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.

Read more…

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

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.

Technorati : Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung, Youdecide2007, books, citizen journalism, gatewatching, journalism, publications
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Uncategorized books, citizen journalism, Citizen Journalism: Global Perspectives, gatewatching, journalism, Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung, publications, youdecide2007

(Crossposted from snurb.info.)

Time to catch up with a few publications - our recent work is featured in a number of new collections:

Mobile Technologies: From Telecommunications to Media, edited by Gerard Goggin and Larissa Hjorth, collects some of the best papers from the Mobile Media 2007 conference (which I blogged about at the time) in Sydney. Looks like a fabulous collection, and I’m delighted that an article by former QUT Visiting Scholar Liu Cheng and me about SMS news in China has been included. We’re looking especially at the experience at Yunnan Daily Press, where Cheng led the roll-out of SMS news functionality, and we’re including some staggering statistics about the growth of Internet and mobile use in China as well (I wonder how they’ll be affected by the global financial crisis…).

Read more…

blogging, citizen journalism blogging, books, community, mobile, news, politics, youdecide2007

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

One citizen journalism project that I’ve been meaning to post about for some time now is the German-based myHeimat.de - a hyperlocal citizen journalism portal with some 14,000 contributors from all around the country. The problem with writing about it is that so far there’s precious little information available that will be accessible to what I presume is a mostly English-speaking readership here at Gatewatching - but happily, IFRA Magazine has now published an English interview with myHeimat’s CEO Martin Huber.

myHeimat (whom I’ll visit in Hannover and Augsburg on my Europe trip in October) is interesting because of its distributed setup and its emerging partnerships with print publishers which re-publish the best citizen journalism content in weekly or monthly print editions which are variously included as supplementary pages or sections in local newspapers, or distributed as free household magazines (similar to, say, the Brisbane News here in Brisbane). In keeping with this, its focus is on community news more than on ‘hard’ political coverage (though some political discussion does take place on the site, too), but of course that doesn’t disqualify it from being regarded as citizen journalism - and it remains to be seen how the site dynamics will change, say, around the time of the next federal election in Germany.

Read more…

citizen journalism citizen journalism, hyperlocal, preditor, youdecide2007

(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.
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

I thought I’d put up here my first piece that’s come out of digesting the youdecide2007 experience. This is the draft version of a paper I’ve submitted to an academic journal, though I think it’s accessible enough for anyone with an interest to read. 

It’s reflecting on the forms of cultural labour our small team did during the election in facilitating citizen journalism, which mixed more traditional tasks of journalism with new disciplines.

Downloadable below

Preditors - Making citizen journalism work (PDF)

As the paper makes clear, I’ve called the workers who  facilitate citizen journalism preditors - thinking through this new form of cultural labour will, I hope, help us get past some often silly oppositions that get set up between citizen journalism and “teh MSM”. Crowdsourced citizen journalism projects actually need “go-to” people with a certain minimum of journalism training; mainstream media organisations are increasingly looking to harness user-generated content. This has implications for journalism training, established media and independent journalism initiatives.

I’ve nominated four areas of responsibility for preditors: content work, networking, community work and tech work. You’ll see how they blend in the paper.

It’s pretty long - over 8000 words - but if you think it’s hard work reading that much, you should try writing it! My long-form writing muscles got a good work out. Fellow scholar-nerds might care to know that this length might be unacceptable for many Australian journals, but is pretty normal for international journals. I’ve handed this one in to one of them (it’s a secret while its in peer review).

I’m looking for reactions and comments, which you might like to put in the comments below… I will give out minties to anyone who finds typos! I’m giving a version of this paper at this conference on citizen journalism in Brisbane this week, and again in England in April!

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, elections, preditor, research, youdecide2007

Good news! Our University has purchased a site license for Leximancer, and we’ll be making extensive use of it in our research on the Australian blogosphere.

The blurb from the website gives a pretty neat summary of what Leximancer does:

Leximancer is a software tool that enables users to find meaning from text-based documents. It automatically identifies key themes, concepts and ideas from unstructured text with little or no guidance. The innovative concept map allows users to interact with the analysis – navigating the true meaning of the text.

Of course, there are other ways to find “meaning” in text, but the application for it in studying the blogosphere is in finding out whether particular bloggers have concepts or themes that they return to over time, and whether that’s matched by the comments threads.

I imagine bloggers themselves might be interested in seeing the results of this kind of analysis of their blogs - we might issue a call for dump files soon when we’re more expert users.

Leximancer itself is an interesting example of research commercialisation - it began its life over at UQ as applied IT research, and now its a commercial venture.

Anyway, its bound to be a fun toy to play with - the first thing we’ll do is analyse our own project, youdecide2007, to see which concepts and themes recur most frequently.

blogging blogging, Leximancer, research, youdecide2007