Brisbane.
We're now in the final session of the first day at the CCi conference, which I'll try to chair and blog at the same time - we'll see how it goes. My colleague Terry Flew is the first presenter, and he begins by outlining the three layers of impact of new media technologies as artefacts or devices (technologies); communication activities and practices using these technologies; and the social arrangements, institutions, and organisational forms which develop around the use and management of such technologies. Journalism has so far responded to the Internet as a new technology mainly in the first sense, no so much in the two latter senses. This also takes place at a time of perceived crisis in journalism, and in the face of the emergence of citizen journalism in responding to that crisis.

Brisbane.
We're now starting the first panel session of the CCi conference, and this is the panel on citizen journalism that my paper is in as well, so I'm including the Powerpoint below (audio to be added later available now).

The first speaker is David McKnight from UNSW, whose focus is on the future of quality journalism in the emerging media environment. He points to a perspective that newspapers are now an 'endangered species'; The Australian passionately rejected this in a September 2006 editorial. It suggested a commitment to quality journalism as an important continuing strategy for newspapers. Nonetheless, the economic case for newspaper publishing is becoming increasingly difficult; circulations are falling and especially classified advertising is moving away from print.

I'm crossposting this from Gatewatching.org, where a discussion about the influence of Australian political bloggers on wider political processes that was kicked off by Jason Wilson's recent posts on Tim Blair's move to the Daily Telegraph and Christian Kerr's summary dismissal of Ozblogistan's political combattants in The Australian has prompted me to finally post up some more information about the research we're currently engaged in at QUT, in collaboration with our excellent colleagues at the University St. Gallen in Switzerland. I'm also attaching a detailed discussion paper which documents our methodological model in some more detail - we'd love to get further feedback on this, from fellow researchers and interested bloggers alike. (For a more condensed version of this material, please see our paper for the ISEA 2008 conference in Singapore.)

As I've mentioned here previously, the Vibewire e-Festival of Ideas is now underway, and I'm taking part in a forum on e-democracy that also involves such luminaries as Mark Pesce, Jason Wilson, Martin Stewart-Weeks, and Tony Walker. I've now posted my first contribution, which I'm republishing here - any comments welcome, and I'll try and bring them to the discussion. Or better yet - join us!

I think it might be useful to work out in some more detail what we mean by e-democracy and related terms. Broadly, for me there are two interesting areas here: ways in which the Internet and other online media can facilitate better communication between governments and citizens (g2c, as well as c2g), and ways in which they enable citizens to engage directly with one another (c2c), possibly bypassing governments as well as mainstream media altogether.

Both are interesting, and there are a few notable developments here. For example, in g2c/c2g,

Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Brisbane.
We're now in the opening session of the AMIC conference "Convergence, Citizen Journalism and Social Change". Today is just a short afternoon with a couple of keynote speeches; tomorrow, the bulk of the papers (including my colleague Jason Wilson's and mine) will be presented. Pradip Thomas from the University of Queensland is offering some opening remarks - referring to the common trope of the decline of mainstream journalism, and the corresponding rise of citizen journalism and its effect on political developments.

We've been meaning to slow down the Club Bloggery series a little while we get busy with other research, but have found this difficult especially at a time when so many new topics present themselves. So, the latest instalment in the series went online about a week ago already, and I'm only now getting around to posting a link to it here - this time, we look at how the U.S. blogosphere is shaping up in its coverage of the current presidential primaries, and the actual election later this year.

Along with the previous one, this latest piece generated some, um, interesting responses from self-styled professional irritators Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt, and their respective cheersquads; predictably, where they ascended beyond mere ad hominems the focus of their harrumphing appeared to centre around the fact that it's possible for research into blogging to be funded - in part - by taxpayer money. (Perhaps the logic here is "hey, if even I can be a blogger this blogging business really can't be worth researching"? How refreshingly humble.) Such comments are as common in the debating arsenal of the irrational right as they are stupidly reductive, of course - if the "Surely that money should be given to research for a cure for AIDS or cancer?" argument is taken to its logical conclusion, then 'surely' nothing save two or three major projects should receive all the funding available?

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?":