International Perspectives on the Political Economy of Participatory Journalism

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.

The study, then, interviewed journalists and editors in ten countries to identify economic, political, and other motives for exploring participatory journalism (as well as a motive described as 'inevitability' - a sense that changes are coming in any case). There are a number of key motives which are common across all countries (but I missed these because there's no Powerpoint and I'm surrounded by a number of very noisy people).

There was a clear intention in many cases to create a sense of belonging on the online site in order to maintain a sustainable brand with loyal followers; this was done for example by creating niche spaces for specific audiences, and was described as engaging various 'stakeholders'. Other cases were more focussed simply on increasing Website traffic, as a way for the industry to survive (put simply, hits equal continued existence); such incoming traffic also helps with being indexed by search engines (or with boosting Alexa and PageRank ratings).

Some journalists saw a need to make users get involved with journalism so that journalists could get involved with their lives; yet others simply saw change as inevitable, and described developments as driven by me-tooism. This also intersects with journalist/management relations - some journalists see themselves as controlled by management, while others feel they are driving important democratic participation projects.

Hm.

Technorati : FoJ 2009, change, citizen journalism, industry, journalism, participation, profession
Del.icio.us : FoJ 2009, change, citizen journalism, industry, journalism, participation, profession