Last year I shared some thoughts on the state of political blogging in Australia. Trevor Cook has just examined the claim that the blogging phenomenon is “losing impetus”. I’m not sure that’s so, and coincidentally, I’ve just sent off a write up of the talk I gave at the Public Right to Know Conference at UTS last year, for a special issue of the Pacific Journalism Review being co-ordinated by the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism. You can read it here [link to pdf].
I’ve taken the opportunity to update my thoughts from last year - when the earlier version was presented as a keynote on the eve of the federal election. Please note that it’s a commentary piece rather than a refereed paper, so it lacks all the usual scholarly apparatus, which - however - does have the virtue of making it short and hopefully relatively more readable.
Elsewhere: Tim Watts at Tree of Knowledge.
If more and more journalist and radio announcers are being made redundant;Being replaced by syndicated columnist’s its more importantant than ever to encourage citizen journalism even though it is often not professional in it’s presentation…
The rot in mainstream media set in during the late 70s, when the old cadetship system, which trained reporters on the job, was replaced by the universification of journalism courses, full of theories which emphasise the primacy of opinion over objectivity. The result is a generation of narcissists who measure their self-importance in column inches and thumbnail bylines.
The truth is, genuine investigative journalism is too expensive for the MSM business model, but opinions come cheap. They require almost no research, no inconvenient checking of facts. And when a columnist’s particular biases become well-known, they begin to receive leaks from like-minded entities with barrows to push, which makes it even cheaper and easier. ‘Columnism’ is basically very lazy journalism.
I hope your comment above is satirical, Barry. You illustrate your own point about the lack of professional standards in ‘citizen journalism’ with seven (7) errors of grammar and spelling in your three short lines.