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When Rumour and Comment Become the News
No full textMany of the dust-ups so far between bloggers and the mainstream media (MSM) in Australia have concerned comment, not news. The kinds of spats we’ve written about previously have been over who exactly has the mortgage on punditry about established stories, social issues, opinion polls and the like
Jumping the Shark
No full textCollectively, the writers here at Club Bloggery have been watching the Australian political blogosphere for years. We know that the bloggers who have perhaps been most important and prominent down under are psephologists – specialist electoral statisticians who try to understand and analyse polls, and consider the interlocking numbers games of electoral politics.\ud
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Head counters like the anonymous Possum Comitatus, Simon Jackman, William Bowe, and Peter Brent produce accessible, incisive, original takes on polling, and engage in prolonged discussion with their readers about the meaning and import of their analysis. Week after week, free of charge, they offer in-depth analysis on polling that improves our understanding of the political process and of how party strategists think. That’s why we were surprised this week when a journalist in The Australian, Samantha Maiden, attacked a few psephs by name, implying that their sites amounted to little more than left-wing wish-fulfilment
Club Bloggery: Once Were Barons
No full textThough we often give the print media a hard time here at Club Bloggery, we’re not so sanguine about the end of the iconic magazine, The Bulletin, last month. Despite its virulently racist origins, and its tendency under Kerry Packer to be used now and then as the mogul’s mouthpiece, its end is an alarming symptom of something wider and more serious. The worrying structural problem it reveals is the difficulty of sustaining any venues for the specialised task of investigative journalism in Australian and international media.\ud
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Investigative journalism is a notoriously protracted, expensive and difficult business. Complicated stories, stories that must get past deliberate obfuscation by powerful interests, or stories that take a long time to unfold, all require major investment
Digging Deeper
No full textClimate change dominated a couple of days of Federal Election campaigning earlier this week, with the major parties both fumbling in laying out their responses. Peter Garrett and Malcolm Turnbull were punished by the mainstream media for, respectively, revealing something approximating a real opinion about how climate change agreements should work, and for being involved in a debate about Government policy before it’s implemented
Election Flops on YouTube
No full textIn an election campaign as drawn out as this, you'd have to have excellent memory to remember the hype around John Howard's use of YouTube to make policy announcements. Some months ago, the media were all over the story - but unfortunately for the Prime Minister, much like the widely-predicted poll 'narrowing', the YouTube effect has been missing in action
Blogging outside the Echo Chamber
No full textIn the current political climate, it's no surprise that a number of sessions at the recent Australian Blogging Conference at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane focussed on the potential for blogs and other citizen journalism sites to impact on political news and punditry. In a previous article, we've already noted the continuing skirmishes between psephologist bloggers and the political commentators, whose rather unscientific interpretation of opinion poll results that some bloggers have challenged fervently
Consulting Bloggers as Citizens
No full textThe announcement of the Greensblog is an interesting example for the possibilities of blogging for minority political parties. Clearly drawing inspiration from Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett’s blog, it shows the value of the blogging format for discussing political positions that fall outside the easy left-right, Labor-Liberal soundbite-based journalism often found in the industrial mainstream. As Greensblog contributor Tim Hollo hopes, it will work for the Greens because their policies aren’t necessarily "soundbite-friendly", and they welcome the possibility of consultative policy development
Who's Afraid of the MSM?
No full textRecent public spats between mainstream industrial journalism and citizen-led media – news bloggers and citizen journalists – actually mask their increasing interdependence, and obscure the advantages to be gained on both sides by recognising and nurturing this. A comparison between two recent moments of exchange between the "MSM" and its citizen counterpart illustrates both the scope of the conflict, and the underlying reality: citizen media is heavily reliant on the mainstream as a source for activities of "gatewatching" and metacommentary, and professional journalists are increasingly willing to turn to citizen media for news, talent and content
Scoring the e-lection
No full textThis close to the election, it's customary for newspapers to recommend a vote one way or the other. We're not about to do that at Club Bloggery (although we would recommend thinking about the candidate who's been more responsive and available to your community), but we can do a summary of who has made the best running on the Internet, and understood and used its possibilities best
Which Way in '08?
No full textThe blogosphere and online independent media certainly proved themselves capable of offering an outstanding alternative narrative of last year's federal election. In several pieces during the campaign, we pointed out how the bloggers had led the way in offering participatory election coverage, and how organs like Crikey and New Matilda had managed to present a refreshing range of opinion that differed from the usual suspects in the MSM. \ud
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Now that the hoopla and buzz of the big event has died down, though, where to from here? Can the momentum be sustained during the fallow period between elections, and where the end of the Howard Government means that there is suddenly a lot less at stake in politics for a largely left-leaning, opinion-driven media space? And can such outlets move beyond opinion and start generating something like original news
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