Leeds: Last Impressions

Leeds.
Well, as the great mind and speedy fingers that is Robert Fripp might say (or type), my suitcase is about-to-be-becoming packed; my time here at the University of Leeds is at and end, and I'm flying back to Australia tonight. I'm spending a last few hours here at the office to say my goodbyes and gather my various notes and files. Time to reflect on the past two months, too, and to tie up a few loose ends. My thanks first of all of course to Stephen Coleman and the rest of the staff at the Institute for Communications Studies for making me welcome here; I hope to stay in touch with many of them even after I've left the place.

Stephen and others also pointed me to the motherlode in terms of British television journalism, after my disappointing experiences with BBC One's main news show; the real stuff happens over on Channel Four News with Jon Snow, as I now know, as well as later on BBC Two's Newsnight with the impeccably coiffed Jeremy Paxman. If more journalists were as independent and outspoken as those two, there'd be far less of a need for citizen journalism to act as a corrective to mainstream industrial 'news'...

That said, Paxman and others are just as testy when criticised by their citizen counterparts, as evidenced in the minor furore in recent days over UK blogger Guido Fawkes's debate with Paxman and Guardian assistant editor Michael White (the BBC has the full video online) - interesting comments on the Newsnight site about this. While Fawkes does rather come across as something of a self-righteous twit, so does White; perhaps the real question is how representative either are of their peers: my feeling is that White's angry dismissal of news blogs as compared to 'real journalism' is rather more common amongst journos (as well as some journalism scholars) than Fawkes's self-aggrandisement is for news bloggers (something he has now apologised for). It's not in individual 'A-listers' that the strength of the blogosphere lies, but in their cumulative actions.

But I'll leave that controversy behind now as I wing my way back to Brisbane. My own work on the produsage book and some other projects has progressed well during my time here; over the last few days, I even found my draft for the upcoming MIT5 conference spontaneously begin to transform itself into the material for a chapter on the produsage of democracy as I was writing it. A good sign that the research process is reaching a conclusion, and the fun part of writing the thing is about to start.

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