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Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

Australia's Political Blogosphere in the Aftermath of 2007 Federal Election (AoIR 2008)

AoIR 2008

Australia's Political Blogosphere in the Aftermath of 2007 Federal Election

Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, Lars Kirchhoff, Thomas Nicolai

  • 18 Oct. 2008 - AoIR 2008 conference, Copenhagen


Australian political bloggers and citizen journalists appear to have played an important role in the 2007 federal elections. They provided a highly critical corrective to mainstream journalism, seemed to influence public opinion on key election themes, and offered a coverage of political events which diverted from the customary focus on political leaders and bellwether locations only. Bloggers were wooed by political parties (such as the Australian Labor Party with its Labor First blog site), mainstream media (such as the online arm of public broadcaster ABC, which ran several blogs of its own), and journalism researchers (through projects such as Youdecide2007.org, which provided a space for a hyperlocal citizen journalism coverage of the campaign in participants' individual electorates).

But what remains unclear to date is exactly how information travels within the distributed network of the blogosphere itself, and from here to other (online) spaces of citizen and industrial journalism. To trace such movements may underline (or undermine) news and political bloggers' claims of influence and importance; it would highlight the extent to which blogging operates merely as an echo chamber for the political cognoscenti, or has impact in the wider population. It would provide insight into the extent to which news bloggers and mainstream journalists feed off and respond to one another's work, and outline possible avenues for mutually beneficial collaborations.

This paper presents findings from an ongoing investigation into the inner workings of the Australian political blogosphere, which is based on a long-term process of gathering and archiving new content on a large number of Australian blogs and news sites. Such content is then analysed using a combination of qualitative and quantitative measures which enable the identification and visualisation of page and site interlinkages within and beyond the network of sites examined, and the tracing of themes and memes across the corpus of data gathered by the project.

The paper will outline the underlying research and data gathering methodologies, and highlight key findings from its investigation. In particular, it will examine the shift in online political communication in Australia as the country switched from election to post-election mode, and seek evidence of a paradigm shift in terms of key themes, issues, and opinion leaders as the defeated conservative Coalition government of John Howard was replaced by the incoming Labor government under new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Building Spaces for Hyperlocal Citizen Journalism

AoIR 2008

Building Spaces for Hyperlocal Citizen Journalism

Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders

  • 18 Oct. 2008 - AoIR 2008 conference, Copenhagen


One of the perceived Achilles heels of online citizen journalism is its perceived inability to conduct investigative and first-hand reporting. A number of projects have recently addressed this problem, with varying success: the U.S.-based Assignment Zero was described as "a highly satisfying failure" (Howe 2007), while the German MyHeimat.de appears to have been thoroughly successful in attracting a strong community of contributors, even to the point of being able to generate print versions of its content, distributed free of charge to households in selected German cities.

In Australia, citizen journalism played a prominent part in covering the federal elections held on 24 November 2007; news bloggers and public opinion Websites provided a strong counterpoint to the mainstream media coverage of the election campaign (Bruns et al., 2008). Youdecide2007.org, a collaboration between researchers at Queensland University of Technology and media practitioners at the public service broadcaster SBS, the public opinion site On Line Opinion, and technology company Cisco Systems, was developed as a dedicated space for a specifically hyperlocal coverage of the election campaign in each of Australia's 150 electorates from the urban sprawls of Sydney and Brisbane to the sparsely populated remote regions of outback Australia.

YD07 provided training materials for would-be citizen journalists and encouraged them to contribute electorate profiles, interview candidates, and conduct vox-pops with citizens in their local area. The site developed a strong following especially in its home state of Queensland, and its interviewers influenced national public debate by uncovering the sometimes controversial personal views of mainstream and fringe candidates. At the same time, the success of YD07 was limited by external constraints determined by campaign timing and institutional frameworks. As part of a continuing action research cycle, lessons learnt from Youdecide2007.org are going to be translated into further iterations of the project, which will cover the local government elections in the Australian state of Queensland, to be held in March 2008, and developments subsequent to these elections.

This paper will present research outcomes from the Youdecide2007.org project. In particular, it will examine the roles of staff contributors and citizen journalists in attracting members, providing information, promoting discussion, and fostering community on the site: early indications from a study of interaction data on the site indicate notably different contribution patterns and effects for staff and citizen participants, which may point towards the possibility of developing more explicit pro-am collaboration models in line with the Pro-Am phenomenon outlined by Leadbeater & Miller (2004).

The paper will outline strengths and weaknesses of the Youdecide model and highlight requirements for the successful development of active citizen journalism communities. In doing so, it will also evaluate the feasibility of hyperlocal citizen journalism approaches, and their interrelationship with broader regional, state, and national journalism in both its citizen and industrial forms.

