Just posting an author copy of the latest paper I’ve submitted for a journal special issue. In it I discuss the looming NBN investment in the context of the decline of regional public spheres.

I use Townsville as a case-study, and argue that the regional public sphere there has declined over many years, to the detriment (and chagrin) of citizens there, and yet despite a level of Internet service provision that’s often comparable with the capitals, people haven’t engaged with the opportunities of public sphere blogging. This is a problem, then, that big fat cables alone won’t fix. I suggest we need to think about the role of creative clusters and intermediary institutions, and think about ABC Open in that light.

This will be the first in a series of articles that talk about the regional uptake of tools for public sphere engagement. I think that we are too often technologically-determinist when we think about things like the NBN investment, and we too seldom think about who’s excluded from online public spheres. I think there are systematic silences generated by our “networked public sphere” in Australia - future pieces will use empirical tools to investigate this.

Anyway, it’s embedded as a Scribd document below the fold. Comments welcome, and I’ll let you know whether it gets through peer review.

Oh, but please don’t quote it at this point without letting me know.

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broadband, journalism, regional bloggers blogging, broadband, journalism, public sphere, Queensland, townsville

Long-term followers of Gatewatching.org may remember that we started the blog in part as a vehicle for discussing our Youdecide2007 citizen journalism project for the 2007 Australian federal election. I’m happy to report that this project has now been featured as a case study in the Australian federal Department for Broadband, Communication, and the Digital Economy’s newly-released report “Australia’s Digital Economy: Future Directions“. For the Youdecide2007 case study, which is described a little misleadingly as an interview with project leader Terry Flew on the DBCDE Website, I drafted a concluding section with a few ideas on likely future developments in professional and citizen journalism, but because of the overall word limit we could only use a few bits from it - so I thought I’d republish the whole piece here:

The Future of Journalism and Citizen Journalism

The journalism industry is currently facing a number of substantial challenges, further exacerbated by the global financial crisis which is severely affecting the commercial media organisations operating newspapers and broadcasters. Newspaper readership, especially among younger age groups, is continuing to decline in most developed nations, and income from advertising is diminishing. Meanwhile, an increasing number of users are getting their news from a variety of online sources - but here, brand loyalty is often substantially less developed than it was for print and broadcast news. Further, new news aggregators - for example, Google News - track and collate reports from news sources around the world, leading to a more random access model for news. This may be beneficial for smaller news operators (whose news reports are now placed alongside reports on the same topic from major newspapers), but further reduces the special position of leading news brands such as The New York Times or The Australian.

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citizen journalism, government, journalism, policy Australia, citizen journalism, DBCDE, digital economy, journalism, youdecide2007

Amongst the standard-issue ammunition in the journalism industry’s defensive skirmishes against those pesky citizen journalists and news bloggers is the deceptively simple claim that there’s a clear difference between reporting the news, i.e. breaking stories (which is what professional journalists do) and commenting on the news, i.e. “endless talk” (which is what everyone else does).

It’s a line repeated in the latest missive from Christian Kerr in The Australian - a rabid, self-serving rant against all those online commentators from Possum’s Pollytics to Larvatus Prodeo whom he doesn’t like, curiously claiming in its title that “our blogs [are] too analytical”, as if intelligent analysis is somehow a bad thing. Still, if nothing else, it’s got one thing going for it: if ‘real’ journalists are the ones that break stories, then Kerr himself isn’t a journalist.

One problem with that neat definition, though, is that breaking stories isn’t a particularly common trait of mainstream newsroom practice these days: much of the content of our daily newspapers and broadcast bulletins comes from a diminishing number of global wire services, and is simply processed by journalists to fit the local context. Similar to citizen journalists’ common practice of gatewatching - following the news passing through the gates of mainstream news publications, and then commenting on it - this is a kind of industrial gatewatching, where agency feeds are constantly monitored for new items to be inserted into the locally-produced publication. So, news bloggers and citizen journalists don’t tend to break stories - but neither, for the most part, do professional journalists.

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blogging analysis, Christian Kerr, citizen journalism, commentary, Die Zeit, journalism, news blogging, paid content, The Australian

There’s so much going on at the moment that it’s difficult to keep up with it all - I’ve been meaning to comment for some time on Rupert Murdoch’s latest bright idea (charging for online news content), but that will have to wait a little longer still. So, in the meantime, just a couple of quick notes about new publications we’re involved in:

Out now is a new collection edited by Stuart Allan and Einar Thorsen, covering developments in journalism around the world - Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives. I’ve yet to see the book in physical form as I’m travelling at the moment, but the Website for the book looks very promising. Jason, Barry, and I contributed a chapter discussing the Youdecide2007 experience.

