Citizen Journalism Double Header at AoIR 2006

I should have expected little else, of course - all I got to see at AoIR 2006 were the two panels I participated in, and the two conference keynotes; my duties as conference chair (i.e. running about to make sure there were no major disasters) prevented me from anything else. The two panels, organised by Terry Flew and Ted M. Coopman, went very well, though. Together, they presented the two sides of citizen journalism: its grounding in the activist tactical media movements of the 1980s and 1990s (on Ted's panel "Byte Me! Digital Media as an Activist Critique and Parallel Mediasphere"), and its continuing longer-term establishment as a legitimate form of journalism in relation to the traditional news industry (on Terry's panel "Online News Media and Citizen Journalism").

My papers on both panels ended up being something of a two-part assessment of the role of citizen journalism in today's mediasphere: on the one hand, examining the future for tactical media in a world where the traditional strategies/tactics distinction (also shown in Herbert Gans's famous description of two tiers of news media) is eroding quickly; on the other, exploring what a fully established, produsage-based citizen journalism sector might need to look like (analogous perhaps to what might be called the 'citizen software' sector of open source). Both papers are slated to be published in scholarly collections some time down the track, so I'm not posting them here - but for what it's worth, the abstracts and Powerpoints are here, at least.

Gatewatching, Gatecrashing: Futures for Tactical News Media

The increasing availability and use of alternative online news publications, which utilise gatewatching and collaborative news production tools and tactics to act as a corrective to the mainstream news media, has finally realised a vision which journalism scholar Herbert Gans had described some thirty years ago - that of a two-tiered system of news media, in which smaller, more specialised players were going to be able to engage with and impact on the leaders of the national and international news industries. But what lies beyond the pathway predicted by Gans - how will this uneasy relationship continue to unfold?

From Reader to Writer: Citizen Journalism as News Produsage

This paper will use the example of collaborative online news publishing sites to outline the key characteristics of produsage - its focus on user-led content production, its reliance on collaborative engagement, its palimpsestic, iterative, and evolutionary development of content, its use of alternatives to traditional intellectual property models, and its heterarchical and permeable community structures. It will also discuss some of the key questions emerging for produsage models, covering issues of economics, sustainability, IP rights, liability, and trust. As a very well-established form of produsage, this analysis of collaborative online news production can be used as a model for the study of produser communities in a wide variety of fields.

Technorati : AoIR2006, citizen journalism, gatewatching, produsage, tactical media
Del.icio.us : AoIR2006, citizen journalism, gatewatching, produsage, tactical media