(Crossposted from snurb.info.)
Singapore.
The first full day at ISEA 2008 starts with a number of parallel paper sessions - and the first paper in one of these sessions is mine (that is, the paper I’ve co-authored with Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai). I’ve posted the slides below, and will try to record the audio as well the audio is up now, too.
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
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.)
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
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.)
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
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?
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
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.
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
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.
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
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.
(Crossposted from snurb.info - for full coverage of the CCi conference, see here.)
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?
In this second part, we’ll follow on from our discussion of key themes in The Other Cheek, Larvatus Prodeo, and Club Troppo by looking at the concept maps which Leximancer produces. But first, a recap of the background for this study: I’ve already posted about our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008. We distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages, and what I’m focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we’ve separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.).
What I’ve done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs. In the first part of this post, I simply listed the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they’re frequently talking about), which produced some notable differences between the three blogs. My reading of this is that Club Troppo focusses much more strongly on policy analysis over political wonkery and insider gossip; for The Other Cheek, the balance is reversed, while Larvatus Prodeo sits somewhere in the middle.
In this second part, I’ll map these blogs’ key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another on the map than terms which don’t, in other words. The resulting maps provide further support to the observation that the blogs have different points of focus in their day-to-day coverage of politics - and by plotting all frequently-used terms on the map, the exact nature of these topical clusters becomes a little clearer, too.
In a previous post, I mentioned our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008, and we’ve now begun an exploratory analysis of this corpus of data.
As noted in our discussion paper for this project, the first step in this analysis is to distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages (something that does not necessarily happen in comparable studies, by the way). So, what I’m focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we’ve separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.). While I’ll mainly discuss content analysis here, this is especially important also in the context of link analysis, of course, where blogroll, comment, and other links skew the data if we want to focus on examining the discursive network between blog posts.
So, building on this corpus of blog post data, here are some preliminary observations. What I’ve done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs, to both fine-tune that process and see if any discernible differences between individual blogs emerge. I’ll present the results in two ways: one simply lists the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they’re frequently talking about), and the second maps these key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another than terms which don’t, in other words. (I’ll post these maps later, in the second part of this post.)
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