Last Friday I went down to Sydney to attend and speak at the ABC Digital Media Forum, an internal conference exploring innovative possibilities for the national broadcaster especially in the user-led online environment. The ABC is doing pretty well in this field already, and from what I saw at the conference, there are plenty more exciting projects in the pipeline - some of these remain firmly under wraps before they're officially launched, though, so I won't mention them here.

My own contribution was to a session exploring the potential of embedding produsage-based models within the ABC framework, and I've already posted my suggestions here and over at Produsage.org; we had a very constructive discussion afterwards which especially also touched on the institutional requirements of the ABC as a taxpayer-funded, public service media organisation with certain obligations to citizens and government, and I think the immediate future for the organisation probably lies in a tiered approach which quarantines its premium, journalistic content to some extent from the potentially more unruly, raw material generated by users, but also explores possible ways in which the two can constructively connect with one another.

I'm happy to say that Club Bloggery has returned for 2008. Club Bloggery was our weekly series for ABC Online's Opinion pages during the 2007 election campaign - and while the election is now well and truly over, Jason, Barry, and I will continue to track developments in the Australian blogosphere and beyond during 2008 (if at a slightly more relaxed pace). While I was on holidays during the second half of January, the guys already posted an article discussing the mainstream media's feeding frenzy over Heath Ledger's death (and the role of blogs in setting the record straight) - and for our second instalment, we've returned to our old stomping grounds: we're considering what role Australia's political bloggers may be able to adopt now, in the aftermath of the election.

All of our pieces will also be published - sometimes in extended versions - on our group blog at Gatewatching.org, of course, along with other reflections on citizen journalism and news blogging.

Which Way in '08?

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, Barry Saunders

The blogosphere and online independent media certainly proved themselves capable of offering an outstanding alternative narrative of last year's federal election. In several pieces during the campaign, we pointed out how the bloggers had led the way in offering participatory election coverage, and how organs like Crikey and New Matilda had managed to present a refreshing range of opinion that differed from the usual suspects in the MSM.

It looks like there are a good half dozen edited collections about citizen journalism that are currently under development; some of them are probably spurred on by the impending U.S. presidential election and the role that news bloggers and citizen journalists will undoubtedly play in it, but I'm also aware of collections being developed as far afield as Australia, Germany, and India (and I've written contributions for a few of them). One of them, Megan Boler's Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times is about to be released, and is already listed on Amazon - as I've mentioned here previously, my chapter deals mainly with the question of what citizen journalism may become, beyond the short-term tactical pleasures of stirring up the mainstream journalism industry.

Meanwhile, the launch of e-Journalism: New Directions in Electronic News Media, edited by Kiran Prasad for the Indian scholarly community, is still a few months away, but I've received permission to make a pre-print of my chapter "News Blogs and Citizen Journalism" available here. It weaves together a few of the threads that I've followed over the past few months - it presents gatewatching as a practice that is fundamental to citizen journalism, outlines citizen-journalistic practices of news produsage beyond gatewatching itself, highlights the role of citizen journalists as providing an important corrective to media bias in covering the 2007 Australian federal election, and sketches potential pathways towards a greater symbiosis of citizen and mainstream approaches to journalism, beyond any initial antagonism, beyond the two-tier mainstream/alternative media structure outlined by Herbert Gans. Towards the end, therefore, I return again to that crucial question of "What next?":

Absolutely nothing unexpected happened on the weekend. Absolutely nothing unexpected has happened since: though slow to work out which way the wind blows, Dennis Shanahan, Paul Kelly and colleagues at the former (and future?) Government Gazette have skipped nary a beat in switching to singing the praises of Kevin the Rudd. Only Glenn Milne seems to have missed the memo - he's still working on his hagiography of 'poor' Peter Costello. Oh, and Caroline Overington, of course, who is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.

Two new entries for David Silver's 'Gone Gallery', then:

Just before the Australian federal election last Saturday, we managed to get our latest Club Bloggery piece out to ABC Online. It's now been eclipsed by more recent developments, of course, but still offers a pretty good overview of the campaign for (online) hearts and minds that was. Read it at our group blog Gatewatching, or at the ABC.

