This is a write-up of the notes for the talk I gave at the Australian Blogging Conference on Friday – there’s a comprehensive report of the session in question over at Woolly Days by Derek Barry. I’m not trying to give a verbatim transcript of what I had to say, but to capture the key points and to elaborate on some where time didn’t allow for a more comprehensive treatment.
A lot of the context for the discussion of the impact and nature of political blogging has been driven by boosterism on one hand and a plethora of cliches on the other. The plenary session at the Australian Blogging Conference included some remarks by Duncan Riley, one of the quota of “blogging evangelists” in attendance. The thrust of Riley’s talk was that Australian bloggers had to promote themselves and the blogosphere more actively and ardently in order to reach the audience we deserve. Inevitably, this sort of agenda is highly coloured by the inevitable, but misleading, comparisons with the American blogosphere.
As part of my preparation for the conference, I read Margaret Simons’ discussion of blogging in her new book The Content Makers: Understanding the media in Australia. Simons’ chapter reminded me of some points she quotes which I made at an ABC staff conference on New Media in Melbourne about this time last year. One of the questions panellists were posed was “are we there yet?” and my answer at the time was “no, but we’re getting there”.
Again, the context was very much the question of whether the influence and reach of political blogging in The States would be replicated here. I was sceptical at the time as to whether the comparison is the most appropriate one, and my argument in Uses of Blogs that the differences in political culture are so stark between the two nations that we might do better to examine the role of the blogosphere in other Westminster democracies such as Canada and New Zealand is one I’d make even more strongly today.
(It’s interesting to note that this has been picked up on in a recent academic paper [link to pdf] by University of Queensland political scientists Ian Ward and James Cahill.)
My take is now that we’re never going to get “there”, if “there” is taken to mean a status and role equivalent to that of the American blogosphere.
There are a number of reasons for that aside from those related to political culture and environment, which I’ll go on and discuss, but I also think it’s important to emphasise that blogging is better seen as having no fixed destination. The way it’s evolving, as Phil Gomes argued on LP recently, is towards being more of a conversation than a platform, or perhaps a set of practices and a certain style which has its own niche and its own value.
So why aren’t we “there”?
In contrast to Riley, I think it’s probably a good thing that we don’t have the sort of partisan high profile blogs like The Daily Kos that monopolise the American “A list”. While that style of link heavy, content short, direct the herd in one direction, make the partisan point and move on blog has its value in American politics, the expectations of both a “gotcha” or “Macaca” moment and/or of the eruption of netroots in Australia are both unrealistic and probably undesirable. As the parties move in heavily to the Politics 2.0 space, we see the same sort of disciplined colonisation of the conversation which has always characterised the media efforts of Australian political parties. Adding to this partisan inside the beltway politics has no value.
Similarly, to a large degree, I think, the oxygen for independent Australian political blogging has been squeezed out. If the 2007 election is a test for the blogosphere, as I myself have previously argued, it’s one where we’ve been failed before we even enter the exam room.
That’s because the willingness in a relatively disengaged political culture like ours to engage in political discussion is always going to be a very small minority interest, and it’s one that has been colonised by the mainstream media. Their response to that other cliche of blogging “journos v. bloggers” has been to pre-empt the space by a combination of cherry-picking bloggers such as Tim Dunlop to write on their platforms and the enabling of comments facilities on what are largely just recycled op/eds (with some exceptions such as Matt Price and Andrew Bolt).
Another cliche is to suggest that blogs are parasitic on the “MSM”. While there’s some truth in that, the relationship is actually more complex, and as I’ve previously argued, there can in fact be some synergies from co-operation and a symbiotic rather than an adversarial relationship. But political blogs’ chances of reaching a larger audience than we were able to build through our own efforts rely on media notice (or a willingness to move away from the nonprofit space and engage in marketing, which is another question I’ll come to).
The American media, in the context of the 2006 midterm election, proclaimed that if the 2004 presidential election was the year of the blogosphere, that campaign had seen the technology move on (to YouTube largely). That, I’d suggest, was actually a depoliticising narrative designed to disable the effectiveness of the complex arguments that can be made on political blogs in favour of soundbite online media which could be more easily contained by the various candidate and party campaigns. Most of the electoral activity in Politics 2.0 in Australia has been of this nature, and the Australian media had the benefit of observing the American moves which enabled them to defang the blogosphere in advance of the 2007 election year.
