Publications

Over the past few years, I've created a few neologisms - terms such as 'gatewatching', 'newssharing', and of course 'produser' and 'produsage'. While some might frown on this (hi, Jean), in my view it's absolutely necessary for researchers to abandon traditional terminology when it becomes overly limiting, and obscures important new features of their objects of study. So, for example, the traditional journalistic process of gatekeeping is giving way to a new mode of gatewatching in news production; for journalists and other news commentators this is "a shift from the watchdog to the 'guidedog'" role, as Jo Bardoel and Mark Deuze have put it.

I've been meaning to post this for a while - a call for papers for the International Journal of Communications Law and Policy that's related to the Association of Internet Researchers conference I organised in September. For those who weren't able to make it to AoIR 2006, there's still some time to submit additional articles...

The International Journal of Communications Law and Policy and the Association of Internet Researchers is pleased to announce a call for further papers for a special issue on Internet regulation linked to the IR7 Conference ('Internet Convergences'). The selection committee - composed of the editorial board of the IJCLP and Matthew Allen (Curtin University of Technology), Fay Sudweeks (Murdoch University) and Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology) - will review and consider all submissions for publication. We have already received several papers from the conference, which are in the process of being reviewed, and would now encourage experts from all disciplines and nationalities to submit further papers for publication by 1 December 2006. Acceptance will be notified by the end of the year for publication in 2007 following strict double-blind peer review.

My colleague Graham Meikle from Macquarie University, author of the fabulous Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet, has just let me know that his review of my book Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production will be published in the next issue of Media International Australia. He's kindly allowed me to republish his review here - many thanks, Graham!

I'm very happy to report that an update of my paper from last year's AolR conference, "Wikinews: The Next Generation of Online News?", has now been published as the lead article in Scan Journal. I was able to find some more recent statistics, which unfortunately confirm the trends I'd already seen at the end of 2005: Wikinews is stagnating, both in terms of new contributors and as far as content creation is concerned. In my opinion, this is due to a misinterpretation of the Neutral Point of View doctrine, which here leads to a counterproductive aversion to any kind of discussion of news and current events. (And let me be absolutely clear: I'm not arguing against NPOV as such here - Wikipedia's current events section does very good work covering the news, for example, so it can work very well in a news context.) Anyway - read the article in Scan Journal! Here's the issue announcement by editors Chris Atton and Graham Meikle:

Well, it's always nice if things have good timing. The other day I found two letters from my publisher Peter Lang in the mail: one, from the Switzerland office, was a royalty cheque for Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production - we've sold over a quarter of the first print run already, even though reviews are only just starting to appear. I was tempted to have it framed - but then, it is an actual cheque... The other was a letter from the New York office, with the contract for the next book, which currently has the working title Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Due in mid-2007, it continues my work on Produsers and Produsage, and provides a guide to the landscape of produsage across a wide variety of domains.

(Um, that's Uses of Blogs in the news - not uses of blogs in newsmaking...)

Heh. Uses of Blogs is already making headlines. Good timing, too - we've just heard from the publisher that the book should be hitting stores in about two months... Alternatively, of course, you could already pre-order it from Amazon.com.