news production values. Also, the election context itself encouraged partisanship rather than reflection. Terry also suggests that the great unasked question in relation to this topic is how citizen journalism relates to citizenship itself, and that this needs to be further investigated.

The next speaker is Trish FitzSimons from Griffith University. Her interest is in cross-media documentary, and she raises the issue of voice as a proxy for a discussion of human creativity (which is able to transcend the boundaries of media platforms). There is a tension in journalism between the voice of professional journalism (linked to objectivity and impartiality) and the voice of user-generated content; the same is true in documentary-making. For Bill Nichols, voice is “something narrower than style: that which conveys to us a sense of a text’s social point of view”. Nichols’s definition challenges filmmakers to exercise that voice, to avoid hiding behind their subjects and instead establish a hierarchy of voices, and this is a challenge that endures today.

What is required, Trish suggests, is a conception of voice as a process, a typology of different types of interaction between filmmakers, subjects, actors, istitutions, and other stakeholders (such as ontological voice, institutional voice, dialogic voice, ventriloquic voice, and choric voice). The idea of choric voice is related to the role of the chorus in Greek theatre, and (in the context of transmedia documentaries involving a strong Web 2.0 presence) this choric voice takes on a new and extended role.

Trish points to some examples for such transmedia documentaries - An Inconvenient Truth, for example, combines the film, Website, online study guide, blogs, and other elements, and the online components act as a kind of choric counterpart to the authorial voice of Gore and Guggenheim as the film’s major creators. Similarly, at the heart of journalism is a kind of lie that voice can be shared; ultimately, journalists tend to hold on to their authorial voice and push citizen journalists and others into the choric role. Similar, After Maeve (dedicated to a young Noosa girl who was run over and killed) allowed the emergence of such choric voices online, in response to the documentary itself. Finally, the ABC programme The Oasis about homeless youth in Australia also operated in this way, and again enabled the expression of choric elements.

This means that choric voice therefore becomes part of a typology of vocal interrelations, and is useful for thinking about documentary process (rather than merely product). Any particular text may have a range of different vocal relations, and broadly, this is a positive cultural development, along with related developments such as citizen journalism. For filmmakers, however, this is a mixed blessing, as funding structures and other frameworks do not necessarily recognise the significant labour involved in teasing out and managing such choric voices.

Another of my Youdecide2007 (and Gatewatching) colleagues, Jason Wilson, is the last speaker for the session, and will reflect especially on his role as editor of the Youdecide and Qlddecides projects. Both were projects operating under an aggergated, hyperlocal, crowdsourced model involving small teams of staff coordinating citizen reporting on the electoral contests in their own electorates. This was also a test of the audience base for citizen journalism and of relationships between citizen and mainstream media; for Jason in particular, however, a key question was also what the work of facilitating citizen journalism projects would entail, and how it would differ from traditional journalistic practices.

This focusses especially on the limitations of the crowd, and combines their work with the editorial and production expertise of professional journalists. As Howe has suggested, part of the heavy lifting in almost any produsage project is done by a few select individuals who do the thankless tasks behind the scenes; Mark Cooper similarly notes that there is a significant need to train content creators if (quality and legal) standards comparable to mainstream journalism are to be achieved. Mark Deuze has described journalism as “a networked practice of producing, editing, forwarding, sharing, and debating public information”; Toby Miller has introduced the idea of the ‘preditor’: “new media employees who perform both production and editorial roles” rather than focussing simply on “the production of new and original cultural works”.

For Jason, the four overlapping dimensions of such networked journalism are content work, community work, networking, and tech work; each of these need to be addressed to make a site like Youdecide possible. Content work, for example, involves editing user contributions to address legal and quality requirements as well as creating original news content to guarantee content flows, provide models of good practice, and draw users to a site (thus balancing the needs of both contributors and mere readers); networking involves making links with existing news channels, news organisations, and colleagues in the field, and pushing out and pulling in content in the wider networked news environment (i.e., not seeing mainstream news media as the enemy to be avoided, but to utilise them to publicise one’s own news site).

Community work may be the most important aspect: providing users with training, site-specific information, and mediation, and providing both structural and personal solutions for users’ needs. Part of this also means to cultivate ’super-contributors’ - to reward the most active and most invested users. Tech work is relatively self-explanatory, and involves both on-site and off-site elements as well as meta-tech work including site use metrics and analysis. Overall, then, these forms of work combine traditional as well as new forms of journalistic work, and this has implications both for organisations working in this participatory field and for journalism educators. They imply more collegial and community-oriented, less competitive journalistic practices.

