If the premise is that Twitter, Facebook and other social media enable politicians to enter into dialogue directly with voters, then, as he says, that’s unlikely. I’d add to the reasons Farnsworth enumerates that those Tweeps who discuss Australian politics are a micro-public, not “the public”. That is to say, as for instance the #ausvotes crowd became more of a community, barriers to entry also arise, and I’d observe that Twitter’s social ecology particularly lends itself to hierarchisation. In any case, we’re talking about a very very small proportion of the electorate, and probably, a much more partisan population than the citizenry as a whole. I’m not sure whether anyone has attempted to gauge just how many people joined in election related talk on Twitter, but I expect that might be one of the outcomes of an interesting research project my former colleagues at QUT, Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess, are conducting under an ARC grant (research results are regularly updated and discussed at Mapping Online Publics).

The second point to make here is that because Twitter is the media’s favourite social medium – as Farnsworth says because of its utility in driving link traffic, but also because it aids in “branding” journos and the media organisations that employ them – we can observe some of the same network effects in operation as those which restrict the discussion of politics to a small circle. Insofar as it’s more porous, than, say, letters to the editor, it still tends to centre around particular nodes – the regular #qanda commentary, #qt when parliament is in session, and comments about and to particular journos who have a high profile on Twitter (@annabelcrabb being a good example). In a textually restricted medium, moving oneself closer to the key nodes (through retweets, gaining more followers, or a mention by a leading Tweep) is often a matter of making a 140 character joke or witticism, or acting as a catalyst for conversations which start to involve a significant number of others. What’s going on is very interesting indeed sociologically, but it’s not either deliberative debate nor, I strongly suspect, particularly influential.

Incidentally, one of the other claims about social media – its ability to aggregate distributed knowledge and to disseminate it quickly, is also I think proved largely false. As Farnsworth rightly observes, the only gain in information during the Gillard/Rudd leadership contest was probably knowing the result about a minute or so before everyone else, and a lot of what was purveyed turned out to be wrong. Twitter probably best lends itself to these sorts of fast developing events, but in terms of citizen journalism, a political event is something very different from, say, a natural disaster, as people aren’t reporting on what they see or know directly, but speculating on snippets of information – and manipulated snippets – from the core inside actors.

I was also interested to note that Derek Barry has written a post at Woolly Days on the submission from my QUT Creative Industries Faculty colleagues Terry Flew, Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns and Jason Wilson (now at Wollongong Uni). Drawing on some lessons from an ARC Linkage Project on citizen journalism (and folks might recall the YouDecide2007 site which was a centrepiece of the research), they argue that public broadcasting needs to be reframed as public service media.

Derek Barry sums up the submission in more depth, but the key idea is that social innovation is now more likely to arise at the margins than from centralised planning. Flew et al contend that the ABC and SBS could enhance the performance of their Charter goals through leveraging user-generated content. This direction would involve reconceptualising the traditional educational and citizenship functions of public broadcasting universality as an opportunity for citizens to negotiate that civic capacity with others via a universally accessible platform.

Most of the submission goes to the news and current affairs roles of the ABC and SBS, but there may also be implications for other areas of the corporations’ activities.

Disclosure: I was also involved in working on the ARC Project which has fed into this submission.

Update: Terry Flew posts about the submission on his blog.

Update: Margaret Simons has a long article on the review at Inside Story.

Image of the State Library of Victoria from avlxyz at flickr reproduced under a creative commons licence.

One thing I used to notice when I used to buy newspapers was that around this time of year “culture” steps out of the weekend review pages and takes pride of place as “holiday reading”. Short stories are serialised, the state of art forms and cultural genres worried about, and reviews abound. And not just on Saturday and Sunday.