Although there’s a lot of significance in the degree to which the “blogs” that News Ltd (and particularly The Australian) host attract large numbers of comments and (presumably) a large number of unique visits, what is being practiced in that space is really not blogging. But it has co-opted and channelled much of the audience for online political discussion that may otherwise have gone to independent bloggers and reinscribed it within a traditional media frame.
That’s not to say that the balance sheet is all negative. Obviously, the Government Gazette v. the Blogosphere wars demonstrate that the psephological blogs (mediated through an online media node somewhat closer to the centre of things, Crikey) have had an impact in disrupting the hermetic circle that encloses political commentary in Canberra. There’s value, I think, in the barbarians storming the gate, and the exposure of The Australian’s motives in attempting to influence and control and circumscribe political debate through its “ownership” of polls and their interpretation.
This phenomenon illustrates some of the classic virtues of blogs – their power to aggregate distributed knowledge and to challenge accepted “media narratives”. But it’s also significant that the point of most influence of the political blogosphere is one of the points at which the quality of the Australian media debate is so poor – the continual reduction of political reporting to the horse race aspects of electioneering, and the obsession with over-interpreting polls. Blogs are playing a very useful role in knocking this narrative off centre, and aggregating expert but outsider analyses, but we’re still talking obsessively about polls and the horse race.
(We should also note that the “media” aren’t monolithic, and Dennis Atkins’ use of online psephology in his Courier-Mail column demonstrates that not all journos are unreceptive or close-minded.)
I’d be much more excited if we could point to significant coverage of policy issues that go underanalysed or unreported, and over the moon if blogs were influencing the policy debate or raising its salience.
Blogs are capable of aggregating distributed knowledge, providing alternate sources of opinion and views, and of interfacing with and influencing the media in various ways (some more subtle than others), but I don’t think that bloggers should get stuck in the mindset of “I don’t like the national media, I want to be the national media!”. We’re often at our best when responding quickly with informed comment to breaking news stories and in taking advantage of the almost hourly media cycle that is the reality of an online mediascape. But, in terms of making a distinctive and original contribution, I think there are two avenues along which we should be travelling.
The first is the “citizen journalism” road. Some of the best political blogging in America in fact concentrates on state and local politics, rushing to fill a vacuum where many news outlets have given up on the municipal and state house beats. If you think back to Brisbane twenty years ago, when we had three daily newspapers and the state based 7 30 report, and contrast it with the situation now where there’s effectively no state parliamentary press gallery and no good coverage of much local politics at all, you can get a sense of the sort of gap that could be filled, and filled well. While I don’t think the scope exists for the “professionalisation” of blogging that has taken hold in the US (though there is, and has been, the scope for new writers to emerge from the blogosphere), it’s possible that a business model could be generated to make this sort of coverage on a full time basis feasible.
That begs the question of whether there is such a model for national political blogs, and whether if there were, it would be a good thing.
Simons, who examines various different business models for new media (and the media generally in the new mediascape) characterises the blogosphere as part of the “gift economy”. She recounts having interviewed Nicholas Gruen of Club Troppo and asked him about what “business model” supported his blogging, and his response being to burst out laughing. Gruen gives freely of his time and his knowledge base and in return it enriches his life and makes it more meaningful. It’s that sort of voluntarism mixed with a sense of civic obligation and responsibility which I think gives the independent Australian political blogosphere the richness we can be proud of.
We probably could “monetise” our blogs to a limited degree, but although I don’t think that “cash for comment” would become an issue, inevitably we’d be trawling and writing for hits. “Paris Hilton no underpants” is probably a more popular search term than “Kevin Rudd health policy”, as Fairfax Digital knows as it goes about happily trashing the reputation of its brand. Political bloggers might not be writing about Paris every day, but writing for income would skew the topics chosen and even the style of the writing. There’s nothing wrong with narrowcasting, and attempting to emulate the broadcasting model of chasing the largest possible audience has its dangers, not least in downplaying the community aspect of blogging in favour of talking at and down to an “audience”. Although there is a balance that needs to be maintained between a time commitment and the need to earn a living, at the moment I think the argument comes down on the side of the gift economy model.
Similarly, the experience of the feminist blogosphere shows how particular perspectives and groups can intervene in and influence broader conversations while providing a space for those who might otherwise feel isolated to leverage a collective mass. It’s the art of public and political conversation that I think creates most value for Australian political blogs, and it’s a form of conversation that has the potential to migrate beyond the blogging platform itself. To the degree that this civic art is cultivated, I believe that’s an unalloyed good that political blogs have provided, if not one that is easily captured by most of the cliches and the mirrored narratives of boosterism and denigration.
