There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few weeks about the continuing struggle between NewsCorp chairman Rupert Murdoch’s defensive and protectionist approach to online news, and ABC Managing Director Mark Scott’s ambitious ABC Open strategy to increase dissemination of its news content and incorporate user-generated content more strongly. Some of that discussion has been insightful, some, not unexpectedly, much less so.

I’m already on record as saying that I think that - outside niche markets - Murdoch’s paywall plans are doomed to fail, and fail miserably; most news users simply don’t care enough about NewsCorp’s specific flavour of news to prefer it so much that they’d be willing to pay money for it, if much the same material is also available for free elsewhere. (If this report from Forrester is right, Murdoch should certainly think twice about what he’s proposing to do.) I’ve also been less than convinced by those commentators who say that the ABC’s plans for a stronger embrace of user-generated content, and the gradual or not-so-gradual decline of commercial news organisations, are ‘bad for journalism’, for two reasons:

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journalism, media abc, ABC Open, online news, paywall, Rupert Murdoch, social media

Readers of Gatewatching may be interested in this: the call for papers for EDEM 2010, the fourth international conference on e-democracy, to be held in Austria next May, has now been released. I attended EDEM 2009 in Vienna a couple of months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it; much of the work presented there (including the paper which Jason and I co-authored, of course) was directly relevant also to the Australian context, especially in light of the explorations currently being undertaken by the Government 2.0 Task Force.

From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

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government, policy, politics, public sphere CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media

Just a quick post to alert our readers to a number of PhD research opportunities in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, in cooperation with various industry partners. There’s a wide range of potential projects here, but personally, I’m particularly interested in applications from potential PhD students wishing to explore future avenues in public broadcasting in collaboration with the Australian ABC. One key question in this context is the connection between traditional public broadcasting models and the embrace of user-generated content, which the ABC and other public broadcasters have engaged in more or less actively, and this is closely connected to my own research interests in produsage and social media as well as the work we’ve done at QUT on the future of public broadcasters.

You can find a full call for applications over at snurb.info - please pass it on to anyone who may be interested. And remember that applications for Australian students close on 30 September, for international students on 9 October…

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media abc, CCi, creative industries, innovation, PhD, produsage, public broadcasting, social media

Opinion piece in the ABC’s Opinion section here.

With the US election likely to be decided today, it’s a good time to have a look at the way social media’s been used in this campaign. From the massive fundraising of Obama’s microdonors, to the fact checking of candidates, to the raving lunacy of the wingnut fringe, this election has really brought social media’s promises and pitfalls to the fore.

The exemplar of a successful political campaign’s use of social media is, barring a sudden upset, Obama’s campaign. Foregoing public funding and the big money of lobbyists, Obama has raised enormous amounts of money from primarily small donors, at last count over $US390 million. Obama claims this will allow him to reduce lobbyist influence in government, though inevitably, the truth is somewhat more complex than that.

Obama’s campaign has also make powerful use of social networking tools such as Twitter, MySpace-style social networking sites and even an iPhone application. This commitment to using tools to engage with a primarily younger, tech savvy audience, combined with an commitment to Network Neutrality and a progressive tech policy (Barack Obama on technology and innovation - PDF) has certainly helped his support amongst younger voters. McCain’s admission that he doesn’t know how to use a computer hasn’t helped his regain any of that support.

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Uncategorized abc, Barack Obama, democracy, e-democracy, election, McCain, Obama, politics, psephology, QUT, social media, social networking, USA