2008 saw, in my view, a number of tipping points in the mediascape (and I’ll have more to say about this in a later post). For instance, according to the Pew Centre, the net overtook papers for the first time in the United States as a source of news. The current counter to the “death of the newspaper” narrative from some of the editorial and journo crew is a claim that everyone suffers if folks don’t have a comprehensive perspective on what’s going on, limiting themselves to following fields of niche interest. Margaret Simons has something to say about this theme at Content Makers, riffing off a piece by Sally Young at Inside Story. Now, I strongly doubt that there were ever people who read the paper cover to cover as a matter of civic duty. [Young doesn't make that claim, but it's implied in some of the less nuanced arguments from folks in the news biz.] Indeed, the division of newspapers into sections, and the usual relegation of matters cultural to the weekend in itself exemplifies the fact that judgements – highly normative (and often gendered) ones – are being made about what people should read. We’re to assume that serious stuff – politics and crime – occupies the minds of serious people, until they get to take a Christmas/New Year timeout. I’m actually not sure these people exist, and the ideal type of the reader imagined in the mind of the all knowing editor and publisher is one of the big problems with print media.

Anyway, all this is a bit of an introduction to a feature that New Matilda has been running over the last little while – a focus on Australian culture. There’s all sorts of interesting reading – Jason Wilson and Melissa Gregg on why we can thank John Howard for Underbelly, Judith White on museums and galleries, Robert Miller on the state of the film industry, Sue Turnbull on the state of Australian television, David Musgrave on Australian’s relationship to poets and poetry, John Hunter on small presses and independent publishers and Lynden Barber with the obligatory Baz Luhrmann review. All are well worth a read.

Returning to my theme, though, as part of the “State of the Cultural Nation” series, Barry Saunders writes on new media and a “surge” in democracy and citizen journalism:

There’s lots of stuff to play with. Lots of people to talk to on twitter. Cheap publishing platforms. Access to public data. Opportunities to use your knowledge to better Australia. Places to publicise your work and your ideas, to show them directly to the PM, the Leader of the Opposition, the Government and the public. Get among it.

Maybe it’s because my professional hat as a sociologist has a certain sceptical bent, but I’m not quite so optimistic. It strikes me that what’s missing from Saunders’ piece is any assessment of the actual influence and impact of the developments he celebrates. No doubt many are worth celebrating, but some are problematic, and some are still at the baby steps stage. One half of one the entrenched dichotomies I think we need to transcend which continues to haunt most discussion of new media in the political sphere is the view that the new must supplant the old, and that this is an unalloyed good. Things, I dare say, are a bit more complex than this.

Of course, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating, and it will be interesting to look back on 1 January 2010 to see what’s actually been achieved through e-democracy and social media in the world of politics. But at this stage, my strong feeling, and it’s been a continuing theme in all my writing on this stuff, is that the most important impact has been cultural – in the sense of fostering a more participatory and engaged culture. But, to return to the beginning, I don’t think anyone in this country has figured out how to make that culture more than a very small niche interest and set of practices.

Sally Young argues that some awareness of politics filtered through as readers skimmed the paper on their way to the sports section or wherever. Maybe they threw the front bit out, but in any case, there are two problems glossed over in this narrative – the fact that most political reportage and commentary is of very poor quality and the fact that most Australians aren’t interested in most of it. There’s probably a relationship there! Expanding the circle of political interest through interactivity and conversations online – that’s the big challenge for 2009.

You know why there are bloggers, @Newshour? Because there is “safety first” reasoning in news. People get sick of it and take up their pens.”

Young doesn’t entirely agree – not that the performance of the media in reportage isn’t a jumping off point for the desire to blog – but that the problem with mainstream journalism is “safety first”. He presents three hypotheses which might explain the quality of political reporting and commentary. I think he’s definitely onto something here, though I’d also add that the structure of the media and its corporate logics are also factors we should take note of.

The post concludes:

…perhaps the urge to blog is driven not so much by the tendency of journalists towards “safety first”, but because journalists are by and large socially homogenous and don’t reaffirm the views of most bloggers, who in reaction create their own social networks.

Which is not why I blog at all, but then, I am an statistically inadequate sample, and this post is pure speculation on which I hope to get some feedback from other bloggers.

Part of the academic stuff I’m working on this year goes to the question of the motivation for the creation of “user-generated content”. In the context of political blogging, I’m not at all certain that the sorts of categories the citizen journalism literature employs – ie “monitorial citizen”, “public sphere” and so on – are at all adequate for understanding the desire to blog.