Update: My attention has just been drawn to an interesting piece by some of my colleagues at QUT in ABC Opinion.
One of the problems with the pro blogging evangelists is that they have the same top ten mentality as the mainstream media, focussed on stats, ranking and being top dog….always looking to measure popularity with lip service paid to real conversations. I’m so over that. They talk a big game about diversity etc but it’s mostly BS.
Anyway, we’re now having is a whole range of important conversations across many easy to use platforms now, most short grabs, but all eventually adding up to one thing, more participation in the social and political life of the country……..drip by drip.
I’ll read this again and maybe I’ll have more to add later.
I think that you’re on the money with your analysis. We could never see an Australian Daily Kos because the differences in our system of government make so much of what they do either irrelevant (get out the vote and fundraising) or impossible (preselection challenges).
I think that those of us engaging with blogs are already ‘letter to the editor’ types and are simply seeking out other pieces of media that reinforce the beliefs that we already hold.
There is an opportunity for the blogs to follow more local stories, as you mentioned, and take more time analysing stories either before the corporate media get there or after they’ve moved on. I think this will be where Australian blogging comes into its own, blogs will become the new broadsheets.
Dave you’re right. I’m sure there are many letters to the editor types such as myself. The Oz (but not The West Australian) is publishing so much stuff that would never have been published in the letters page for content or space reasons. The fact that I can be a crackpot globally or micro-locally means it’s a golden age for my opinions.
What Mark and Phil said.
I think that the strength of blogging and all the Web 2.0 goodness is that it is all about enabling the political conversation. While not everyone’s into it, and I wouldn’t expect that many people to spend hours a day trawling TeH Interwebs, it’s enabled a new class of people to join the political game.
Lately I’ve been thinking about all these Web 2.0 campaigners as being a bit like the Moral Majority movement of the early 80s. The Reagan era brought the Christian Right to the party in the US, and a big part of the reason for their success was their organization. In a similar way, blogging has brought progressives to the party as, for one reason or another, it has allowed them to be a bit more organized than they were before.
I think in the long term that this effect will be nullified, though hopefully it might force the Dems and the ALP and other leftish parties to open their doors a bit to some of the new generation (cause they desperately need it).
Good post, Mark.
I think another important issue about the comparison with US blogs is both the size and them temperament of the potential audience. We Aussies may bitch and moan about our own system, but the US political and business climate is criminally corrupted, and the media is a big part of it. So there you have many times to population to start with, including some high-density cities which make local blogging more easily marketable, and also you have people desperate for an alternative to the MSM.
Despite all the failings of the Murdoch-Fairfax duopoly, there are still a few good journos working within both stables (very few at Fairfax, even less at News) and their stories are not routinely suppressed. Then we have other news sources like SBS and ABC, which (even as they become increasingly politicized and under-funded here) really don’t exist at all in the USA (closest thing is probably PBS and Cspan).
So given the limited population and limited maximum audience for Ozblogistan, I would suggest that a “successful” Aussie blog probably needs to create its own readership community in order to thrive (see Troppo, LP, Surfdom and even Crikey). The alternative is to chase an international audience (a la Chrenkoff) or dish up some very meaty stories which generate their own interest (where is the Aussie – preferably leftist – version of Matt Drudge? the psephologists are probably leading the way here).
Finally, without wanting to divert this into a Dunlop-centric thread, I am curious that you cited Tim as an example of a blog co-opted by the MSM, then suggested that such professional blogging necessarily leads to reduced quality and originality (or did I misread “inevitably we’d be trawling and writing for hits”?). You also said:
While I agree that so-called MSM “blogs” full of trite nonsense, where comments take four hours to appear (if at all), must turn many casual readers off the whole concept of blogging, that does sound a bit harsh. Even John Howard is scientifically classified as “homo sapiens”, like it or not!
Well, Blogocracy is not a blog “co-opted by the MSM”, gandhi, but Tim is a blogger hired by the MSM. So that’s a difference.
I don’t see them as blogs for four reasons (and I’ve noted some partial exceptions).
The first is that blogs don’t have the filter of editorial or proprietorial or contractual control or influence between the writer and the content. Bloggers can post what or when they like constrained to some degree by their own judgement of their readership and the views articulated by their readership, but the absence of a filter from a “masthead” is a very important point of distinction.
The second is that most of the “blogs” (note the different language used from that which has developed within the blogosphere – commenters are also referred to as “bloggers” and posts are “blogs”) are no different in any way from the normal op/ed fare, or even worse, because they aren’t subbed.
