gatewatching

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

An upbeat piece about politics and the internet on New Matilda here.

Is there anything to look forward to? The gnomes running the internet have given us a few reasons to be optimistic about journalism and democracy.

The US is finally stepping up and implementing some of those e-democracy initiatives they’ve been promising since AOL, and Obama’s Change.gov is an encouraging sign that they might actually be serious about it. Obama’s good on net neutrality too, which bodes well for continued internet access.

Locally, however, Stephen Conroy is dead keen to slow down the Australian internet so Clive Hamilton can steam open every email to check for child porn prior to delivery, but public opinion, technical implementation and, uh, reality are putting the brakes on his plan. The campaign against the so-called Clean Feed is a great example of how new media technologies are "hyper-empowering" (for lack of a better term) ordinary people. A relatively small group of highly connected people on Twitter sparked a loud online campaign that feed into initiatives by the EFA, the Greens and later on GetUp that has comprehensively upset Conroy’s plans. While Conroy will no doubt push onwards, the online environment has allowed these single issue activists to run rings around Conroy and Hamilton’s free speech = child porn argument. The outburst on Twitter no doubt contributed to the appearance of @turnbullmalcolm and @kevinruddpm on Twitter.

Some discussion of the article on LP here.

Uncategorized Barack Obama, Crikey, Larvatus Prodeo, Margaret Simons, Poll Bludger, Possum Comitatus

(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.)

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

Newspoll Tuesday has become a bit of an occasion in the Australian blogosphere. The influence of the pseph bloggers, the moments of antagonism between the blogosphere and the Oz last year, the motivation to enter into further fruitful dialogue with Dennis Shanahan, and the urge to take Dr Nelson’s temperature have meant that most of the major blogs will offer some opinion on the latest numbers.

Today’s no exception. The headline news, which even Mr Shanahan has forced himself to read out, is that Nelson’s surge is over for the moment, and that Labor has boosted its support at the Coalition’s expense. Nice takes include Tree of Knowledge’s snarky rhetorical questions and disturbing photoshopping, Kim at LP’s questions about the media’s real influence on public opinion, Andrew Bolt’s call for Dr Nelson’s head, and Tim Dunlop’s scepticism about the whole concept of a “Honeymoon”. Pride of place, as always, goes to the psephos takes - Pollbludger’s discussion thread, Mumble’s spin smackdowns, and Possum’s detailed analysis (including wonky graphics and a Pollytracker update).

Yes, Newspoll Tuesday gives a warm fuzzy feeling of regularity for the blogosphere connoisseur. But it may be more important than that. Even though it’s based on an MSM poll, it might show that the Australian blogosphere is developing it’s own news cycles and temporality. The peculiar trajectory of the development of political blogging here (as well as the features of Australian democracy) mean that, at least once a fortnight, everyone is talking about the same thing.

Uncategorized blogosphere, Bolt, Dennis Shanahan, Larvatus Prodeo, Mumble, Newspoll, Poll Bludger, Possum Comitatus, psephology, The Australian, Tree of Knowledge

Update: For those prepared to contemplate the erotic allure of blogspot profile photos in relation to the Henson debate, the NSFW (language) Grodsthink for this week should provide some food for thought.

This week, in the tissues and the blogosphere, there has been a lot of discussion of art, and its “evil twin” pornography, in relation to some photos. A lot of it’s been that simplistic - either Bill Henson’s photos are art or porn, either we should plump for “freedom of expression” or the “protection of children”. In this sense, many responses have amounted to little more than a less-than-helpful jerking of the knees.

For mine, neither one side’s claims to be speaking for common decency and the Law, nor the other side’s gratuitous displays of cultural authority or browbeating dismissals of “philistinism” have been particularly enlightening. The whole debate so far has caused nothing but confusion for some people, not least pollsters in some metropolitan tabloid newspapers.

(Image from Yesterday’s Crikey) Read more…

Daily Telegraph academia, art, Bill Henson, Bolt, Crikey, criticism, Daily Telegraph, Larvatus Prodeo, Mentalization-Positive, Sorrow at Sills Bend

I seem to recall that last year that we copped a bit of stick for suggesting that Larvatus Prodeo was an influential blog. This was, of course, partly premised on Axel’s issuecrawler analysis of issue networks in the Australian blogosphere. The value of this analysis was disputed at the time, by other influential bloggers.

I’ve been meaning to post on some information that was passed onto me on this very topic, but it seems that Trevor Cook has beaten me to it. There’s very similarly-premised research from Dr Colin McLeod, Marketing honcho from the AFL, suggesting that… LP is an influential blog.

Presumably, aforementioned prominent bloggers will be writing to the AFL forthwith to dispute their findings.

Well done, in any case, to the LP crew.

Uncategorized Larvatus Prodeo, Trevor Cook

UPDATE: Grodscorp’s weekly podcast, this time including discussion of the Blair move, is here. NSFW - frequent coarse language.

I think it’s fair to say that we here at Gatewatching have had an… interesting relationship with Tim Blair’s blog since we started posting here last year. I won’t go over the details of our spat - you can check out the archives if you like. In some ways a fight with Blair has probably become a rite of passage in the Australian blogosphere. Anyway, news is that he’s moved his blog onto the site of his main employer, the Daily Telegraph.

Blair’s blog has been one of the most successful Australian efforts in terms of traffic, not least because he’s been able to draw an international readership. He’s moved through several hosting set-ups - first on blogspot, then spleenville, then to the place he was blogging until today, timblair.net. All of this, apparently, has been independent of his work on the Bulletin and then the Tele as an editor and columnist. Now his blog has been integrated on the paper’s main site, and it esembles those of his News Limited colleagues Andrew Bolt, and Tim Dunlop (author of Blogocracy).

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Blair, Daily Telegraph, blogging Blair, blogging, Blogocracy, Bolt, Daily Telegraph, Dunlop, Grods, Larvatus Prodeo, MSM, news.com.au