To the degree that they aren’t just dependent on a reinscription of the whole “public purpose” argument about journalism in a new frame and a range of concepts about public deliberation which are too abstract, I think they’re probably a post facto effect rather than a motivator. In fact, I’m not entirely sure there’s as strong a correlation between the quality of the media and the impulse to blog as everyone seems to think. So I’d be very interested in others’ observations!

Elsewhere: Gary Sauer-Thompson.

Coverage of the Brisbane rally is at Nocensorship.info, and Skribe has uploaded a citizen journalism video report of the Perth event to YouTube:

Please feel free to add links or reports in comments.

It’s worth noting as well that the latest Essential Research poll found support for the censorship plan running at 49-40% [via The Poll Bludger]. Remembering that their sample is online and thus of internet users, there’s still obviously a way to go in turning around public opinion on this issue.

Related posts: The politics of the clean feed and protest tactics.

Tim has some reflections on the role online media plays and its value and potential vis-a-vis the mainstream media which I think are clearly heartfelt and incredibly important, so I’m going to take the liberty of quoting his last post at some length. In particular, I want to endorse Tim’s sentiments about the necessity of supporting and growing the independent online mediaspace, and I want to point out how those comments have direct implications for the sort of work we do at LP, and how that work could be enhanced. But more of that later.

As difficult as this decision is, there is nonetheless something apt about the timing. The blog began life not long after I moved to the US at the end of 2001. It got up and running in the strange twilight period between the events of September 11 and the disastrous decision by the Bush Administration to launch a war in Iraq in March 2003. With the election of Barack Obama to the Presidency that period has come to something of a natural and symbolic end and thus, for me at least, some of the central motivations for this sort of writing has dissipated. This blog, and others like it, have seen off the end of the Howard Government and the Bush Administration and on that score I couldn’t be happier.

This is not to say that there isn’t now a role for the sort of work blogs do, only that I, personally, am not in position to take on that sort of commitment at the moment. In fact, the need, especially in Australia, for wise independent voices to discuss and dissect the great issues of the day is as great as it has ever been and so that’s what I want to go out with: a plea for people to support — genuinely support — independent media in this country.

The fact is, Australia’s mainstream media is moribund. Although there are great journalists and other contributors out there, the institution itself is stuck in a hopeless, self-serving, tenured cul-de-sac and is failing in its job to properly inform, discuss, debate and entertain. Not to mention, reinvent itself. The form is dominated by a handful of insiders who have grown so content with their own lot that they are immune to sensible criticism and lack the self-awareness to reassess what it is they are doing. They are supported in this self-satisfied loop by a political class that is happy to exploit the status quo, feeding them leaks and other tidbits to keep the whole charade ticking over in such a way that nothing really changes.

The narratives, the memes, the discussions of our political and social life are set in concrete and endlessly recycle. We have learned to accept the daily, largely manufactured, controversies of political and social discussion in lieu of genuine examination. The same voices — and there are only about 20 of them — continue to define what is important or useful or worthy of discussion and the few organs of the mainstream media keep churning them out. Their lack of seriousness is only matched by their lack of courage.

To say that a fully-functioning independent media is the answer is glib. It is not that easy. And yet, there it is. The idea is not for such independent groups to replace the mainstream media but merely to get them to lift their game, to lead by example.

The situation as it currently stands is not completely hopeless. For all their failings, there are some new voices out there trying to make a difference. Some of them are thinktanks, some of them of grassroots organisations, some of them are blogs or other forms of online media. None of them has really “broken through” in the way that is necessary to make a real difference, but they are a start.

At the end of the day, though, they will only succeed if, firstly, they can organise themselves and offer a genuinely professional product and, secondly, if we-the-people properly support them. That means not just reading them and cheering them on but, by and large, financing them. And I don’t mean a few bucks in a tip jar once a year: I mean serious ongoing financial support. For as long as I have been blogging I’ve been hearing people tell me how wonderful blogs and other new media are and how much they enjoy and appreciate them. But I have very rarely seen those fine words and sentiments backed up with hard cash. It is about time it was.