With only a tiny minority of exceptions, there’s no engagement between the “blogger” and the “commenters” and there are usually filtration procedures for comment as well. Nor are the commenters usually conscious of a sense of community and the continuity of a commenting persona over time. It’s often sort of hit and run, and more like a “forum” or a “board” than a comments thread. So it’s one step ahead of letters to the editor, but a few steps behind a genuine blog thread.
Finally, there is a marked difference in tone and style even where the blogger on the professional news site conceives of themselves as such rather than as an op/ed or leader writer or journo.
Well, Mark, you said that News Ltd “has co-opted and channelled much of the audience for online political discussion” so I assumed you included Blogocracy there. I don’t see the difference with how I phrased it. But never mind.
Again using Blogocracy only as an example, does that fact that Dunlop is not free to write whatever he wants mean that you do not classify it as a blog?
I remember a Scientific American article a couple of years ago. As I recall, it analysed 40 or more blogs from the U.S. blogosphere, and checked which sites were on other site’s blogrolls.
They ended up with two clumps – one affiliated with the “Left”/Democrats*, and one affiliated with the Right/Republican. Sites of the Left generally linked to sites of the Left and sites of the Right generally linked to sites of the Right. There were very, very few links from one clump to another. Partisan? Very.
I don’t really see the same happening in Australia, nor do I want the same to happen. Firstly, we’ve got more political parties down here – six or seven as opposed to two. Secondly, most political blogs are not affiliated with a party, and view most, if not all parties, with great suspicion. Are any blogs embracing Kevin07 as the savior? Few, I guess – they’re just glad he’s not the other guy. I don’t see the faith that a lot of US bloggers hold in Dean or Gore or Obama.
(I know the Aussie RWDBs link to themselves and each other. But they seem to be an annex of the American Right rather than a truly Australian phenomenon.)
* Not that I think the American Democrats are that Left.
Interesting post, Mark. I suspect that the things we now call blogs (I predict the name won’t survive more than another few years) will develop in a number of different directions.
Some will be co-opted by the MSM, some will become “professionalised” in their own right – Crikey could be seen as an example of this kind of thing happening.
Some (most) will remain in the gift economy, and the gift economy will be constantly reinvented nd renewed as new people move in to content creation. As I say in my book, the phenomenon of blogging is not going to go away, even if individual blogs come and go. Meanwhile, the different forms of “gift economy” media will at the very least be major sites of innovation in media – for the simple reason that they have nothing to lose, and can therefore take risks.
Why won’t the name blogging last? Because I think it is already inadequate to capture all the different things that are going on under its banner. You have media organisations like B5Media, the MSM blog attempts, online journals such as National Opinion Online, as well as Mumble, and also those personal journals and diaries and family snapshot collections intended only for a small social circle. Clearly we are going to need words that allow for differentiation and distinction between these very different types of web-based publishing.
Could say more, but it’s late. Glad you got the book, finally! Cheers Margaret
Gandhi, I think we’re at cross purposes. Yes, I think Blogocracy has been part of the draining off of the potential readership of the independent blogosphere which comes from the media (most significantly News Ltd) trying to co-opt it. But obviously Blogocracy itself didn’t exist before it was established at News.com.au and thus can’t have been co-opted. Surfdom is still going strong. I think I’ve already answered your other question, and I don’t want to dwell on this point to the exclusion of others in the post.
Down and Out, some of those points came up in the discussion in this session and also in the later one on citizen journalism. There have been several attempts to establish a Labor branded blog. None have succeeded.
Thanks for the comment, Meg. As is probably clear from the post, I agree with the points you make.
I’ve added a couple of paragraphs to the post to make the argument about the mainstream co-optation of the blogosphere’s space clearer:
The News Ltd blogs seem pretty neutered, and it’s hard to think of anything particularly interesting they’ve had on offer. The fairfax blogs aren’t much better. Some of the professional blogs draw quite a readership, but some blogs on Fairfax/News Ltd become ghost blogs pretty quickly.
I think groups of independent bloggers (such as on the present site) will be the main alternative to the professional blogs.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the Fairfax Online mob have never really gone down the News route of political “blogs”.
They’re nor marketed as ‘political’, but they’re political in some sense. The would-be Sex in the City blog is arguably about sexual politics (if somewhat facile), and Jack Marx touches on political stuff indirectly.
Yep, fair enough, but don’t forget Jack Marx got sacked by Fairfax (and resurfaced at the largely anodyne Bulletin election blog).
