gatewatching

Eagle-eared listeners of 2SER FM may have noticed me popping up on the radio the other day - Leeanne Torpey interviewed me for a segment on The Fourth Estate about the use of social networking in politics (following on from the successful use of social networking in galvanising support for Barack Obama and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Kevin Rudd). It’s come out quite well, and you can now access a podcast of the whole 30-minute show at the 2SER Website.

The key point I ended up on, and one very much worth exploring further, is what to do with a network like Obama’s now that the election is over. (Labor’s campaign managers have just answered [?] this by rebranding Kevin07 as KevinPM - we’ll see how that works out.) For the Obama machine, this will be interesting to follow - after all, what exactly is his my.barackobama.com network? Is it part of the Democrat campaigning system, part of Democrat party structures, or even an element of the incoming administration? Is it a quasi-party in its own right, a political movement, a non-profit lobby group, or even a commercial enterprise (it is a dot.com, after all)?

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USA, social networking activism, Barack Obama, elections, Kevin Rudd, social networking, USA

(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.

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

For those of our readers following the US Presidential campaign and wanting to look beyond mainstream coverage, Henry Jenkins has a nice overview of a few citizen journalism projects which aim to provide alternative perspectives on the election race.

It’s nice to see the emphasis on first-hand reporting here (which was also a key aspect of our Australian citizen journalism projects, of course) - this works against the perception that citizen journalism is mainly the domain of “armchair journalists” (as Dennis Shanahan would have it), or simply acts as a parasite feeding on mainstream journalism content (as Jürgen Habermas appears to believe).

Also interesting is the cautious support from mainstream media organisations for such projects (in the cases Henry lists, this includes MTV and the Christian Science Monitor, for example). Next week, I’m presenting a paper at the CCi conference in Brisbane on ways for journalism to move beyond the pro-am (industry/citizen) schism, so these examples are very timely.

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citizen journalism citizen journalism, conferences, elections, journalism

Thanks to a heads-up from Tim at Tree of Knowledge, I found out about this conference, the Personal democracy Forum, being held in New York City this month. Looks like they’ll be discussing some issues that have preoccupied us here at Gatewatching - the influence of new technologies on political campaigning and debate.

The debate in this area doesn’t just happen on Gatewatching The conference’s tagline is “technology is changing politics”, but Charlie Beckett (who heads up the LSE’s Polis Centre where Tim is studying) has posed the following tough questions that he’d like the conference to answer:

1. Tell me in concrete terms what the new technology has allowed you to do that is significantly different in political terms from before? Not just being faster, more connected, more responsive. Tell me what difference it has made, if any, in policy outcomes and the distribution of power?

2. Is this just an American thing? Is it because US politics was so sterile, so locked up by lobbyists and big money and ideological stasis? or can new technology unleash new democratic forces in other countries?

I’d add another - could you make a realistic comparison of the current impacts of online campaigning methods and traditional broadcast media? One of the big speakers at the conference, Clay Shirky, has said some pretty silly things lately about the place of television in our culture - I would hope that the conference would proceed with a recognition that broadcast media are still the principal information source for most voters. That’s not being cynical, just conceding that there is a long way to go, and lots of work to do, in making online engagement more generally available and effective.

Sadly I won’t be able to go - I’ll be preparing for something new (more on that later), but Tim says he’ll be liveblogging the conference (presumably over at TOK), so that’s something to look forward to.

USA Charlie Beckett, Clay Shirky, conferences, democracy, e-democracy, elections, Tree of Knowledge, USA

Our colleague Terry Flew has a brand spanking new blog. So far, he’s been doing some on-the-ground reporting on the US Primaries (Terry’s in the States on a sabbatical at the moment), but no doubt the blog will come to include Terry’s academic interests, including citizen journalism. Go visit!

blogging blogging, Brisbane, elections, QUT

I thought I’d put up here my first piece that’s come out of digesting the youdecide2007 experience. This is the draft version of a paper I’ve submitted to an academic journal, though I think it’s accessible enough for anyone with an interest to read. 

It’s reflecting on the forms of cultural labour our small team did during the election in facilitating citizen journalism, which mixed more traditional tasks of journalism with new disciplines.

Downloadable below

Preditors - Making citizen journalism work (PDF)

As the paper makes clear, I’ve called the workers who  facilitate citizen journalism preditors - thinking through this new form of cultural labour will, I hope, help us get past some often silly oppositions that get set up between citizen journalism and “teh MSM”. Crowdsourced citizen journalism projects actually need “go-to” people with a certain minimum of journalism training; mainstream media organisations are increasingly looking to harness user-generated content. This has implications for journalism training, established media and independent journalism initiatives.

I’ve nominated four areas of responsibility for preditors: content work, networking, community work and tech work. You’ll see how they blend in the paper.

It’s pretty long - over 8000 words - but if you think it’s hard work reading that much, you should try writing it! My long-form writing muscles got a good work out. Fellow scholar-nerds might care to know that this length might be unacceptable for many Australian journals, but is pretty normal for international journals. I’ve handed this one in to one of them (it’s a secret while its in peer review).

I’m looking for reactions and comments, which you might like to put in the comments below… I will give out minties to anyone who finds typos! I’m giving a version of this paper at this conference on citizen journalism in Brisbane this week, and again in England in April!

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, elections, preditor, research, youdecide2007

Jeff Jarvis smacks down the American media’s love for (and lack of skill at) horse race politics:

It’s amazing that reporters love horse-race coverage since they’re so damned lousy at it…
Any idiot can bet on a horse and lose. And there’s a word for them. Losers.

While we’ve also been quite critical here about the Australian election coverage and its horse-race narratives, we’re very lucky to have an electoral system that is open to good psephological analysis. As Simon Jackman points out in addressing the lack of an American Antony Green:

The United States doesn’t have an Antony Green. I’m not sure it can. It doesn’t have the ABC (the national broadcaster), it doesn’t have the AEC, nor compulsory voting, nor standardized, nationwide election administration (balloting procedures, registration procedures, etc).

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blogging, citizen journalism abc, blogging, citizen journalism, elections, investigative, journalism, poll wars, psephology

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