I reviewed the recent Australian publication Barons to Bloggers for the Media International Australia journal a little while ago. The review has now been published in MIA 118 (February 2006), and they've also been nice enough to allow me to republish it here. 

Debate? What Debate?

Jonathan Mills, ed. Barons to Bloggers: Confronting Media Power. Carlton, Vic.: Miegunyah Press / Melbourne UP, 2005. ISBN 0 522 85207 6.

Reviewed by Axel Bruns

Barons to Bloggers is a curious little book (or rather, at sub-A5 size and 122 pages, booklet). The first volume in the Alfred Deakin Debate series, it combines two public lectures on the future of journalism in light of the emergence of citizen journalism with a number of responses from media and journalism figures in Australia – but herein also lies perhaps its greatest flaw, as the book once again demonstrates the apparent inability of journalism professionals to respond to the challenges facing their industry.

ABC Chairman Donald McDonald’s brief introduction is a good example of the polarised vision which prevails in this context: he offers a choice only between ‘public’ or ‘personal’ media – either journalistically “selected and sorted according to a sensibility that is not our own, yet one that we somehow trust”, or a narcissistic “Daily Me … to reflect our interests and views to create a daily paper” (15). Notably, both these forms remain largely passive, and do not address the now clearly demonstrable desire of many audience members to become active users and what I call ‘produsers’ of the media.

However, in contrast to such simplistic views, the challenge for journalism as it confronts the changing media environment is not to make a choice of either maintaining a public information space, or addressing personal information needs: instead, it is to navigate a course which lies between these two extremes, and involves both ‘professional’ journalists and their new ‘citizen journalist’ counterparts. This engagement with the users of news, replacing older mass media modes and to some extent forced on the journalism industry by the emergence of collaborative news production models by users for users, will significantly affect the future of news.

Happily, in his contribution to this booklet NYU’s citizen journalism expert Jay Rosen redresses McDonald’s tunnel (or should that be channel?) vision by pointing out that the most significant shift currently underway is the emergence of widespread horizontal, many-to-many news discourse as an addition to the existing vertical, one-to-many media forms. He presents a cogent argument for why this shift is necessary and desirable, and what changes it may entail.

In the second keynote contribution, Lance Knobel, founder of the Q Network think tank, continues this discussion, pointing out the great democratic potential inherent in the new online tools for information retrieval and publication. Knobel also notes that the modes of usage of such information technologies are still emerging, and invokes “the motto of the Royal Society, nullius in verba – ‘don’t trust in anyone’s word’” (51) as a useful guideline in this process: a motto which seems just as appropriate when engaging with mainstream journalism as it does for its new grassroots counterparts.

Of the other four contributors, though, only veteran political journalist and Webdiary blogger Margo Kingston offers an informed view of where journalism may be headed, stating as a result of her own blogging experience that “the future lies in a collaboration between journalists and readers” (81). Against this, SMH editor turned Crikey publisher Eric Beecher appears to claim that (against all evidence) the move to citizen journalism has “money and business as its driving forces” (69), while ABC TV’s executive producer of arts Guy Rundle similarly fails to emerge from the media myopia; only someone from the other side of the television screen could keep a straight face while suggesting that “the interactive nature of the Net only takes us so far” because in essence all media are merely just “a more abstract form” of interactive, face-to-face dialogue (97).

Finally, veteran journalist and editor Andrew Clark claims that “talking to my American colleagues, watching satellite TV and reading leading US newspapers on the Net each day does not give me any sense of a new Net-based Jeffersonian media democracy emerging” (114). No surprise there: to experience the good and bad of citizen journalism one would actually have to go to the news blogs and collaborative online news publications themselves.

What is striking about these articles is that while billed as ‘responses’ to the keynotes, they hardly engage with them at all – providing a final, most persuasive argument (if any were still needed) for why we need the discussion, debate and deliberation on current issues which takes place in the blogosphere everyday. The debate in this booklet could itself have been facilitated far more effectively in blog form, inviting the four respondents to interact more directly with the keynotes and one another, and offering a space for responses from other readers as well. Sadly, however, it seems that a great many news media professionals are still content to rant from the sidelines rather than get into the game. 

 

Bio:

Dr Axel Bruns (a.bruns@qut.edu.au) is a lecturer in Creative Industries at Queensland University of Technology. He is the author of Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), co-editor with Joanne Jacobs of Uses of Blogs (New York: Peter Lang, forthcoming in 2006), and General Editor of M/C – Media and Culture. His blog is at snurb.info.