Technorati : Australia, CCi 2008, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, documentary, journalism, participation, politics
Del.icio.us : Australia, CCi 2008, Youdecide2007, citizen journalism, documentary, journalism, participation, politics

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.

Traditional Australian defamation law requires the plaintiff to do relatively little; it requires the public availability of speech which identifies the plaintiff and may have a defamatory effect on their public standing, but the plaintiff does not have to prove untruth or prove actual harmful effects of this public speech. This is different from the US, and in the Australian environment the focus is therefore especially on the possible defences for such defamatory public speech. In the US, traditionally the key defence was truth; since the 1960s, for defamation of public figures actual malice and known falsehood of defamatory public speech must now also be proven. It can be proven that these different legal environments have significant effects on the comparative level of critical public speech in both countries.

In Australian law, a wider defence has been developed in recent years: a general defence that relates to matters of ‘proper public concern’ and ‘reasonable circumstances’ of publication for critical public speech. In other words, the law used to say that critical speech had to be proven true; now it allows for reasonable circumstances regardless of truth.

Coming out of Andrew’s interviews with news personnel, then, are some common themes - media makers see some lawyers as very sympathetic to the media (willing to explore the full range of speech allowed by law and following current investigative journalism processes), while others take a more defensive approach and are less closely aligned with journalistic processes, for example. In Australia, the local knowledge of both lawyers and journalists of plaintiffs’ ‘form’ was far more central, and strongly influenced their willingness (or otherwise) to engage in potentially defamatory public speech - for more belligerent plaintiffs, in other words, there was less willingness to stretch the boundaries of the law than for others. Another notable difference was that while the documents to be used in support for critical public speech were roughly similar, US media makers had far more ready access to such documents than their Australian counterparts. For these reasons, US journalists could much less imagine themselves working under Australian frameworks than vice versa.

Next up is Sue Campin from QUT’s Faculty of Business. Her focus is on physical space in postmodern cities, and she identifies a struggle for public space at present. Personal, private, home spaces are getting smaller in postmodern cities (South East Queensland with its 1000 new residents arriving each week is a good example here); public spaces become all the more important, then, and they’re under increasing stress also from more and more public events (such as street festivals, etc.). New approaches to governance, including a stronger focus on self- or private governance, also play a role here - and the demographic makeup of those commonly involved in such governance projects needs to be problematised further.

Sue explores this in the context of North American ‘Business Improvement Districts’, which have been popular in the US and Canada for some time (one of the earliest projects was around Toronto’s downtown Yonge Street area). Such areas extract a special levy from local businesses (sometimes in exchange for a reduction in rates bills), which is invested in local improvement projects - for example, youth outreach groups, area ambassadors, anti-litter squads, para-police ‘crime prevention officers’, ICT training, and specific events. This also introduces a new level of non-representative quasi-governmental organisations, sets up new exclusion zones which disallow certain forms of using public facilities (bicycling, skating, playing sports), and leads to the homogenisation of local areas (described as ‘clone towns’ without local specificity) and the balkanisation of the urban fabric which creates rootless, placeless phenomena.

Finally to my PhD student and fellow Gatewatching blogger Barry Saunders. He’s presenting work which is closely related to our wider blog mapping project, which aims to track distributed political discourse online. This also flows out of our ARC Linkage project on citizen journalism that generated the Youdecide2007 and Qlddecides Websites. In terms of blog mapping, Barry notes that much of the work done so far is essentially incomplete as it focusses mainly on the mapping, but does not take into account the political and public sphere dimensions of political blogging; network mapping (’linkfluence‘) and Google PageRank-based investigations of importance and influence are limited in their insights.

In particular, the maps of link networks which are generated in the process are usually static snapshots of link structures; blog conversations, however, are not static, and blog interlinkage is only one indicator of blogging activities themselves. Further, link analysis often mistakes static blogroll links for (arguably more important) discursive links within blog posts. Against this, Barry’s approach is multi-level, iterative, and palimpsestic - tracking development in blog-based interaction over time using tools such as datascrapers, Issuecrawler, Leximancer, as well as statistical analysis and visualisation tools (like IBM’s Many Eyes).