I don’t mean you should toss a whole lot of cash at some guy with a blog. But at some point, enough of you are going to have to take a bit of a risk and invest a decent sum in this or that site so that they can genuinely operate as independent media. And the online media itself is going to have to get organised to the point where they can offer a product that is going to attract that sort of contribution, as well as money from other sources, advertising, or whatever.

Until this happens, stop whinging about the mainstream media. Spare me the heartfelt cries of how much you love this blog or that blog and just accept the fact that if you really want a functioning independent media you are going to have to pay for it. It’s that friggin simple.

Tim goes on to thank everyone for the support given to his various online endeavours, and I want to thank him for them too, but I’d mainly like to riff off these comments I’ve excerpted.

First, I really don’t think that anyone could disagree with his diagnosis of the media, and of its multitude of failings. One could add to that the observation that Australia fails to support many outlets for writing on public affairs outside newspapers themselves – while there are some exceptions such as The Monthly and Overland, we have nothing like the rich culture of magazine journalism and commentary that exists in comparable countries. That’s not just a factor of the distribution costs involved in a big country and the relatively small market. It’s also a product of the monopolisation of public space – and here Fairfax are equally at fault with News Limited – and this is why the dumbing down of ABC news is so lamentable. But it’s also a product of our own culture – a failure to engage publicly which is one of the worst aspects of the Australian political landscape.

If you wanted to make a living as a freelance writer in Australia, you could do so by writing about gadgets or travel or writing for teen mags (and I’m not knocking…) – but it’s just about impossible for anyone bar a very small hermetic circle to do so in writing about public affairs. And that’s one of the reasons why our “public intellectuals” are largely such a lacklustre lot – the “marketplace of ideas” is literally anti-competitive because of the lack of viable pathways for anyone to put the time and effort into breaking into it.

Ideally, online should be the place where this can be remedied. To some degree it is, but Tim’s quite right to say that there are barriers to the improvement and progress of what we’ve got (whether we’re talking about things on the internet like Crikey or New Matilda or the blogosphere.) I’m constantly thinking about how we could make LP a much better place in terms of all sorts of features and depth of analysis, but what blocks us from doing that is time. And therefore money. In trying to “monetise” the site, we’ve discovered that it’s possible to maintain our current readership levels and earn enough small change to supplement the income of one of us – me. But we’ve been set back by the state of the economy and the decline in advertising sales and the price at which ads can be sold, and that’s also made it more difficult to go ahead with the various strategies we have in mind for expanding the reach of the joint as quickly as we’d like (though there will be some movement on this front in the new year). I’ve always been of the view we could relatively easily triple the size of our readership just through some straightforward marketing, but that costs.

But – not to put too fine a point on it – if we really wanted to try to provide the sort of independent media we think we deserve in this country, we’d need several people working full time on such an effort. There is just no other way.

The frustrating thing is that I know we’ve collectively got the expertise to do it, but we can’t, because we don’t have the seed money to even get started. (And I very much include the LP community in that “we”.)

Now that I’ve got more time post-PhD, I’m planning to take the work I did on how we could grow online independent media a couple of years ago (and as some will know, quite a lot of dosh and about six months’ work was put in to mapping this out) off the shelf and see what we can do with it. At this stage, it might be necessary to find an “angel” or two to fund startup costs, but while I’m convinced that could be done, I think that process in itself might be quite a lengthy one.

So what can you do if you want to see a better and enduring online independent media?

If you like what we do here, please do take the opportunity to promote LP to friends and colleagues. If you know of anyone who you think might want to support an expansion of the online mediasphere, get in touch with me! And please consider unblocking ads on this site, and/or giving us a donation.

I’m sure LP will be with us for a long time to come, but we need to think about whether we want to grow and expand, do a holding operation, or scale back to amateur blogging. The latter always has a bit of pull, because the amount of work that goes into multiple daily posting, and making sure that quality is maintained (though it could be improved with more time!) is considerable, and carries an opportunity cost. Although I’ve flirted with the “blogger cherry-picked by bigger media” thing in my time, I’ve become increasingly convinced that’s not the way to go – it’s much better if we can collectively decide that we want to provide a bigger and better online alternative to the mainstream media. But I think Tim is quite right about this – if you don’t show you love it, you could lose it!

