gatewatching

(Cross-posted from snurb.info.)

So, last Saturday I went to the Future of Journalism event in Brisbane (and spoke on one of the panels). Contrary to my usual practice, I didn’t live-blog the event - panel-based events are notoriously difficult to blog. Here, then, are some reflections on what I saw - adding to comments already posted by Mark Bahnisch, Marian Edmunds, Cameron Reilly, and Bronwen Clune, among others.

The event began well, with Margaret Simons setting the theme with her usual insightful comments. Her observations about the troubled economic future for the journalism industry (and here, especially newspapers) are perhaps nothing new to most of us (though still not necessarily fully appreciated by many journalists themselves), and the bleak future that this malaise points to especially for in-depth, costly, quality investigative journalism has been discussed in some detail already (including by Jason, Barry and me in the Club Bloggery series), but it was a useful framing for the panels to follow.

Two key points Margaret made bear repeating, however. On the one hand, that the link between the business of media and the practice of journalism is gradually being severed - it is increasingly possible for some forms of journalism to take place outside of the business environment (indeed, the best future for investigative journalism may now lie in funding by taxpayers, NGOs, or philanthropists, while quality political commentary in Australia is now found in citizen journalism sites more so than newspapers), while there is also a chance for journalists to extract themselves from employment by mainstream media organisations and set up shop on their own (something Margaret herself is currently attempting to do, of course).

On the other hand, then, this also requires journalists (and especially journalism students), to develop skills well beyond the standard journalistic craft. Margaret stressed quite strongly that journalism students would be well advised to learn about business plans, and to seek a possible professional future in alternative ventures rather than relying on the availability of employment in the mainstream industry.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism blogging, Brisbane, citizen journalism, conferences, futures, journalism, MEAA, newspapers

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

The Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance (the key union for Australian media workers) has recently begun to organise a series of events titled “The Future of Journalism”, bringing together industry and citizen journalists, academics, and other media experts to explore future developments in the news media. The first of these was held in Sydney in May, covered by Jason Wilson at Gatewatching and Rachel Hills at New Matilda, and now it’s Brisbane’s turn - at QUT’s Gardens Theatre on 13 September 2008.

For more information, and to register, see the MEAA’s Future of Journalism site. In the afternoon, I’ll be part of a panel titled “Bloggers: Amateur Netizens or Professionals of the Future?” alongside Mark Bahnisch and Marian Edmunds, and I think the first point I’m going to make is that the amateur/professional dichotomy (usually mapped on a parallel blogger/journalist dichotomy) is of course no longer sustainable today. In fact, it’s nothing more than the result of the classic approach in journalistic writing which reduces any conflict ultimately to a struggle between two opposite stereotypes - amateurs vs. professionals, youth vs. establishment, poor vs. rich, left vs. right, good vs. evil.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism blogging, Brisbane, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism, MEAA

(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.

Read more…

blogging academic, blogging, conferences, mapping

(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.)

Read more…

media academic, conferences, futures, journalism, media

(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.)

Read more…

Graham Young, citizen journalism academic, blogosphere, citizen journalism, conferences, Graham Young, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, youdecide2007

(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?

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism, Margaret Simons

(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.

Read more…

social networking academic, conferences, elections, Kevin Rudd, social networking

(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.

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism, youdecide2007

(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.

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism

(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?

Read more…

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, conferences, journalism