The approach is to select specific political issues and generate common search terms for them, to choose limiting parameters (here, the Australian political blogosphere), and develop a seed list of Australian political blogs discussing such issues, to feed these seeds into Issuecrawler, and feed the URLs found by the crawling process to the datascraper. The scraper accesses posts in these blogs and identifies blog post links and texts; these, finally, can be mapped through analysis and visualisation tools such as Many Eyes and Leximancer. (At the same time, cross-comparison between the maps generated for different blogs remains difficult, and further secondary analysis - e.g. through a second round of visualisation - may also be necessary; Barry will further develop this methodology throughout his work on his PhD project.)

What such information is eventually able to throw some light on is the development of political discusion online, the tracking of public opinion and identification of the new opinion leaders in the political blogosphere, and the shape of the public sphere in a post-broadcast environment.

Technorati : CCi 2008, blog mapping, blogs, business improvement districts, defamation, politics, public space, public speech, visualisation
Del.icio.us : CCi 2008, blog mapping, blogs, business improvement districts, defamation, politics, public space, public speech, visualisation

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?

A common response in online contexts has been a move to more tabloid styles of reporting, and a focus on search engine optimisation strategies to make content seen; against this, a few quality online news sites exist, but remain largely cross-subsidised by offline news organisations. (Online ads do not generate the same level of revenue as offline advertising, so a simple shift from one medium to another is not feasible.) What is sustainably possible in the online world?

In Australia, newspaper circulation is declining, but not as fast as elsewhere; worryingly, advertising revenue development is no longer directly connected to the performance of the overall economy here, either. One consequence of the online unbundling of stories (as users get straight to specific stories rather than accessing the entire newspaper product) is that more targetted advertising is possible in the online environment, providing customers with a new kind of efficiency; this is problematic, however, as it introduces a very strong short-termist focus on content that sells ads and confuses what is popular with what is good (leading for example to a reduction in strong and balanced foreign news coverage).

What space is left for thoughtful, reflective, discursive journalism in this environment? Additionally, the professional media have developed a rich ecosystem which may be in the process of being dismantled by the economic decline of news media, and citizen journalism may not be able to make up for what is being lost in the process. Critiques of the decline in quality in journalism miss a wider decline in democratic participation, David suggests - so journalism itself is no more to blame here than society overall.

News blogging and other forms of citizen journalism continue themselves to rely on mainstream journalism’s output, to engage with and criticise where necessary, and so a decline in mainstream industrial news may in the same process also undermine its major critics. Journalists provide a crucial linkage between politicians and audiences; most online sites as yet do not operate on the same level, and are not able to ask critical questions of politicians in the same way that mainstream media are able to - especially if their financial basis remains tenuous at best.

One answer in the online world is a strong focus on user-generated content, but where this is done by commercial operators it may resemble a new form of sharecropping, where site owners provide the digital space, and content is created by their dependent digital ‘peasants’. Australian print newspapers have traditionally been more autonomous in their political coverage, David suggests, than future news organisations are likely to be; the rise of private equity as major shareholders in news organisations may prove to be highly problematic for their independence.

Next up is Georgie McClean from SBS, whose focus is especially on questions of how public service media organisations may need to reshape themselves to suit the emerging mediasphere. New media technologies are tied to the gradual devolution of mass media, and SBS and other organisations must respond to this while maintaining their public service role, which is based on an implicit universalism. Any erosion of public service broadcasting leads to an impoverished public sphere - so while public funding for PSBs may be seen as anticompetitive, the commercial aspects of media must not be allowed to overshadow their cultural role.

PSBs should be assessed in terms of their status just as much as in terms of their ratings, therefore, and the bleeding of these elements into one another is problematic; PSBs must continue to be able to guarantee pluralism and diversity. In this context, new approaches to content and engagement with media users have evolved. Many networks have turned towards entertainment content and away from news and informational content. At the same time, the increasing diversity of media channels and significant investment in development may have led to a reduction in media diversity, due to increasing competition between channels.

