More than one might think, if this news report is anything to go on.
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Archive for the 'Blogging' Category
All sorts of dark conspiracies are alleged at Quadrant.
Quadrant Online previously reported that the ABC had invited Bob Carter to contribute to an online debate on The Drum following their publication of a series of five articles by Clive Hamilton.
Left internet newsletters and blog sites were outraged that sceptics were to be allowed to comment on their ABC.
Professor Carter submitted his article, on James Hansen and the Hansenism cult, and the ABC has rejected his article – which Quadrant Online is privileged to publish.
James Hansen is visiting Australia. We can only guess at the pressures which have been exerted on the ABC to close down criticism of Hansen – and the cowardice which saw them conform. So much for Australia’s brave freedom fighters of the press.
You can read the entire text of the voiceless Carters spiked piece at Quadrant.
Added commentary on the ABC’s ‘balancing act’ supplied by Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes.
*All links added to the Quadrant pull quote are mine.
If you’re interested in a subscription to Crikey at a discount price, go round and check out Nicholas Gruen’s post at Club Troppo.
Drum Editor Jonathan Green appears to have capitulated to braying demands for a false balance.
Next week: The Drum-Unleashed will feature a series of pieces commissioned from noted writers on the sceptic side of the climate science debate. Included will be Alan Moran, Tom Switzer, Mark Hendriks, Bob Carter and Jo Nova.
My questions to him are these:
Will the commissions be drawn against the ABC’s editorial policies that demand information be factually accurate?
Or will he give these already widely published writers a pass and allow them to disseminate their speculative theories without them having been drawn against the scientific facts for accuracy prior to publication?
Will this opinion at the Drum defy gravity; somehow exempt from objective fact?
Update I: Alan Moran is first cab off the rank and sure enough there is at least one big misrepresentation. A total misquote of Phil Jones’ position on the pace of warming.
Warming itself has appeared to have stopped, perhaps temporarily, a fact that even the defrocked high priest of the rising temperature trend, CRU’s Professor Phil Jones, has been forced to concede.
Moran cops a hammering from the smarter commenters but the usual denialist trolls come out to play, and Green cynically gets what he wants, with 498 comments to date.
Update II: John Quiggin gives us a whole post centered around Phil Jones’ quote. Another reason why Green should pull Moran’s post and abandon his misguided “project balance”.
Update: [by Mark] Bernard Keane takes aim at the ABC’s “balance without judgement” and rebuts Moran and Tom Switzer’s Drum post today.
Matthew Knott at Crikey’s climate change blog, Rooted, will be live blogging Kevin Rudd’s Copenhagen speech from 8pm AEST. Go here to read.
With a fair bit of ado, the ABC launched its new opinion website, The Drum, on Monday.
It’s edited by Jonathan Green, formerly of Crikey, to whom congratulations are due, as they are to Sophie Black who’s had a very well deserved promotion to the top gig at that thing on the internet.
Margaret Simons, writing at her Content Makers blog, discusses two inter-related aspects of this ABC initiative. She first riffs on a piece by Media Watch’s Jonathan Holmes, which questions the distinction between analysis and opinion, which apparently grounds the ABC’s dictates to its own journos (“analysis good, opinion bad”). Simons then looks at the cult(ure) of personality attached to high profile journos, and questions whether non-witty, non-pretty, non-Tweeting writers are perhaps missing out in a new age of “audience engagement”. She also worries about objectivity, which is another distinction which is hard to maintain.
All these are worthy points for discussion, though I’d also be interested in what people think of the quality of the writing and analysis to date. I’ve already noted some Crikey writers, such as Greg Barns, who may have come across with Green, featured (though Barns does have a tendency to pop up in a lot of places). Whether the ABC should cast its remit rather wider is another issue – which, of course, circles back to the glam/Twitter/name issue…
My own view is that it’s harder than some might assume to find good writers with different takes. It might well be that identifying, developing and mentoring such new voices would be a most valuable contribution. But that’s almost a full time publishing/editorial gig in itself, and it may be incompatible with the ABC’s desire to have an immediate impact. We shall see.
It might also be something we could make a small contribution to here…
I’m a bit late to this party, because I was away on holidays last week, but I think I’ve just managed to squeeze in a plug for the Overland subscriberthon while it’s still going! There are all sorts of prizes to be won for new subscribers, and a host of content from all sorts of luminaries on the magazine’s blog to celebrate.
Overland is a fantastic literary and cultural journal, which while long established, continues to bring fresh and interesting perspectives to all sorts of debates – with a democratic and political tinge. So do yourself the proverbial favour…
As Phil observed recently, LP has joined the Twittersphere. We can be found here.
We’ve also revamped our Facebook presence, supplementing and eventually replacing our group with an FB Page. As many of you will know, pages offer better functionality – with wall posts appearing in people’s live feed. And they avoid the weird FB rule that you can’t be in more than 300 groups (what is with that?)…
So we’d love to see you in these other nodes of the social media thang!
Update: The Facebook page now has a simplified url. Find us here.
In a quick and dirty post announcing the presence of LP on Twitter I wrote about where I thought mass adoption of the platform was likely to take place.
My favourite use for Twitter? Search for breaking news and to capture the zeitgeist and as a back channel for important events. It’s made watching popular TV fun. Which by the way is where I think it’s real potential lies – integrated with TV as a live mass media watercooler. For example, watching tonight’s Four Corners on the Liberal Party’s internal struggle with global warming and the CPRS while following the #4corners tag.
