gatewatching

It’s been awhile between drinks here on Gatewatching. My excuse is that I’ve moved jobs, and things have been (and remain) frantic here at GetUp! (Not sure about Axel and Barry’s excuses )Big news soon, but the job has been something of a continuation of my work on youdecide2007 and queenslanddecides, with a little bit of open australia mixed in, and some other spesh features. Watch this space.

Anyway, I’m inspired to post today by what seems to me to be indications of a definite move into a second “wave” or “phase” of Australian political blogging. A lot of bloggers seem to be moving towards group blogging, underwritten by advertising revenue - higher-traffic political bloggers are moving towards long-term, monetised and (hopefully) more sustainable models of content-making. (This is apart from those bloggers - the Bolts, Blairs and Dunlops - who are already operating successfully within MSM sites).

Read more…

Uncategorized advertising, blogosphere, business, journalism

(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.
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

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.

Read more…

citizen journalism citizen journalism, conferences, elections, journalism

Journos get a bit of stick in the blogosphere sometimes, but it’s worth remembering that their job requires bravery. Especially in areas afflicted by authoritarian governments, corruption or civil disorder, they often risk their lives simply by doing their jobs. Graphic proof is available on this interactive map from MSN which shows where and when journalists have died in the line of duty. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of the casualties have been in Iraq and Afghanistan.

HT: journalism.co.uk

Uncategorized journalism

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

The last months have been enormously productive (and, at times, exhausting!) for me. In addition to my own book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I’ve also contributed to a number of other publications - and quite a few of them are now finally available in print and/or online.

In a previous post, I’ve already mentioned Megan Boler’s edited collection Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. I’ve now received my copy of the book, and very nice it looks, too - a great collection of essays from many key authors and researchers in the field, combined with Megan’s interviews with journalists and media activists including Robert McChesney and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. My own contribution explores the post-tactical opportunities for citizen media, and draws parallels to the long-term establisment of other once tactical movements; a pre-print version of the chapter is online here. The book is available from Amazon and MIT Press.

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism academic, blogging, citizen journalism, journalism