Introducing Gatewatching

No, the book isn't getting a re-release (yet). There's a lot of other activity going on around the fields of citizen journalism, news blogging, and online opinion writing, so Barry, Jason, and I thought it would be a good idea to set up a group blog dedicated to tracking these developments - and I'm pleased to announce that our new blog at Gatewatching.org is now open for business. This doesn't mean that I'll stop blogging here, of course - but my citizen journalism-related thoughts, and the outcomes of our collaboration on Youdecide2007 and beyond, are going to be collected there (as well as cross-posted here where appropriate). Come join us as we try to make sense of it all.

This launch also coincides neatly with the start of a series of posts we'll do for the ABC Online opinion section over the coming weeks (and throughout the Australian election campaign) - we've been asked to report from the political blogosphere in an effort to highlight the best ideas emerging from outside the mainstream media. It seems appropriate in this context that our first post to the ABC site is a rumination on the interrelationship (and increasing interweaving) between industrial and citizen journalism, touching on the 12 July meltdown at The Australian as well as the crategate story we managed to uncover through Youdecide2007.

Also related to this, on a more personal note, is that a paper I've co-authored with Mark Deuze (Universities of Indiana and Leiden) and Christoph Neuberger (Universität Münster) has now been published in Journalism Practice. In it, we look at a number of 'pro-am' models of journalism in our respective countries - including Bluffton Today, Skoeps, Opinio, and On Line Opinion. I've posted a pre-print version of the article here, and the final version is available from the Journalism Practice site.

OK - I'm off to the Australian Blogging Conference now; hope to see many of you there. Finally, then, here's an excerpt from my first post to Gatewatching.org - visit the site for more:

Gatewatching the Future

Welcome to Gatewatching.org. This site is a group blog run by the three of us - Barry Saunders, Jason Wilson, and me, Axel Bruns. (We may rope in a few more of the usual suspects over the next few months - watch this space...) What we're looking to do here is to track and analyse the further development of the phenomenon of citizen journalism, in Australia - where we're all based - and elsewhere; in fact, the upcoming federal elections in Australia in late 2007, and in the U.S. in late 2008, should produce plenty of interesting developments for us to observe and examine. In the Australian context, we're also part of the team behind an ARC Linkage research project into citizen journalism which is currently in the process of launching a hyperlocal citizen journalism site for the upcoming election, at youdecide2007.org.

Barry and Jason will introduce themselves here shortly, but for now, here's a little more about my own background: I was responsible for introducing the idea of 'gatewatching' into the citizen journalism debate, and have published a book about it - Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production. Gatewatching itself describes the process of identifying and posting about interesting stories which is a core practice in citizen journalism, news blogging, and other related fields; it's the 'open news' alternative to the 'closed news' practice of gatekeeping as it's been a mainstay of conventional, professional, industrial journalism for the past century and more. Gatekeeping was what journalists and editors did: they made strict selections about what stories to cover, what articles to include in the newspaper or broadcast bulletin, and what letters to the editor or calls to the host to share with readers, listeners, and viewers. This was done in part for practical reasons: with column space and air time strictly limited, and with only a handful of papers and stations operating in any one region, it was important to filter the 'newswhole' very strictly for the most salient stories. (More recently, of course, gatekeeping has also been abused in a number of cases to filter out stories and views which would contradict a news corporation's political or commercial agenda.) Possessing the skills to effectively keep the gates, to effectively filter the most important stories from the rest before publication, was one of the characteristics supposedly distinguishing professional journalists from their audiences.

But the increased availability of information, and the shift from a print and broadcast to a network model, both of which were driven in no small part by the rise of the Net and the Web to widespread public use, have changed that logic - we've seen a shift from 'filter, then publish' to 'publish, then filter', as Clay Shirky has famously described it. Gatekeeping no longer makes sense - the gates have multiplied beyond all control, and it's possible for any of us to bypass the gatekeepers quite easily, to get directly to the sources. And many of us do: citizen journalists, news bloggers, interested enthusiasts, and many others are engaged in a constant process of watching the gates, finding news, information, reports, opinion which they think will be of interest to like-minded people, and share their findings with the communities to belong to. That's the core of what I've described as gatewatching: following developments in an area not because you're told to, or paid for it, but because you're interested to do so; collecting and collating relevant news items and combining them in a quick story which includes links to further information, and posting that story on a blog, citizen journalism site, or one of the many other community spaces which have now popped up all over the Web.

Read more...

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