The other new book, also just released, is probably going to appeal to a somewhat smaller number of our regular readers: Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung covers the findings of a major new study of the transformation of journalism in an online context in Germany (and is published in German). Editors and authors Christoph Neuberger, Christian Nuernbergk, and Melanie Rischke kindly invited me to contribute a chapter on gatewatching and citizen journalism, which presents a condensed and updated summary of the key arguments in my 2005 book Gatewatching. Highly recommended if you can read German and want to know what’s happening there in the citizen journalism arena.

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Uncategorized books, citizen journalism, Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, gatewatching, journalism, Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung, publications, youdecide2007

Just a quick announcement (more real blogging to come soon, promise!) - one of the research teams at the Smart Services CRC that I’m participating in is currently running a survey about Australians’ use of online news. Please participate, and pass on the link: http://tinyurl.com/digitalnews. One lucky respondent will win an iPod!

Technorati : Smart Services CRC, journalism, news, survey
Del.icio.us : Smart Services CRC, journalism, news, survey

Uncategorized journalism, news, Smart Services CRC, survey

I’ve had to be away from my computer since Friday, as I’ve been entertaining visitors. When I came back the last thread had been transformed out of all recognition. I thought that rather than address everything that had been said there with further comments, and in the light of further posts at The Content Makers and LP, it might be good to post anew.

Over the last few days a mysterious piece of woodwork called the “journalists versus bloggers frame” has kicked around a fair bit. What motivated my original post was, in part, a desire to trouble an idea that seemed to be doing the rounds that comparisons between bloggers and journalists were necessarily uninformative, even misleading - “out of court” as I said initially. I elaborated on this in comments in the last thread. While I don’t think it’s the only lens through which practices of blogging ought to be viewed, I think there are times in which it’s perfectly legitimate and relevant to compare the actions of bloggers and journalists. There are circumstances in which the actions of bloggers and journalists overlap sufficiently for the comparison to be informative. This is one of them.

What’s at issue is a very specific question: when is it right to publish details of someone’s identity, knowing that revealing this information may have damaging effects on the the reputation of the person concerned? This is an ethical question with implications for the practice of anyone engaged in publishing information. My answer to the question is: the appropriate time to name someone publicly is after you’ve had some solid confirmation of the person’s identity, and ideally this should be first-hand confirmation.

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blogging, ethics, media blogging, blogosphere, Club Troppo, ethics, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, media

This is my first post upon re-entry to academic life - I am now lecturing at the University of Wollongong and I am based in the beautiful Illawarra region. I’ll have more time and capacity to devote to my participation in this blog from now on, and I’m able to have a broader view of the issues Gatewatching has always dealt with, now that I’m no longer neck deep in the business of being a full-time practitioner.

The occasion for this post is the wash-up from Katherine Wilson’s hoaxing of Keith Windschuttle. I’m a little late on this, and my only excuse is the trauma of moving cities for the sixth time in five years. Most readers who are familiar with the Australian media and blogosphere will be across the details, so I won’t rehearse them here. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, and want a blow-by-blow account from near the centre of the action, check out the archive over at Margaret Simons’ place. There are also many astute analyses of the situation online.  For mine, Graham Young’s at On Line Opinion is the most sustained and productive reflection on the incident to date, even if I don’t necessarily agree with all of the conclusions.

First, a disclaimer: I enjoyed the hoax immensely, I think it worked, I think Windschuttle had it coming, and I think his excuses exceeded even the hoax itself for entertainment value. Among other things, his explanations show him appealing for slack that he has never been prepared to cut for other scholars. I think Margaret Simons behaved ethically throughout, and in my view most suggestions that the hoax wasn’t worth doing proceed largely from political or personal axe-grinding.

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Graham Young, blogging, citizen journalism academia, blogging, citizen journalism, Crikey, Graham Young, journalism, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, newspapers

(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.

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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.

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

A bit of overdue housekeeping on some research progress in the project. Even though I’m now at GetUp! almost full time, I’m still engaged with research collaboration at QUT, and I hope to publish something on the experience of building an e-democracy project in the not-too-distant future.

For now, the news is that a few weeks back, Professor Terry Flew and I submitted a paper to an international journalism journal, based on the youdecide2007 experience. It’s called “Journalism as Social Networking: The Australian youdecide project and the 2007 Federal election.” (Obligatory colon ahoy!) You can go to the QUT eprints archive to download it. Academic publishing being what it is, it may be awhile before it appears in a published form, but everyone should feel free to read and discuss this preprint version.

We’re pretty happy with it at this point - basically it combines the stuff I’ve banged on about concerning the four dimensions of the work of the “preditor” - the emerging professional role of facilitating citizen journalism - with a whole lot of context concerning the state of journalism, the state of news media in Australia, and the changing role of journalism education.

The paper feels well-timed, given the consternation and discussion around the future of media careers and institutions in Australia at the moment. (I heard some fascinating versions of this at the “Media in the Pub” event last week in Sydney.)

Anyway, let’s see what the peer reviewers say! Enjoy.

citizen journalism, media citizen journalism, journalism, media, Terry Flew, youdecide2007