Blog

Cardiff.


It's second and last day of Future of Journalism 2009 - and after Transforming Audiences in London and e-Democracy in Vienna, the last day in a long week of conferencing for me. Of the three, FoJ is the most multi-tracked conference, so I'll be able to see only a fraction of all papers here - but many of them will be available online as well. We start this morning with a paper on journalism in Second Life, presented by Bonnie Brennen. She begins by noting the current concerns about the future of journalism and views that facts and truth are losing their importance in the postmodern world. Still, there is good journalism being done, if not always in conventional formats, and this journalism is helping people understand key issues in their lives.

Cardiff.


Finally for this session at Future of Journalism 2009 we move to Henrik Örnebring, presenting some preliminary findings on newswork across Europe that are coming out of a Swedish study. The countries targetted here were Sweden, the UK, Italy, Poland, and Estonia, as they are representative of a range of different media systems. The study conducted 61 semi-structured interviews with journalists involved in daily news production in various media, contexts, and institutional settings, and an email survey with some 2200 journalists across these six countries.

Cardiff.


The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Milissa Deitz, presenting a paper on behalf of Lynette Sheridan Burns. She notes the shift from journalism as transmission to journalism as communication, and the rise of various technologies which facilitate this. Much as TV and radio changed the newspaper landscape, so online technologies are changing the news landscape across all other media - and users divide into digital aliens, immigrants, and natives.

Audiences have become active, and no longer like to be told what to think, so they have turned to social media and are active content creators; they are multitaskers snacking on content. This undermines the information gatekeeping role of journalists, and creates problems for journalism's democratic role - and such concerns have been taken up by various journalism and journalism studies bodies, of course.

Cardiff.


The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Kevin Barnhurst, whose focus is on reporting form(at)s on US newspaper sites. News reports are expressive of historical processes, forms of production, and other factors, and historical changes in radio, TV, and print reports can readily be observed; this work can also be translated to the online environment, of course. US news has been redefined in the 20th century, from denotative (factual) reporting to interpretative and opinion-based analysis; this is an ideological process reflecting the way that power to control societal discussions has moved towards journalists in the 20th century.

Cardiff.


The second session at Future of Journalism 2009 starts with Marina Vujnovic, presenting on a ten-country study of political-economic factors in participatory journalism by interviewing journalists and editors. There are a number of questions here - the place of user-generated content in the wider information production processes, the role of citizens as informational labourers, the vanishing distinctions between information production and consumption, and between work and play, the emerging convergence culture, and the rise of communicative capitalism and the threats for more democratic forms of participation which follow from it.

Cardiff.


The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Jane B. Singer, who presents a study of local journalists and their engagement with user-generated content. Such journalists are potentially a very different group, as they're already closely connected with the local community, but similar to other colleagues have to come to terms with changing news values, norms, roles, and processes. Like their colleagues elsewhere, they are concerned about how the rise of user-generated content is affecting the news.

Cardiff.


The next speaker at Future of Journalism 2009 is Andy Williams, who shifts our attention to user-generated content at the BBC, with a study based on interviews with BBC staff conducted in 2007. Andy, too, notes the substantial shift in perceptions towards a more active role for audiences (journalism as less lecture and more conversation), but in practice, journalist/audience roles at the BBC seem to have ossified rather than opened up.

BBC news has wholeheartedly embraced audience content (footage and photos, eyewitness accounts, audience stories); beyond this, however, also lie other forms of user-generated content, including audience comments, collaborative content, networked journalism, and non-news content. To embrace such content, there is a need for a new institutional framework; BBC journalists are now trained in engaging with UGC, and the phrase 'have they got news for us' is emblematic for this.

Cardiff.


After the very fruitful EDEM 2009 in Vienna I've once again entrusted my life to the dubious abilities of KLM to deliver me to the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff, where the weather has turned out to be unseasonably warm as well - seems like it's following me! Unfortunately I missed the opening keynotes, so if there were any brilliant new insights into the future of journalism there, we'll have to wait until the recordings become available.

Vienna.


For the final paper at EDEM 2009, we're on to Ursula Maier-Rabler, whose interest is in e-politics from administrative through to communicative democracy, and from individual citizens through to state institutions and parties. This creates a two-dimensional matrix: e-Government is administrative and driven by institutions, e-democracy communicative, but still driven by institutions; e-voting is administrative, but relies on the individual, and e-participation is individually driven and communicative.

e-Participation supports the empowerment of people oo integrate in bottom-up decision making, make informed decisions, and develop social and political responsibility - and to achieve this, it is necessary to start with young people in order to develop a participatory culture (which may be different in its specific shape from country to country). This ties into Web 2.0 and similar participatory platforms,and must be integrated also into general political education in order to create a new homo politicus in the online environment.

Vienna.


The next presenter at EDEM 2009 is Silke Weiß from the Austrian Ministry of Finance. Her focus is on the egosta (e-Government Stakeholder Involvement) platform, which aims to develop and test stakeholder involvement systems. For the project, e-participation is the participation of citizens and businesses in political decision making processes through ICTs; such participation strengthens mutual trust between stageholders and can result in more broadly based solutions.

However, so far participation is very unevenly distributed, and some citizens, enterprises, and NGOs are left out from the consultation, which can lead to distrust towards electronic forms of government processes. So, it is necessary to develop a standard method and tool for the instant and immediate involvement of stakeholders in the development of new e-government applications, using Web 2.0 technologies. This will hopefully optimise processes of knowledge transfer between all stakeholders (defined broadly as all groups who may be future users of IT applications or may be affected by outcomes).