Elsewhere: Surfdom’s end is also noted by Terry Flew.

Update: Some excellent reflections on this topic from Guy Beres. Gary Sauer-Thompson at Public Opinion.

Update: Guy Rundle in Crikey.

Update: An Onymous Lefty and The Interpreter.

Update: Robert Corr. John Quiggin.

Image of spontaneous street celebrations in Harlem courtesy of matt semel at flickr – reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

No doubt one of the big stories about the US election will be the influence of the blogosphere and the netroots. In many ways, the rise of the intertubes in politics was an unintended consequence of the Rove approach to politics, as Publius perceives:

The bigger story is that this same anger – this same frustration – has led liberals to organize in more numerous and consequential ways. In the last few years, we’ve seen new think tanks. We’ve seen blogs flower. We’ve seen the rise of media sites like TPM and Huffington with real journalistic chops. We’ve seen unprecedented efforts to register and canvass voters.

In short, we’ve seen a new energy driving liberals back to politics.

In an opinion piece at ABC Online, Barry Saunders sums up the changes that net based activism and citizen journalism have wrought:

The impact of social media on this election has been enormous. Whoever takes office will have to deal with widely available factchecking data, embarrassing videos, rabid wingnuts, opinionated bloggers and TV hosts, and a massive number of new voters and donors who feel they have invested in the American political process – as well as two wars and a collapsing economy. Here’s hoping they know what they’re doing.

John Quiggin writes of the “end of the first age of the blogosphere”:

Once the initial euphoria dissipates, and the inevitable mistakes, failures and compromises/sellouts begin to emerge, it’s necessary to strike a balance between criticising what’s being done wrong and reminding yourself how much worse the other side was and would be again. The attitude of constructive critical support is a hard one to maintain, especially given the habits built up over years in opposition.

We’ve already had a look at Michael Bérubé’s thoughts here at LP:

But perhaps the left blogosphere could be of some use in this regard, no? It needn’t be consolidated fully into Obama Enterprises Inc.; it could serve instead as a forum for writers dedicated to things like “hope” and “change” and “arguing that Obama was wrong to cave on FISA and better not do that kind of thing as President.” Of course, it could also serve as a forum for charting and mocking all manner of Ace-of-Confederate-Red-State-Yankeespade wingnuts as they venture into new realms of sheer barking lunacy that even the world’s sheerest barkingest lunatics have hitherto been unable to imagine. That might be fun. And it could do “shorters” and cat blogging and Theory Tuesdays and Friday Random Tens too. It’s a blogosphere. It’s a big place, with many many tubes.

And Possum makes some sharp points comparing the media/punditsphere and online social media:

Data beat punditry, statistics beat navel gazing, demographic analysis beat wishful thinking.

The intertubes were 3 hours ahead of the network coverage, Dick Morris should never show his face in public again if he had an ounce of integrity, and, most importantly, this has been a demonstration that sometimes things dont happen in the same tired old ways they always have before.

There’s one point I’d like to add to all this analysis.

Going back as early as 1976, commentary about US elections focused on the decline in voter involvement and its eclipse by top-down media strategies. We’ve seen a massive revival in citizen participation and activism, something that was recognised by Barack Obama in his victory speech. The future of this re-engagement will be dependent on how Obama governs, but as he correctly says, it will also be dependent on the preparedness of citizens to continue to act publicly and collectively.

All technology is shaped socially. Blogging, YouTube, and other social media have been enablers and not just causes of this invigoration of democracy. I’d like to see some research and analysis focused on the wellsprings of activism we’ve seen bubbling up. I think that would be, in many ways, a more productive frame through which to look at what’s interesting, distinctive and exciting about this campaign than yet another round of “journos v. bloggers” style articles.

Elsewhere: An interesting post from Terry Flew on the role of satire in the campaign, and some suggestions for future analyses of the results.

