Industrial Journalism

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.

Last week we published another instalment in our ABC Online series Club Bloggery - this time dealing with the demise of iconic Australian news magazine The Bulletin. As always, the article is also cross-posted over at Gatewatching:

Club Bloggery: Once Were Barons

By Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson, and Barry Saunders

Though we often give the print media a hard time here at Club Bloggery, we're not so sanguine about the end of the iconic magazine, The Bulletin, last month.

Despite its virulently racist origins, and its tendency under Kerry Packer to be used now and then as the mogul's mouthpiece, its end is an alarming symptom of something wider and more serious. The worrying structural problem it reveals is the difficulty of sustaining any venues for the specialised task of investigative journalism in Australian and international media.