Overall, there is both a decline in audiences for serious news, then, and an increase in channels for accessing such news for those who still want to do so. The management of editorial standards remains a key challenge for PSBs, and engaging with curated user-generated content in context becomes increasingly important. This is not a zero-sum game; user-generated and professionally prodused content can be used in combination. Questions of how such combinations may work best emerge especially in the context of niche content and niche audiences, many of whom cannot be addressed effectively by commerical media organisations alone. Market failure in providing non-mass or ‘unpopular’ services, the need for quality and diversity of voices, and a focus on public value and democratic principles all point to a continuingly important role for PSBs in this context. This is both a challenge and an opportunity for public service broadcasters, and notions of community engagement and universalism are all the more important here. For SBS in particular, its low level of direct government funding further complicates its performance in this area, however. (Whew, Georgie talks fast - hope I got the main gist of this…)

We move on to Anne Dunn from the University of Sydney, who continues our focus on public service broadcasting. She is currently working with the ABC on a user-generated content project, part of the second wave of digital developments in PSB (following the move to the online space which constituted the first wave). Digital media mean a vast increase on part of users in demand for content; there is, then, a need for a transition from PSB to public service media, and here, the dilemma is whether to open up or hold back in negotiating this transition. Anne’s research as presented here has been mainly with cross-media content producers in ABC regional radio, but is also informed by wider processes of upskilling ABC journalists for future media environments, including audience-generated content.

ABC radio remains in a very strong position in the marketplace overall, even in spite of strong and sustained commercial challenges, and public support for continued public funding for the ABC is also strong, therefore. The ABC’s ability to respond to user needs is also complicated by the demands of its charter (requiring it to provide coverage of parliamentary discussion, for example). However, governments (especially conservative governments) are also often criticising the ABC for apparent bias, and undoubtedly succumbs to a kind of ‘pre-emptive buckle’ in response to such criticism.

The ABC’s editorial policies therefore highlight the need for editorial balance, and position the organisation overtly as owned by the public; they require all news and current affairs content to be accurate, impartial, and objective. This focus on impartiality is problematic in its universality, and no commercial competitor to the ABC is under similar obligations; consciousness of this ’sacred duty’ of impartiality strongly affects especially also the ABC’s response to the challenge of online media.

Media organisations overall need to respond to this challenge, of course, but often continue to position their users merely as an inactive, infantilised audience; PSBs claim a responsibility for the audience, but also hold a strong anxiety about relinquishing any control to that public. Such relinquishment is seen as undermining universality, comprehensiveness, the sustenance of national and local identities, respect for public opinion, and quality and innovation in coverage. The weight of responsibility remains on content, quality, and editorial judgment, and programmatic innovation in this context means risk-taking at a significant level. Loosening the reins of editorial control is difficult here, and has usually taken place only in a strictly limited fashion (at the ABC and BBC, for example); going beyond any form of pre-filtered audience involvement further amplifies that risk.

The ABC’s responses to the desire for participation by users in media production have remained within that editorial framework; any level of participation in the news environment has remained especially limited (largely to photographs), and user-generated content remains clearly distinguished from professional work. In order to move beyond this, the ABC needs to train its own journalists to better generate content across platforms; it needs to find a model for participatory journalism, and it needs to retain a commitment to responsibility and editorial politices while working with the people who own and pay for the ABC as a public service media organisation.

Finally to my paper “Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration between Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework”, then - here’s the Powerpoint…

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Technorati : Australia, CCi 2008, SBS, citizen journalism, journalism, news
Del.icio.us : Australia, CCi 2008, SBS, citizen journalism, journalism, news

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.

I have been posting like a madman today because I saw how close we were to the magic milestone of 100 posts this morning. Yay.

Time to take stock. My favourite moments and biggest retrospective lulz on the way to this landmark include being “Blaired“, “Bolted” and “Parished” all in the space of a week. Awesome. Thanks for the initiation ceremony, guys. Readers’ magic moments can be added in comments.

I guess this is also a good point to make a clear announcement on the blog that next week is my (Jason’s) last one on deck full-time at QUT. From July 1st I’ll be moving to GetUp! to be their eDemocracy Director. I’ll be helping them with a number of things, including developing projects around long-term citizen engagement with the political process. More on this later. Anyway, very exciting, and a chance to achieve some worthwhile things.

I’ll still be blogging here at Gatewatching, though the character and frequency of my posts might change slightly. I’ll also be maintaining a connection with the research project at QUT, so I’ll be around the traps publishing and conferring in this field of research.

It’s been a great year working on the projects, and also helping to establish this blog as an adjunct to the research. The one thing I’ve found this year - and I think I speak for the others as well - is that the best way to learn about blogging and citizen journalism is by doing. This and youdecide2007 have been the most valuable learning experiences in my career to date, and they have been lots of fun, too. Thanks everybody!