Institute for Distributed Creativity
Cultural Studies Concentration of Eugene Lang College

Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production

• 11 October, 6 p.m. - The Thing / Postmasters Gallery, 459 West 19th Street, New York City

Recent years have seen the emergence of collaborative publishing models in key news Websites ranging from the worldwide Indymedia network to the massively successful technology news site Slashdot and further to the multitude of Weblogs. Such sites have been instrumental in debunking political misinformation and providing first-hand coverage of unfolding events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, but also provide an important corrective to the mainstream news media in their everyday coverage of current events.

Building on collaborative approaches borrowed from the open source software development community, their participants are gatewatching the news: filtering through the reports of a myriad of news sources, collating the news and adding their own commentary and analysis. In the process they develop a style of dialogic and deliberative journalism which provides a credible alternative to gatekeeping and other traditional journalistic models of reporting and has enabled millions of users around the world to participate in the online news publishing process.

Bio

Dr Axel Bruns teaches and conducts research about online publishing, electronic creative writing, online communities and popular music in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), and a founding editor of the online academic publications M/C - Media and Culture and dotlit: The Online Journal of Creative Writing.

He is currently preparing Uses of Blogs (with Joanne Jacobs), an edited collection of scholarly work examining the range of current approaches to blogging (forthcoming from Peter Lang in 2006). More information about this book and other research projects and publications can be found in his blog at snurb.info.