Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

On 22 September, I'm going to be on a panel at a journalism conference to mark the 85th anniversary of journalism at the University of Queensland. The conference has undergone a number of changes over the past few month, and has now become a one-day symposium at the Brisbane Marriott Hotel, but I hope that the panel session will be useful, interesting, and well-attended nonetheless.

Tonight I'm at UQ yet again, for the second CCCS public lecture by visiting scholar Georgina Born (and you've got to admire my restraint in not titling this blog entry "Born Again"). This talk looks like it's going to be more generally about the lessons to be learnt from the BBC's history and present. She begins by noting the distance between executive rhetoric and the reality of work in public service broadcasters (PSB), but of course such contradictions characterise any complex organisation.

As I arrived back in Brisbane, there was good news relating to my research work waiting for me here. Some time ago, we'd put in a proposal for a Linkage grant project to the Australian Research Council - and after a considerable waiting period, Linkage outcomes were finally announced a couple of weeks ago. So, I'm happy to report that our participatory news project has finally received the go-ahead (and the $380,000 of funding over four years attached to it) from the ARC. This is a project for which I'll be a co-Chief Investigator with my QUT colleagues Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham - and our industry partners are SBS, National Forum, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. I'm particularly looking forward to working with SBS on this, who (in addition to being the Australian home of football) are also one of the most innovative and responsible broadcast organisations in Australia.

I'm very happy to report that an update of my paper from last year's AolR conference, "Wikinews: The Next Generation of Online News?", has now been published as the lead article in Scan Journal. I was able to find some more recent statistics, which unfortunately confirm the trends I'd already seen at the end of 2005: Wikinews is stagnating, both in terms of new contributors and as far as content creation is concerned. In my opinion, this is due to a misinterpretation of the Neutral Point of View doctrine, which here leads to a counterproductive aversion to any kind of discussion of news and current events. (And let me be absolutely clear: I'm not arguing against NPOV as such here - Wikipedia's current events section does very good work covering the news, for example, so it can work very well in a news context.) Anyway - read the article in Scan Journal! Here's the issue announcement by editors Chris Atton and Graham Meikle:

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The second session starts off with Douglas Kellner, presenting on the reporting of the Iraq wars. There has been a move from a fairly tightly controlled pool system in the first Iraq war, where reporters were held to tightly drawn contracts and media corporations sued the Pentagon after the war because of these restrictive measures, to the idea of embeddedness. Embedded UK reporters were found to be just as critical as other reporters and news anchors, but the case was rather different for U.S. reporters - the framing of stories here was very much in line with the intended message of the Pentagon.

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Finally, then, there was the panel I participated in, on participatory journalism. Obviously I didn't get around to blogging it, but I made an audio recording - and if it turned out OK I'll try and put it up here soon. Some very interesting international perspectives on the challenges for journalism brought on by participatory media - and I thank my co-presenters Christoph Neuberger, Jane Singer, and David Domingo, as well as Mark Deuze who proposed the panel and brought us all together. Let's see if we can do some more follow-up work on these issues. Here's our abstract for the panel:

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The next session is on citizenship and the democratic responsibility of journalism. Margaret Duffy is the first speaker. She begins by presenting some research by the Newspaper Association of America on entertainment preferences by media users. There is a significant preference for television and the Internet over print media in this, and trends in the time spent with media are also significantly negative as far as TV is concerned. Obviously, this is bad news for newspapers.

To add to this, this study worked with the U.S. Life Styles database, from a large study of consumer behaviour. Findings pointed to complementarity: the more people used any media for information, the more they used other media for information, and there is a mixed relationship between media used for entertainment and information purposes - only entertainment television has a strong and negative impact on use of other media for information (probably due to TV's usurpation of time). More new media use has a positive effect on commmunity particpation, and as it turns out owning new media products also has a negative impact on cynicism.

I presented a paper reviewing the first year of Wikinews at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Chicago in 2005, and this paper has also been accepted for publication in Scan Journal in June 2006. Today I've finally posted the audio from that presentation.

I also spent part of today revising the paper with more recent figures on the development of Wikinews for publication in Scan - in the conference paper I had argued that some of the systemic problems within Wikinews had stunted its growth through the furst year, and I'm sorry to day that (but for a brief spike in the aftermath of the London bombings and hurricanes Katrina and Rita) this trend appears to have continued to date.

A little while ago I mentioned that my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production had been nominated for the Communications Policy Research Award at Fordham University's Donald McGannon Communication Research Center. My publisher Peter Lang now informs me that it's made the semi-finals of the award process. While I don't exactly know what this means - are there four books left from the initial field, and do these now get evaluated against one another in a two-step elimination process? will there be slow-motion replays on ESPN6? - it sure does sound good. Fingers crossed.

We went on a nice but all-too-short post-V-day getaway to North Stradbroke Island last weekend, but I'm afraid any sense of relaxation went out the window quickly when I saw on Monday that numbers in my Creative Industries unit had risen to nearly 370 students by Monday morning. This meant quickly adding a couple more tutors and giving them an induction to the material, and elsewhere too I've been playing catchup all week already - not because I've been slack in the lead-up to the semester, but because there's just so much to do at the moment.