Scoring the e-lection

By Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns

This close to the election, it's customary for newspapers to recommend a vote one way or the other. We're not about to do that at Club Bloggery (although we would recommend thinking about the candidate who's been more responsive and available to your community), but we can do a summary of who has made the best running on the Internet, and understood and used its possibilities best.

Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and I have now posted the seventh instalment of our ABC series Club Bloggery, covering the online dimensions of the Australian election campaign. Just to mix things up a bit, this week we had a look at what's been happening on YouTube over the past few weeks, and found that (perhaps unsurprisingly) the more interesting developments are in DIY campaign advertising and mash-ups. Plenty of links included with the story, which we've also posted to our group blog Gatewatching - I encourage you to see for yourselves!

Election Flops on YouTube

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

In an election campaign as drawn out as this, you'd have to have excellent memory to remember the hype around John Howard's use of YouTube to make policy announcements. Some months ago, the media were all over the story - but unfortunately for the Prime Minister, much like the widely-predicted poll 'narrowing', the YouTube effect has been missing in action.

That's not to say that YouTube and similar sites haven't played a role in the campaign - but certainly not to the extent they've already featured in the U.S. presidential primaries, where debates between the candidates on either side of the political divide have invited citizens to pose their questions via YouTube, and where some politicians even announced their intention to run for President on the site.

Digital Media and Democracy:
Tactics in Hard Times

I'm very happy that a few of the articles and chapters I've worked on throughout the year are now coming close to publication. One of them is a chapter in Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, a book edited by Megan Boler for MIT Press; my contribution is based on one of my papers for the AoIR conference last year and explores the possibilities for citizen journalism beyond the tactical moment, as it transcends the industrial journalism/citizen journalism two-tier structure first described (though not exactly in those terms) by Herbert Gans so many years ago. Will citizen journalism remain tactical, and thus perhaps excuse itself from attempting to exert a more permanent, strategic influence on public life? Will it 'sell out' and go mainstream? Or is there a third, hybrid option which retains its strengths as a bottom-up movement while developing more permanent, sustainable forms?

My suggestion in the chapter (which I've called "Gatewatching, Gatecrashing: Futures for Tactical News Media") is that we may see a development of citizen journalism that's not unlike the trajectory charted by the evolution of extra-parliamentary opposition groups in 1970s Europe into credible political alternatives (and here especially the Greens parties). As a German, the obvious case in point for me is the career of Joschka Fischer from street protester to German Foreign Minister, ultimately commanding grudging respect even from old political enemies - and in citizen journalism, I think we're beginning to see the potential for similar transformations. In the chapter, I do go so far as to call OhmyNews' founder Oh Yeon-ho "the South Korean Joschka Fischer of journalism", though with tongue in cheek - guess you'll have to wait for the book to come out to see whether you agree with me on that one. It's now listed for pre-order on Amazon.

We've now published the next instalment of our Club Bloggery series at ABC Online and on our Gatewatching group blog. After four long weeks of the election campaign proper, and many more months of pre-election scuffles, this time we couldn't hold back any more and finally decided to 'go' The Australian for its atrociously partisan and misleading coverage of the election. And from the comments the piece has received on the ABC site and elsewhere, it looks like we're not the only ones to think so... Kudos to the ABC subbies, who found the appropriate image to go with an article titled "Jumping the Shark"!

Jumping the Shark

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns, and Barry Saunders

Collectively, the writers here at Club Bloggery have been watching the Australian political blogosphere for years. We know that the bloggers who have perhaps been most important and prominent down under are psephologists - specialist electoral statisticians who try to understand and analyse polls, and consider the interlocking numbers games of electoral politics.

The next instalment of our Club Bloggery series for ABC Online is now up. As always, we've posted a slightly longer version of the article on our group blog Gatewatching, in addition to the ABC article itself. Here's an excerpt:

Digging Deeper

By Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, and Axel Bruns

Climate change dominated a couple of days of Federal Election campaigning earlier this week, with the major parties both fumbling in laying out their responses. Peter Garrett and Malcolm Turnbull were punished by the mainstream media for, respectively, revealing something approximating a real opinion about how climate change agreements should work, and for being involved in a debate about Government policy before it's implemented.