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.

I think what’s more significant here is a recognition from Crikey of a shift from a relatively static form of internet publishing to a more dynamic and interactive one. It’s a better model in some ways than cherry picking bloggers to write static articles, because it encompasses the whole context of the form.

There’s obviously also a commercial element in the decision – frequently updated sites with lively and long comments threads multiply the page views and thus the advertising revenue. And, as with the general trend towards blog networks, it should be possible for Possum and the rest of the mob to earn a modest living from what they do without all the hassles of being their own advertising agent, and to concentrate on the content and the community without being their own tech support. What will be interesting is the degree to which there’ll be a crossover from Crikey “readers” to Crikey blog participants/commenters.

What does this imply for the independent blogosphere? I doubt that there’s any dimunition in independence – having written extensively for Crikey in the past myself, writing for them is very different than writing for the MSM. Having said that, I do think there’s value in preserving a space for blogs which don’t affiliate with other media organisations, and it’s not the sort of move I’d ever want to see LP take. I personally am not averse – as everyone knows – to the occasional gig doing something I consider to be different from the sort of blogging that I do here at LP, but LP and I are not synonymous. I think there’s a lot in the ability to post on whatever, whenever, without any editorial guidelines from above, and to get silly and anarchic from time to time, and also from the continuing engagement with a very site specific community. Part of the fun of blogging – and this is where amateur has its own original meaning and carries that connotation – is teh lerve and also not taking it all too seriously too much of the time.

For my own part, then, I can only offer lavish congratulations to Possum, The Poll Bludger and Andrew Bartlett.

Elsewhere: Lyn Calcutt at Public Opinion.

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.

I’m keen not to restage the “bloggers v. journos” debate as I think it’s wrongly framed for a number of reasons. First, blogging is in fact a much richer suite of practices, norms and communicative styles and interactions than is usually captured by positing it as an alternative or supplement to journalism, and I think is interesting and in many instances laudable in its own right. Margaret Simons, who’ll be one of the speakers on Saturday, has a useful taxonomy of blogs published this week at Creative Economy Online, which captures much of the diversity of the range of practices that make up the blogosphere.

Secondly, I think the actual subtext to much of the so-called debate is a threat to the professional identity of journos. That probably gets me close to the topic – because I agree with my co-panelist Axel Bruns (who previewed his thoughts at Gatewatching the other day) that in many instances the sorts of work bloggers do prefigures what is now required of journos. There appears to be a misperception that blogging just happens, that all it takes is a keyboard and an internet connection, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. I’ll probably talk a little about that from my own experience, and I think it’s important to see it within the context of a broader challenge to the boundedness of professional identities and practices which is one of the key characteristics of work generally at the present time.

There’s been a bit of discussion about blogging and journalism around the traps recently, in the context of the “quality journalism” debate kicked on by the Fairfax sackings and strike. Where Mark Day gets it wrong, I think, is that he recites another cliche of the journos v. bloggers wars – the claim that blogs don’t “break news”. That’s sometimes untrue, but even if it is largely true, it misses the point. There’s a difference between “news gathering” and analysis, commentary and interaction which is what the blogosphere provides – and transparently. That’s where its value, I think, lies. Again, there’s a sort of mythology at work here with fearless journos pounding the streets in search of a story which rarely reflects contemporary media work practices. On the other hand, bloggers like me do have our own networks and people we talk to – in the context of political blogging including contemporaries who are active participants, party strategists, etc. But they’re not regarded as “sources”. It’s more a matter, I think, as Kim said, of reconfiguring, analysing and throwing open bites of information as it were and particular perspectives.

The other point I probably want to make – and this goes also to Axel’s point about where skills and capacities can be found and disrupting the pro/amateur distinction – is what I and others at LP argued in a recent discussion over two threads with George Megalogenis … which is that it’s interesting that when News Ltd began its co-optation of the blog form, (and I still think that most if not all of the MSM ‘blogs’ are better characterised as message boards), it didn’t appear to occur to anyone concerned that the facilitation of community and interaction is itself a skill and a potentially transmissable one.