References

Bruns, Axel, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders. "When Audiences Attack: Lessons from the Australian Poll Wars." Leeds: Centre for Digital Citizenship, 2008.

Netizens and Citizen Journalists around the World

Copenhagen.
The post-lunch session here at AoIR 2008 begins with a paper by Ronda Hauben. She notes that 2008 is the fifteenth anniversary of the publication of Michael Hauben's seminar article on the 'Netizen' concept - a concept emerging from Michael's research that spread rapidly and widely, and (especially in Asia) still has a great deal of currency. The concept had a great deal to do with the fight against commercialisation of the Net which was prominent then; today, for the same reason the concept has been suppressed to some extent by those interested in a more commercial Internet.

Tracing Trust and Power in Online Communities

Copenhagen.
The final session of this first day of AoIR 2008 begins with James Owens, whose focus is on online news and democratic communities. Interactive technology enables the production of new social formations, but can also reproduce existing social formations; this can be related especially also to local community formations. James is interested in three Chicago-based Websites (of the Tribune, a citizen journalism site supported by the Tribune, and the local Indymedia site), and is interested here especially on whether such sites promote or prevent social fragmentation.

The Present of Journalism

So, last Saturday I went to the Future of Journalism event in Brisbane (and spoke on one of the panels). Contrary to my usual practice, I didn't live-blog the event - panel-based events are notoriously difficult to blog. Here, then, are some reflections on what I saw - adding to comments already posted by Mark Bahnisch, Marian Edmunds, Cameron Reilly, and Bronwen Clune, among others.

The event began well, with Margaret Simons setting the theme with her usual insightful comments. Her observations about the troubled economic future for the journalism industry (and here, especially newspapers) are perhaps nothing new to most of us (though still not necessarily fully appreciated by many journalists themselves), and the bleak future that this malaise points to especially for in-depth, costly, quality investigative journalism has been discussed in some detail already (including by Jason, Barry and me in the Club Bloggery series), but it was a useful framing for the panels to follow.

Coming Up in October and November

Well, with the Future of Journalism now safely behind us (the event, that is - some reflections at Larvatus Prodeo, and also here later this week, hopefully), it's time to look ahead to other upcoming conferences and talks. I've posted some information about some of these on the Produsage.org site already, so here's a quick summary only. You can also track my progress through these upcoming events at Dopplr.com.

The Future of Journalism Arrives in Brisbane Next Week

The Media and Entertainment Arts Alliance (the key union for Australian media workers) has recently begun to organise a series of events titled "The Future of Journalism", bringing together industry and citizen journalists, academics, and other media experts to explore future developments in the news media. The first of these was held in Sydney in May, covered by Jason Wilson at Gatewatching and Rachel Hills at New Matilda, and now it's Brisbane's turn - at QUT's Gardens Theatre on 13 September 2008.

Approaches to Collaborative Production

Singapore.
The next day at ISEA 2008 has started. The first presentation this morning, by Susan Kerrigan, is about a creative research PhD project related to Fort Scratchley in Newcastle, New South Wales (which went through a number of names before the current name stuck). The fort guarded the harbour entrance for some time before being shut down and becoming a public space; it was recently restored.

The story to be told about it is both a military and a broader story, then. The approach to this work, then, is a rational, not a romantic approach to creativity, rejecting the auteur model and instead adopting a confluence model that brings together the individual, the field, and the surrounding culture. Susan came out of ABC TV, bringing those individual skills; cultural aspects included the body of knowledge already existing in the context of her project (not least also the local history relating to the fort); and the field within which she operated included the cultural intermediaries acting as gatekeepers, stakeholders, and collaborators. She also had to work with various institutional stakeholders, of course - from Newcastle City Council to various other bodies with a connection to the site and its history.

Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration betw. Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework

CCi 2008

Beyond the Pro/Am Schism: Opportunities for Collaboration between Professional and Citizen Journalists under a Produsage Framework

Axel Bruns

  • 25 June 2008 - CCi 2008 conference, Brisbane, Australia

The emergence of citizen journalism, and the challenges it poses for the conventional journalism industry, have been well-documented over the past decade. Citizen journalism has been hailed as a new "Estate 4.5" (Singer 2006), acting as a watchdog for a journalism industry increasingly compromised by commercial and political agendas; it has been seen as making possible a return to a more dialogic, deliberative engagement with the news (Heikkilä & Kunelius 2002) in which a broader range of perspectives are represented and engage with one another; it has been described as shifting focus from the global and generic to the hyperlocal and specific.

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