New Models for Journalism, beyond the Citizen

Brisbane.
The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with a paper by my colleague Terry Flew, who is also the chair of the conference. He begins by noting the old trope of the journalist as hero (as embodied for example by Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate affair), and its decline (Glenn Milne is the anti-hero in this context). There are substantial impacts of Web 2.0 technologies on contemporary journalism, of course, and there are serious questions about the future role of journalism. News organisations have most trouble, in fact, not in coming to terms with new technologies but with this new lack of deference to their once powerful position.

Vint Cerf has suggested breaking the term 'newspaper' into its two components - news certainly still has a future today, but the role of the paper as a medium may be coming to an end. At the same time, there is also plenty of what has been called cyberbole on both sides of the argument (from the Tim O'Reillys of this world as well as from the Andrew Keens) - but there is no doubt that there is substantial democratising potential in new technologies as well.

There is a hollowing out of existing newsrooms taking place, and citizen journalism cannot fully replace what is lost here. This relates also to unanswered questions around citizenship, and the role of media in the formation of identity - and the established normative binary between citizen and consumer has yet to be overcome. Additionally, the discourse of democracy bifurcates between French and American traditions: between developmental republicanism and protective republicanism.

Recent developments in the US (such as the Obama conservatives) are interesting here - many conservatives, for example, were deeply concerned about the deleterious impact of the Bush administration on the US Constitution, and for that reason voted for Obama. This is part of an overall negative view focussed on human limitations, which always seeks to choose the lesser evil; compared to this is the European approach, which sees democracy as something that we must strive to (and can) improve.

There are a number of interesting developments in Australia - the development of online-only news sites such as Fairfax's Brisbane Times, which has been established as an online competition to the print and online Courier-Mail - this had a substantial impact when it was first established, but the gap between the two has increased again since then. This is partly because of the Courier-Mail's fighting back, but also because of the limitations of an online-only resource which is unable to deeply embed itself in local community and also failed to explore new ways of reporting the news. This was visible for example in the context of the recent Queensland state election, where the Brisbane Times had only one local journalist covering the event - by comparison, Crikey ran a blog combining the efforts of three established local political bloggers.

There is also a question for public broadcasting, which much similarly change to position itself as a public media organisation - the ABC has been doing interesting work in this area already, while SBS has been somewhat more laggard (not least because of limited funding), but is also exploring ways to address its diverse multicultural constituency. At any rate, innovation largely comes from the margins and not from the centre now, and this creates new challenges for media policy, especially for policy-driven public media organisations.

There are opportunities perhaps also with crowdsourcing and citizen journalism initiatives, of course, but the appropriate structures for this still need to be developed further. More strongly editorially supervised, more professionally managed sites may need to be developed here, especially in order to ensure longer-term survival (OhmyNews and Malaysiakini are good examples here, as is Crikey). This may be more a form of alternative journalism, not a citizen journalism inherently opposed to the mainstream.

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