The caveat I want to enter before proceeding further is that there’s a real sense in which I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m not a journalist or a journalism educator, and I don’t think “citizen journalism” is the best way of conceptualising what I do in my online writing, even when it most closely approaches reportage. My stake in all this is really that of a citizen and that of a media participant, and precisely because participation is a better model for engament in/with the media now than “audience” or “reader”, I don’t regard myself as being a privileged participant in these conversations, let alone in some way representative of the figure of “the blogger” which is in a real way a mythical one. A lot of what I bring to all this is probably more to do with my background and worldview as a sociologist.

That takes me to the first point I want to make – as I argued previously, I think the “bloggers v. journos” stoush is badly framed and misses most of what’s actually going on. It’s also worth noting, as I did at the outset of the session yesterday, that the debate as it plays out in the opinion columns and (ironically) the “blogs” at The Australian is more accurately seen as a subset of the culture wars and a struggle for hegemony and control over information and analysis than anything much to do with either the conditions of media work or the “fourth estate” role that the media supposedly plays. But more on that later. A lot of actually existing journos aside from columnists and right wing editors aren’t actually suffused with antagonism for blogs. It’s also interesting, and here I’d refer to the paragraph above, that some bloggers or “web evangelists” have an equal stake in continuing the “journos v. blogger wars”. (But for those interested in the latest series of “blogs are no longer the future of journalism” pronunciatos from the “fact and balance” crew, see this post from Stilgherrian, and my previous post.)

Cameron Reilly, for instance, appears to have perceived an antagonism in the session that he was a panelist in which entirely escaped me as someone watching it from the floor. He also takes an unjustified swipe at QUT’s Jean Burgess, who I think totally correctly debunked the “catastrophist” narrative, as I later dubbed it, about the death of the newspaper. And that theme is reproduced in another key by another participant Perth Norg‘s Bronwen Clune, who also recently wrote the obituary of the (Fairfax) newspaper. I don’t want to be reductive about the contribution that Reilly and Clune have to make, and the latter in particular had some interesting things to say which I’ll come back to, but this “web evangelist” stuff does seem to me to unhelpfully define itself against its Big Media Other, and to need sustaining through constant boosterism which then moves on to some “new killer app” almost at the same speed as the permanent revolution fails to deliver what’s claimed for it, and as the media empires resist their predicted collapse into ruins. Self “branding” and entrepreunerial writing bring in their wake real costs as well as benefits, and citizen media is not the transparently democratic exercise it’s purported to be.

But one good point Clune made, and one which was echoed by other participants yesterday, was that the “control media” have missed the boat and been swamped by the tide. This is where I think the concentration on media ownership is misplaced – it’s certainly not unimportant that there’s a concentration of ownership in the Australian MSM (and Axel Bruns is right in my view to question whether that’s not a large part of the reason the Australian media have been so resistant to, and inept in, the web 2.0 takeup), but in many ways it’s a debate of the 1980s and the 1990s. I’ve never understood the focus on Rupert Murdoch as teh evil that seems to obsess so many. As a social democrat, I don’t expect capitalist corporations or media “barons” like Murdoch to act in the public interest or to be without a political agenda, and the recent Fairfax shenanigans surely put to bed any residual sense that Fairfax was or is some sort of temple of fourth estate goodness. A simple proliferation of papers – which all define “hard news” in the same narrow sense of crime and day to day politics – never provided us with the golden age of journalism some like to wistfully misremember, and there’d be a better bang for the buck from initiatives other than starting an ABC newspaper or whatever.

I think Jason Wilson was the first to make the point last year at the height of the Government Gazette vs. blogosphere wars that the angst that accompanied the pseph blog dissing was a reflection of the fact that the ownership of opinion and analysis had slipped from the proprietorial grasp of the punditariat. That sort of ownership is gone, and it ain’t never coming back, and that’s a really important shift. And there’s a broader shift at work where media corporations can no longer control their audiences, which does totally disrupt the equation of a conversation among pundits at the summit of the media heights with a representative role for a unitary public. That point was made by MEAA secretary Chris Warren. That was never true, and it’s clear that it’s increasingly impossible to maintain the pretence that it is true now. A democratic public sphere needs to privilege participation over representation by a putative fourth estate.

