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.

Read more…

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

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

(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

Editor and Publisher today has a report (worth reading in full) on Nielsen data suggesting that some high-profile newspapers and broadcasting news brands are far outstripping Google news in terms of unique traffic. The New York Times is the leading newspaper by traffic, and MSNBC and CNN Digital Network are in the top five. The leading online news source is Yahoo! News, and AOL News is number 4. Google News comes in at number 8.

The report shows the top 30 - to my surprise, Huffington Post is there, but Drudge is nowhere to be seen…

media Google, media, newspapers, ratings

In his recent post on mainstream newspapers’ gradual warming to Google as a source of traffic to their Websites, Jason points to Matthew Hindman’s claims that descriptions of the Net as ‘democratising’ media participation may be overstated (in Hindman’s book manuscript Voice, Equality, and the Internet), and notes my skeptical stance towards Hindman’s conclusions. Heh. Jason, are you baiting me?

Seriously: yes, I do have very strong reservations about Hindman’s work. While he’s got access to some useful statistics about the distribution of attention in the blogosphere, and is perhaps worth reading for that reason, I’m very doubtful about what he does with those stats, and why he does it. To some extent, Hindman’s work seems to me to be cut from the same cloth as that of Andrew Keen (though operating at a more apparently scientific level) - which is to say that in the first place, he seems to grab many of the most banal and over-exuberant claims about the blogosphere and unsurprisingly has no trouble debunking them.

In reading his book manuscript, I noted down ’straw man argument’ a good half dozen times - he claims that his work helps to debunk views that the Internet in general and blogs in particular democratise media participation, but pays little attention to exactly what other authors mean when they express such views, and instead substitutes a caricature of their views instead.

To take one example: on page 71, Hindman writes:

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blogging, media academic, blogging, Matthew Hindman, media

British journalist and blogger Dave Lee wants Google’s famous workplace innovation of “20% time” to be extended to journalists. Google’s scheme allows employees to take a day a week to use their initiative and creativity in projects that go beyond what they’re assigned. Lee argues

If every reporter at every paper had 20 per cent to spend following their own nose on a story, heaven knows what gold we might find. We always hear the phrase ‘more bobbies on the beat’. How about ‘more journos on the beat’? Sounds great to me. If I was a regional reporter I’d want every parent at every school to know my face, and I’d want every copper to know my name, so that if anything happened that the public should know about, they wouldn’t be afraid to call as they’d know me as being an good, honest bloke.

Sounds great to me, too. After my experience at the Future of Journalism conference last week, I’d wager that many newsrooms would feel that they couldn’t afford this in an era of diminishing revenues and tightening budgets. But maybe they can’t afford not to be publishing the most well-informed content, and allowing journalists to make the strongest possible links to the local community.

It may be that the adoption of participatory forms of journalism can help journos serve and interact with their community in new ways. But either way, giving journos space and time to be creative (or even investigative) could pay off for proprietors.

citizen journalism, media citizen journalism, journalism, media, UK

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China’s first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose to prominence especially after the events of 11 September 2001). Its rise also contributed to a new debate on the nature of journalism itself, and many initial views argued that news blogging was not journalism due to the narrow subjects explored by most blogs, the reliance on second-hand information, the limited sources and experience of news blogging, and its limited credibility.

In China, citizen journalism emerged with the 2003 SARS crisis, when citizens reported about the effects of the crisis; there are now some 28 million active blogs and 47 million blog writers in China (as of 2007), and citizen journalism provides an important source of uncensored news. Zola Zhou, then an Internet manager, began blogging in 2004, and rose to prominence through investigative reports about a couple who refused to have their house moved to make way for a new development project. By late 2007, the blog carried some 814 articles, 112 were filed in a category called “social news” (and Zola Zhou currently works as a vegetable vendor).

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism, government, media academic, blogging, citizen journalism, government, journalism, media

One of the most consistently… bracing political blogs is Andrew Elder’s clearing-house for the foibles of the commentariat, Politically Homeless.

I haven’t had time to have a good solid read of his stuff for a while - a comment from The Doctor on a previous Gatewatching post led me to have a squiz this evening.

His stuff is critical and often hilarious, but it’s beyond snark - Elder’s style involves a close, often line-by-line disassembly of the offerings of the paid-up commentariat, and discussions of their shortcomings that are extended, impassioned and incisive. Usually each post focusses on a single article.

I couldn’t just add a link to the poll wars post of earlier this week, which catalogued the brouhaha on the 21st - I thought passages like this deserved a post of their own:

Dennis Shanahan is an experienced journalist, yet his experience was sidelined by
his yearning for more Howard. He was comprehensively shown up by people going
by names like Possum Comitatus, Poll Bludger and Mumble. People smarter than him,
people who knew more about voting patterns than he did, people who all but stole
the bread and butter out of his mouth.

That’s about the least combative part of that post, by the way.

Anyway, I’m sure you’ve all got his feed in your readers already. If you haven’t, and you’d like to see how excoriating intelligent, informed blogospheric voices can be, get over there.

UPDATE THURSDAY: Yesterday’s post about the “renaissance” of moderate Liberalism, which bounces off an article written by Liberal MP Marise Payne, is simply a classic of Elder’s idiosyncratic style.

blogging, media blogging, journalism, media, poll wars, The Australian

Among the consequences of the emergence of the opinion-led blogosphere are, on the one hand, news organisations bringing prominent bloggers “inside the tent”, and on the other, presenting their op-ed writers work in a “blog-like” format. Whether you think that’s just due recognition of the affordances of blogging and the ’sphere’s emerging talent, or lip service and the co-optation of alternative voices will depend on what you think blogging is for.

What’s interesting to me is that, in turn, this allows differences of opinion within media organisations to emerge pretty well instantaneously. Today, for instance, Blogocracy’s Tim Dunlop has done a long post about his disagreeement with the underlying logic of a column by Malcolm Colless, published in this morning’s Australian.

Read more…

blogging, media blogging, Bolt, Dunlop, journalism, media, news.com.au, poll wars, psephology, The Australian

In the Outsiders post earlier today, I mentioned that Possum said he was bringing his regular service back online after a short break in the real world. He has delivered immediately with a reply to The Australian’s Dennis Shanahan’s criticism of the psephosphere last week.

Read Shanahan’s column first, then proceed directly to Possum’s post.

We’ve written about last year’s poll wars here, in our ABC column and in some academic publications before. They’ve been ignited again, and once more it seems to be the Oz that’s buying the fight. To repeat our earlier arguments - this is a struggle over cultural capital, and the authority to interpret political information, but it may well turn out to be counter-productive for Shanahan. Possum’s reasoning in this latest reply seems compelling, but the fact that bloggers can actually bring expert knowledge to these topics might well be the very thing that inspires broadsheet snark.

We’ll watch this unfold with interest.

UPDATE: Let the record show that William Bowe at Poll Bludger and Peter Brent at Mumble responded to the Shanahan on the 21st. We would have got to this earlier but we were busy last week

blogging, media blogging, journalism, media, poll wars, psephology