So if you’re feeling in a nostalgic mood, or if you weren’t around way back when, you can check out the first two posts or have a look at a snapshot of where we were and what the place looked like on 21 February 2006, the first point at which the National Library’s Pandora archived us.

Skepticlawyer comments:

One entirely legitimate attack that the MSM directs at the blogosphere is based on the latter’s pettiness and nastiness. Of course, they use a broad brush, and all of us are tarred. Sure, Crikey doesn’t quite count as MSM, occupying an interesting liminal space, but I’m not sure that facilitating this aspect of the blogosphere is the way for any media organisation to go. It may be one day, but not with this group of writers.

That’s an interesting point, though the MSM attack on the blogosphere is so predictable it hardly matters if it’s justified [and I won't comment on the merits of the various Grodscorp etc. blogs as they're not among my regular reading]. I will say that I think there is some public purpose served by attacking Bolt’s egregious twisting of the facts and logical black holes – because he’s so prominent as a climate change denier. I’m not so sure about Tim Blair. He seems to me to be stuck in something of a blogging timewarp – invent formula circa 2002, stick to it. What strikes me about Tim’s blogging is how little it engages with the Australian political debate. Bolt may claim to have a million hits a month or whatevs (and incidentally, on Bolt’s misleading measure – remembering a million “hits” doesn’t equate to readers, we were at 1049199 pages served in January). I’m puzzled, though, as to how many Daily Telegraph readers are interested in catfights between Blair and “lefty” bloggers and other minor public figures.

The blogosphere as Blair once knew it isn’t the small group of sites referencing each other all the time read by a tiny few. He seems to me to be writing more for his commenters a lot of the time rather than for a broader audience. How many people going to the news.com.au domain really care about Margo Kingston, Bob Ellis, or Marieke Hardy (or Jeremy Sear, and with respect given to all those people) and the others Blair takes pot shots add? … I should of course include “Lefty Kim” in that list… Or even know who they are? Crikey can “monetise” the value of the online politics aficionados who know the rules of this game, but what sort of audience reads Blair having a go at obscure lefties? I may, of course, be wrong. Perhaps there’s a huge audience. I’m open to correction on this, but if I’m not mistaken, Tim – who used to place so much stock on stats comparisons – no longer tells anyone anything about the size of his readership.

Elsewhere: Guy Beres.

When have news journos derived their copy off bloggers?

Some people think that the answer is… quite often. I’m with them. Consider this passage here at LP – posted by Mark on Saturday, about the negotiating stances of the government and The Greens and Steve Fielding on the stimulus package’s Senate passage:

I suspect that this manoeuvring might factor more into what comes out of the Budget sausage machine. The government has clearly been shifting its rhetoric on the unemployed, and I would expect the minors to be told that people on benefits will benefit as a result of the Henry Review. So it may be that some commitments might be made for future measures in exchange for current support. That would still, however, give the minor party Senators a real chance to shape the response to the economic downturn.

Then consider this from Michelle Grattan on the same topic, posted on the SMH website last night:

It is also clear the Government will have to review the level of the dole when it looks at pensions in the budget. It is inconceivable it could give pensioners a hefty increase but do nothing for the jobless.

The Government has locked itself into action on pensions so it might as well do the same on the dole.

Coincidence? Great minds? Picking up the phone? Some other explanation? You be the judge…

A salient point in reply to Wilson’s claims about the obligations of bloggers regarding fact-checking might be synthesised from Legal Eagle’s post and a comment on Simons’ thread from Mediamook. LE points out that she’d be unlikely as a blogger to cold call someone and ask for verification or confirmation of facts, and Mediamook is sceptical that a lot of people who might try would get all that much in return, because of the perceived illegitimacy of blogging. It seems to me that this point materially affects Wilson’s argument, and the additional points LE makes about the opportunity for correction and interactivity on blogs also harden my suspicion that Wilson really hasn’t taken adequately into account the distinction between journalists who trade in “news” and bloggers who are interested in commentary and conversation. So, although I think that some interesting and salient questions have been raised, I rather doubt there’s much to be gained by eliding these different aspects of blogs and what Wilson calls “industrial journalism” in formulating some sort of overall “ethics of information”.

This isn’t the first time that scholars have misunderstood the basis of civil society. Scholars of civility and debate have held up the London coffeehouses of the 18th century as models. Political theorist Jürgen Habermas depicted these coffeehouses as the paradigmatic example of an emerging “public sphere” of discursive political participation. However, these coffeehouses were less the occasions of civilized and genteel discussion than they were the sites of vigorous partisan contestation. As the historian Brian Cowan argues, London coffeehouses, like blogs, often identified with one of the two major political parties of the era. These parties’ adherents sometimes came to blows with each other. Nor was this partisanship accidental to coffeehouse culture. Cowan claims that the “public sphere” of coffeehouse debate was actually “born out of the practical exigencies of partisan political conflict.”

This isn’t merely an academic point — it has implications for national politics. Obama’s political project faces a dilemma that goes back to his own roots in the civic movement. Despite his efforts to build consensus with moderates and conservatives, his campaign’s organizational innovations depended on and may be helping cement the politics of partisan division. As Obama shifts focus from electoral politics to administration, he is trying to take online structures that were built around decentralized partisan participation and reorient them to a less partisan national agenda.

Evidence suggests that people who are strongly engaged in politics and hence likely to volunteer for campaigns are strongly partisan and tightly clumped around the ideological poles (they are strongly liberal or strongly conservative). If this is right, online activists are unlikely to follow Obama if he moves toward a post-ideological politics of citizenship and may even use Obama’s own machine to organize against him (as they did within MyBarackObama.com when Obama announced his support for controversial wiretapping legislation). By rebuilding the Democratic Party around a model that is friendlier to decentralized online participation, Obama is both making it easier for Democratic activists to organize in protest against overly “moderate” decisions, and forcing Republicans to adopt similar organizing techniques in order to win elections.

I’d encourage folks to read the whole article.

Update: Farrell blogs about his article.

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.

It’s been noted before in comments here at LP, but continuing the Tim Dunlop theme, it’s also worth highlighting the initiative of commenters at the former Blogocracy in establishing Blogocrats. It’s a very powerful reminder of the importance of community in the blogosphere and online media more generally.

While Key has promised to govern for all New Zealanders, carefully moved his party to the centre, and promised to retain core Labour policies such as interest-free student loans and Working For Families, the coalition demands of ACT and the current financial crisis make those promises worthless. And the result, I suspect, is that they will be left by the wayside, dumped because Roger Rodney demanded it, or because we “just can’t afford it” (while shovelling vast wodges of cash at the rich). Even if Key – who seems to have no solid beliefs beyond his own ambition – was inclined to resist ACT’s demands, National’s hardliners, the 90′s retreads like Bill English, Lockwood Smith, Murray McCully and Maurice Williamson, won’t be. And with 64 MPs between them, there will be no effective check on their legislative program.

The good news is that I doubt the public will stand for that sort of betrayal. If National pulls that switcheroo and rules from the right having run from the centre, it will be a one-term government. But it could still do a significant amount of damage in that term – damage which would take another decade to repair.

As for Labour, while they’ve lost, they’ve also brought in a pile of new talent, and should be in a strong position for 2011. Until then, it’s probably going to be a nasty, bitter three years.

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.