And that’s a problem with a lot of these debates about the future of journalism. They’re based on pretence and a threatened professional identity. Again, Clune and others had some worthwhile things to say – particularly to many of the young and student journalists in the audience – about the need to focus on interactivity and a different conception of “sources” than is captured by the traditional models – a point also made by Edmunds on our panel. But for someone who’s not actually part of the media industry, what’s striking is the degree to which a groundswell of workplace change has come so late to the attention of journalists.

A lot of us have been working in an environment for many years now where the “nine to five” job is totally a thing of the past, where it’s actually vital not to identify too much with one employer, and where fluidity characterises work practices and career patterns both. Industrial realities and workplace restructuring driven relentlessly by the bottom line seem suddenly to have jolted a lot of journalists into a realisation that this is not the hypothetical way of the twenty-first century or something (for instance something happening in “society” outside the media workspace), but the reality of the present. It struck me that the distancing from “society” proper to a certain conception of the journalist as a professional, the reification of change, and a mindset that privileges the observer are actually huge barriers to both a constructive approach to change and to resistance to its more deleterious dimensions.

A lot more could be said about all this, but I was left thinking that the first steps towards mapping out a future of journalism involve a rigorous and probably unsettling confrontation with the harsh realities of the changed conditions of possibility for professional practice. I think that also entails – paradoxically – a stronger identification with the profession itself (and a weaker identification with employers) and a shift in disposition towards radical questioning of what entails doing “being a journalist” in the world we now live in.

Note also: Related posts at LP from Kim and dk.au, and from Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

Update: Ken Parish on the future of newspapers at Troppo, Derek Barry provides a comprehensive summary of Margaret Simons’ session at FOJ, and Andrew Elder responds to Christian Kerr’s “balance and fact” rant and Mark Day.

Update: My fellow panelist Marian Edmunds has her say.

Update [by Kim]: Derek Barry has now posted his notes on the third session at which Jean Burgess and Cameron Reilly spoke.

But there’s something more at stake here. Colless’ mind dumps very often give readers an insight into what passes for thought among the managerial minds of the press. Perhaps precisely because no one is reading his stuff, he’s departed from the News Limited correct line and failed to decry the Fairfax cost-cutting as a threat to the quality of journalism. What you can make of this tangled paragraph is probably up to you:

McCarthy cannot afford to be blindsided by sweeping and emotional claims that change, of itself, will necessarily destroy quality journalism. Quality, after all, often can be the exclusive prerogative of the creator. But at the same time he should be careful not to confuse muscle with fat as he wields his cost-cutting scythe.

But, unwittingly, with his union bashing schtick, Colless has actually exposed a fault line that bedevils and cripples the quality of the quality journalism debate. It’s still too much about ownership – either a faceless public company with corporate buccaneers focused solely on cost cutting like Fairfax, or a private(ish) media fiefdom run by an almighty Proprietor like Murdoch’s News Limited. According to News, the latter allows quality journalism to be funded, while the impersonal mavens of corporate capitalism sacrifice the fourth estate to the lowest common denominator – the bottom line of the buck. And indeed, there’s another irony in the defence of Fairfax – for several years the venerable mastheads have been the go to place for celebrity trash on the intertubes while their print editions have increasingly adopted a tone narrowly tailored to an inner city and Eastern suburbs audience.

What we really need to be thinking about here in the new media landscape is less about ownership and more about an information and analysis commons. Part of the argument in the journos v. bloggers wars is often a reiteration of a tired meme that bloggers are parasitic on content created by journalists. Maybe so. But that’s actually ignoring something central to the information architecture of an innovative and creative economy – value is added by re-arranging, analysing and deconstructing bites of information and opening them up rather than acting as a one directional transmission point from authoritative reporter of “news” to “consumer” or “reader”. There have to be viable options other than a dependence on either the God Proprietor or the corporate megalith which professional journalists of good will and citizens can work together on facilitating.

Maybe some of these issues will be discussed at the Walkley Foundation’s Future of Journalism shinding on Brisbane on Saturday. There’s some discussion of the event here from Axel Bruns, and as Mark is one of the speakers, I’m sure he’ll be writing something about it too.