A Bunch of New Citizen Journalism Publications

The last months have been enormously productive (and, at times, exhausting!) for me. In addition to my own book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I've also contributed to a number of other publications - and quite a few of them are now finally available in print and/or online.

In a previous post, I've already mentioned Megan Boler's edited collection Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. I've now received my copy of the book, and very nice it looks, too - a great collection of essays from many key authors and researchers in the field, combined with Megan's interviews with journalists and media activists including Robert McChesney and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. My own contribution explores the post-tactical opportunities for citizen media, and draws parallels to the long-term establisment of other once tactical movements; a pre-print version of the chapter is online here. The book is available from Amazon and MIT Press.

Also out now is my article for the journal Information Polity, 13.1-2 (2008), edited by Stephen Coleman and Scott Wright, which outlines my thoughts on what might replace the mass-mediated public sphere as Jürgen Habermas had outlined it. You might remember from a previous post that I'm no fan of Habermas's depiction of the role of the Net in public communication (which largely dismisses the idea that Internet-based media could play any serious role at all); I think there's much to be said about the idea of a networked public sphere, or indeed an overlapping system of public spherules, and I hope that some of our blog mapping work might end up tracing the outlines of this system. A pre-print version of the article is online here.

The next one to come out will be a chapter in Making Online News: The Ethnography of Digital Media Production, edited by Chris Paterson and David Domingo. (Like the Information Polity article, this is another product of my stay at the University of Leeds last year, where I met both Stephen Coleman and Chris Paterson.) In my chapter for this book, I revisit the role of citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election, and explore what conclusions we may draw from this event for the further development and study of citizen journalism in Australia and beyond. This builds on my previous research into the practice of gatewatching, of course: it's self-evident that a significant part of the work of key Australian blogs and citizen journalists from Larvatus Prodeo to Possums Pollytics to Tim Blair is to watch the publication gates of conventional journalistic sources, and comment on the quality of their work - but at the same time, there's also a push from some quarters towards the production of original content in its own right. The book will be launched at the ICA conference in Montréal during the next few days. A pre-print version of the chapter is online here, and Chris and David have also set up a Website for the book.

Two chapters and a journal article may be enough for now, but wait, there's more: Debra Adams and I are currently putting the finishing touches on our chapter for Blogospheres: Identities, Politics and Blogging around the World, edited by Adrienne Russell and Nabil Echchaibi (previously titled International Blogging), and that book should be out later this year. Probably around the same time we'll also see Journalismus im Internet: Profession - Partizipation - Technisierung, edited by Christoph Neuberger, Christian Nuernbergk, and Melanie Rischke. The publication of that book will mark the first time that I've written a chapter on citizen journalism in German, so it's particularly dear to me - finally something my family will be able to read... The chapter I've contributed is a condensed translation of the key arguments from Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production - and probably not my last German-language article; from what I've seen, citizen journalism is becoming an increasingly important topic over there now, too. Amazon.de is now accepting pre-orders for the book, and a preview of my chapter is online here.

There's another book chapter or three in the pipeline at the moment, but more on those as they take shape!

Technorati : blogs, citizen journalism, gatewatching, journalism, politics, public sphere, publications, research
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