I wrote some notes towards a critique of the Fairfax “blogs” here a while back:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/09/06/msm-blogging-and-other-related-musings/
Mark sorry to take your blog blog but I would love to have you blog this for me. I am a total luddite but I have just found out I have upset the sanctimonious Mr Andrew Bolt ! Could some one please help me get this into the blogsphere I am just dying laughing at this one.
Being ‘Bolted’ is considered a badge of honour among many of the sane…
I cannot stop laughing !!!!
I wish I had found this earlier
I think technology has a lot to do with it. As Jacques Chester commented once before the Au blogs missed out on the slash/scoop tech wave and nearly all come under the wordpress/blogspot banner. This means the dailykos/redstate/eurotrib type diarying has not occurred.
This has been mitigated somewhat by the large blogs being group blogs and with aggregation such as the ozpolitics feeds and troppos missing link; but I think it is more a tech issue than anything else.
Does anyone know if the sessions of the conference that were recorded are planned to be hosted somewhere?
I wouldn’t mind watching them.
Yes, on the conference website. But I think they’ll take some time to appear. I’ll let people know.
At the end of this Age article about politicians’ blogs comes a revelation (no doubt to be seized upon the Liberals’ dirt unit) that Peter Garrett has 3137 teenage daughters.
That adds up to more than one per day between 1987 and 1994…
A very thoughtful piece, Mark. I would agree with the above and probably most of it, though I don’t have the benefit of a comprehensive macro or micro-view of the subject or even given it all that much thought.
But my impression is that there is a swag of excellent to good, independent (progressive) political blogs in the US (much less so in Australia, but then we are a far smaller population and some of the best don’t allow for comments at all), which may comfort the afflicted and provide a measure of catharsis and release for the self-selected, shifting community of writers, readers and commentators, but probably don’t/won’t really mean that much in terms of broader political influence for some of the reasons you’ve outlined At least for the foreseeable future and given no environmental changes that may change that.
My view is based to a large extent on nothing more scientific than my perception that most politically engaged people in Australia, where the blog options are far fewer than in the US, simply don’t read political blogs at all, let alone contribute to them – for a variety of reasons. I guess those reasons need examining too, to get a fuller picture. I think this is a reasonable deduction given the nos who ever comment here, one of the most popular political blogs. I am the only person I know in my social/political/work circles who reads LP or comments on it, I am pretty sure. And I think that is a shame. Of course, there may be some lurkers that I don’t know about!
Thanks, jinmaro.
Update: My attention has just been drawn to an interesting piece by some of my colleagues at QUT in ABC Opinion.
Interesting piece here too
I’m sorry, but the idea of a conference devoted to blogging seems a bit navel gazing to me!
I don’t see why, Sacha. You don’t have to agree that it’s going to set the world on fire (as I suggested in the post, I don’t) to agree it’s a significant thing worth discussing and it’s surely not unusual for people with any common interest to want to get together and talk about it and meet and chat.
Sacha: before you next decide to not go to these sort of things you might consider-
-Just because your navel is uninspiring doesn’t mean there aren’t some spectacular ones out there, well worth a bit of a gaze if you get the chance
- Tacit knowledge often only finds overt expression when practitioners from a domain get together in highly fluid discourse. This was definitely the case in the search engine optimisation discussion which developed in one session. We all had to take an oath that we would never write the dark secrets down.
- Some things just don’t translate into browser-rendered glyphs, like sandwiches de-luxe, and after-conference drinks.
- It might seem strange to you, but it was heard oft repeated on the day ” It’s good to be able put a face to the attitude”.
Give it a lash next time you get a chance.
yes, yes – of course – whatever works for people. I just think that a lot of blogging, while influential or potentially influential (as in the U.S. or in the silly responses to good blogs by The Australian), isn’t that substantial and so a conference on it is a bit odd. But whatever works for people
Essentially Slash and Scoop are not blog platforms as we think of them now. They are systems with a community-led focus built into their design. Slash empowers readers to submit stories for selection by editors and anyone to comment. Scoop went further and allowed private diaries and voting queues to determine what would reach the front page.
This means that Daily Kos and Redstate (both of them Scoop sites) are massively busy and influential because users didn’t need to go anywhere else. A great diary story could easily be promoted to the front page. There was a lower barrier to entry on commenting on other diaries and stories, plus the useful niceties like threaded conversations and member histories which have yet to make it to third-generation platforms like Wordpress.
I could go on and on — in fact I already have — so I’ll instead direct people to my posts on the topic. This one in particular.