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.

For more information, and to register, see the MEAA's Future of Journalism site. In the afternoon, I'll be part of a panel titled "Bloggers: Amateur Netizens or Professionals of the Future?" alongside Mark Bahnisch and Marian Edmunds, and I think the first point I'm going to make is that the amateur/professional dichotomy (usually mapped on a parallel blogger/journalist dichotomy) is of course no longer sustainable today. In fact, it's nothing more than the result of the classic approach in journalistic writing which reduces any conflict ultimately to a struggle between two opposite stereotypes - amateurs vs. professionals, youth vs. establishment, poor vs. rich, left vs. right, good vs. evil.

Reality, of course, is substantially more nuanced. As I've noted in a recent conference paper, for example, everyone's favourite stats nerd, the psephologist blogger Possum Comitatus, is both an amateur journalist and a professional electoral opinion analyst, while the Australian political blogosphere's preferred punching bag, The Australian's political editor Dennis Shanahan, is both a professional journalist and pundit and an absolute disgrace as an interpreter of opinion polls.

Expertise, and lack thereof, can be found in the strangest of places, and sticking to an amateur/professional divide isn't helpful here (nor has it ever been). What I'm more interested in is what models may be available to highlight and harness the best expert contributions wherever they may originate, and get as many people as possible to see and debate them. Our work with Youdecide2007 (in collaboration with professional media outlets SBS and On Line Opinion) explored this question, the German myHeimat that I mentioned a little while ago tries the same from a very different perspective, and of course there are many more international attempts to find new Pro-Am models for journalistic coverage as well. These developments will be interesting to watch for years to come.

Speaking of The Australian, by the way: while its become a popular sport amongst bloggers to point out shortcomings in its political analysis, let's also give credit where it's due - kudos the paper's parent company News Ltd. for supporting the Future of Journalism event through the sponsorship provided by Sky News.

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