More comprehensively in The Naked Truth About Social v Broadcast Media, Jason Wilson writes about exactly that intersection of social and broadcast media.
The post stems from a recent event where Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes obliged his legion of fans on Twitter by uttering a single word.
Yes, LP is now Twittering. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.
Heck you can’t avoid it now that it’s become the favourite plaything of the mainstream media. In fact it appears whole conferences are dedicated to Twitter – participants seemingly unable to talk about anything else.
As some of you may know I’ve been Tweeting my head off for a few years now, and jumping on and off the bandwagon. Now it’s become a part of the daily background hum.
I’m like a lot of web media workers for whom Twitter is now a work tool, but I also use it for a little bit of play, to inform and to annoy, to be annoyed and to be amused.
Lately it’s annoyed the crap out of me because the usual (and not so usual) social media suspects continue to overstate it’s importance. It’s not a replacement for anything, it’s an addition to something which already exists.
Not to be outdone by The Australian, Quadrant has launched its own series on the left. This time with non-leftists writing it… And writing about the Australian’s articles. Jason Soon, for instance, along the way to arguing that social justice is a “category mistake” and the basis of “the left’s form of creationism”, takes a swipe at LP as “postmodernist”. News to me. The mis-en-abyme of Quadrant’s deconstruction of putative lefties writing for a right wing op/ed page strikes me as much more properly po/mo. Or maybe it’s a piece of pure Dada-ist modernist absurdism.
It’s hard to conclude otherwise when the now compulsory comparisons of Julia Gillard et al with the North Korean regime are wheeled out once more, coupled with crazed elisions of a bunch of rather mild social democrats with Stalin and Mao, and paeans to the millions of dead, etc, etc. There’s a certain irony in one of the contributors accusing critics of writing conspiracy theory. Not to mention the argument, if that’s the word for it, that concern with narratives is evidence of postmodernism (evil!) sitting uneasily next to attacks on social democrats for not having a narrative. Anyone remember when the teaching of narrative history was supposed to be a touchstone of John Howard era approved political correctness? Contradiction piled on contradiction…
There’s lots more. Should you not wish to read all of the series, Gary Sauer-Thompson has devoted some time to analysing the introductory piece by Mervyn Bendle. Bendle contributes another article, damning Julia Gillard among others, complete with another clever pun in the title. I thought that was the sort of Derridean wordplay he despised. But anyway…
Related LP posts: Here, here and here.
Elsewhere: Catallaxy.
Update: Skepticlawyer.
I was interested to read recently of a Canadian court decision which found that, for the purpose of defamation law, hyperlinking does not imply publication of the page to which the link points. In other words, a hyperlink per se implies no endorsement of the views or opinions or the veracity of the text linked. The Canadian Court didn’t explicitly decide whether a hyperlink with an expression of approbation would constitute publication, though there are some suggestive obiter dicta in the decision.
There’s been a bit of argy bargy around the practice of hyperlinking in Australia over the last little while, apropos of Gerard Henderson’s apparent belief that a link from Joshua Gans’ blog to an xkcd cartoon constituted Gans’ research. Gans subsequently asked:
How can someone purporting to watch the media not understand the point of hyperlinks? That said, his post doesn’t seem to contain any itself so this web-stuff might not be his thing.
The charitable interpretation would indeed be that Henderson is just lost at sea.
Andrew Leigh, in writing to Henderson today, doesn’t appear to be so sure it’s just Hendo’s confusion about digital culture at stake:
As Professor Gans has pointed out this week, the material you have quoted was not in fact his research, but a website that he hyperlinked to from his weblog. Like your own newsletter, Professor Gans’ weblog contains plenty of items calculated to amuse and entertain, as well as to inform. The original source of the urinal analysis was a cartoonist who goes by the pseudonym xkcd.
More than the factual issue, what concerns me about this is your decision to portray Professor Gans to your readers as someone who works on pointless trivia.
Elsewhere: Pure Poison.
There’s a big confab on in Sydney on the 5th and 6th of November on all things social media and future of journalism – Media140. Rachel Hills is running a competition to win a free pass to the conference. For details, please see her post!
A lot of the most reliable data on web use and social media comes from the World Internet Project. Most of the findings from the project derive from rigorous quantitative research, and unlike a lot of what purports to be analysis of the web and social media is therefore free of commercial or ideological and boosterish agendas.
WIP’s founder, Professor Jeffrey Cole, is currently in Australia.
Margaret Simons observed in today’s Crikey email that he’d given a briefing to a Fairfax strategy meeting on Monday:
So when Cole speaks, media executives tend to listen, even if they don’t like what they hear. Cole told me yesterday that Fairfax’s Melbourne chief executive, Don Churchill, was “at one with me” on the future of print newspapers, but that some other members of management seemed to think, or at least hope, that the bad times for Fairfax papers would fade with the end of the global financial crisis.
Yesterday afternoon Cole expanded on his views at a public lecture at Swinburne University. He said that print newspapers will cease to exist in the United States within 3-6 years. The rate of decline in Australia is more gradual, but he gives us a maximum of 10 years, with the only possible bright spot being weekend newspapers, because they are more like magazines, some of which will continue to do well.
Simons has posted a longer summary of Cole’s thoughts at her blog, Content Makers. Continue reading ‘The web, everyday life and the future of media’
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