I’m not sure where all this leaves the “quality journalism” debate but I’ve got a strong feeling it’s actually completely unrelated to the whole question of the blogosphere. Others may of course have a different view!

At least the turf this issue – the purported opposition to earmarks and pork that Palin is supposed to share with McCain – is being fought over is a public policy issue rather than all the personalised stuff which just puts the Democrats and the media where the GOP want them. But Obama’s reluctance to use the words “lies” and “liars” shows he knows the score. He’s being criticised for that by liberal bloggers, who are cheering on the media “fact checking” exercise.

But all this truthiness is also at great risk of playing into the GOP’s hands – because it reinforces the equation of the media and blogosphere with the Democrats Rosen identified as the tactical positioning the Republicans want – and which George W. Bush reinforced with his claims about “the angry left” in his RNC video link. The culture wars schtick works – because the America of Wal-Marts and small town “values” has more electoral power in the swing states that count than the wonky redoubts of the blue staters. And a lot of those voters – who don’t source their news from the internet but from cable tv – and get their analysis from others of like mind in their own circles rather than bloggers, commentators and wonks – are seeing what McCain wants them to see – a feisty outsider being beaten up by the Beltway elite. Hence McCain’s polling gains, among other demographics, with white women.

Intelligent commentators realise all this. But what no one has seemed to be able to sketch out – in an electoral landscape where the swing states are rustbelt white Reagan Democrat central – is a compelling political and media strategy to rebut and counter it. Crying “truth” and calling time on lies just isn’t enough in a postmodern political world. Anyone remember SwiftBoating? What’s certain is that McCain’s mob have worked out how to game not just the media but also the liberal blogosphere.

Elsewhere: An interesting perspective on all this from sociologist and blogger Andrew Perrin at Scatterplot.

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.

My concern is not what you argue but how you go about it.

My mind is open on pretty much every issue. It’s what journalists do for a living: keep their minds open in the hope that they catch the next new idea out there.

Sadly, what a significant minority of my bloggers do is begin their posts with an assumption that everyone who disagrees with them is a “moron”.

Here’s why those posts grate: My job as a journalist is to assume that the person who disagrees with me doesn’t know what I know. To increase the sum of their knowledge, I can only tell them what I know on their terms, in their language. Which must begin with an assumption that I am not better than my reader.

Anyone who remembers the “civility wars” from a few years back in the Ozblogosphere would also recall the lesson that the worst possible way of getting a more civil commenting community is to call for one! The dreaded meta-post would open old wounds, and bring out the worst in people. The facilitation of community on blogs requires a sense of humour, a democratising of the conversation, and participants who are actually interested in doing practicing community in the first place. None of those things is particularly evident in the MSM “blog” threads for a whole range of reasons. But one of them is the distance between the journalist/columnist and the “readers”, even if they’re anachronistically dubbed “bloggers”.

Trevor Cook has also very astutely picked up on this – the well known phenomenon that the tone of an online space and the deportment of its facilitators will shape the character of the debate – by questioning whether News Limited’s online practice itself isn’t full of ad homs and a sneering and derogatory tone to those who dissent. See his post for more.

A lot of the expectations and framing of the work of the journalist is in terms of the “public sphere” – a presumed space where rational and civil debate takes place (Habermas has a lot to answer for). But as any Rawlsians out there will know, you bring your own status and commitments with when you try to inhabit a “neutral” and “rational” space. And a big part of that is the “professional” – the journalist – talking (even if they try to descend a few inches down the pedestal) from an authoritative speaking position – Megalogenis himself refers to his own professional status and its habits of thought. But we live in a world where arguments from authority are failing, and talk is being democratised (in a sense).

I’d like to counter that image with one I picked up in something I read recently – we should think in terms of a ludic and performative public sphere. We’re not doing world shattering things when we “natter on the net”, to quote Dale Spender. We’re not sorting out the destinies of the world. We are doing something meaningful, and if we approach it in a spirit of play, then you’ve actually got more genuine communication and debate occurring.

Just sayin…