A problem known to be holding back citizen journalism is the question of business models. Collectively providing a public good is bound to be difficult. At least in my experience of the online journalism movement, ‘business’ is not a dirty word the way it is in arts circles – ‘profit’ is, maybe, but the importance of sustainably financing large-scale participatory journalism projects is clearly evident among citizen journalists worldwide.
Steve Outing, from Poynter Online, provides a good summary of some of the options available and operating around the place – including a missive to the mainstream media.
But I’ve been sporadically following this guy DigiDave, who runs a community-funded reporting project in the States, called Spot.us. Spot.us is a ‘crowdfunding’ experiment. Members of the community pitch ideas they’d like to have investigated and reported. Spot.us then collects donations from those who want the same story written.
A clear benefit of this type of reporting is that it ensures that stories generally under-reported by the traditional media get picked up and covered, a cornerstone function of the blogosphere as a participant in the fifth estate.
This is something that Australia hasn’t tried, as far as I can tell, and considering I assumed Australia to be five years behind the US, I was surprised to stumble on this media release about the Australian version, the The Foundation for Public Interest Journalism. Other coverage I could find was limited to regurgitations of this, and advertisements for board nominations.
One journalist’s concerns ‘about the impact of the global collapse of the business models supporting traditional media forms’ is the silver lining of all this economic concern if it leads to journalism being carried out in the public interest, independent of current commercial motives of the predominant outlets in the world.
I can’t find a website for the Foundation, as it seems the project is still in the embryonic stage. The report on Crikey blog The Content Makers mentioned that the Foundation would support projects through philanthropy and individual donation, while the report in the Australian was that the Foundation would co-ordinate community-funded journalism in the style of Spot.us, et al.
Either way, it will be interesting to watch the progress of the Foundation in Australia. At my most pessimistic, I assume that Australian readers are too passive for the sort of initiative required to make a go of something like this. I hope to be proven wrong.
The model seems to work well in the States. Spot.us recently celebrated the first six months of their website, after publishing 23 stories over the first 24 weeks. Founder DigiDave also blogs extensively at his own website, often coughing up lucid and succinct advice to anyone interested in sprouting a little community-funded journalism operation of their own.
The Spot.us experiment is funded by some grant money DigiDave was awarded, and one of the grant’s requirements is that he make the knowledge and experience public, so that others can pick up with the project easily and learn from it. Following this project, its offshoots and the Australian should make for interesting fodder.
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Tags: crowdfunding, minority coverage, public funded journalism, start up grants
No Clean Feed campaign
Not even five minutes of link-hopping from an entry on Antony Loewenstein’s blog website uncovered the following Australian blogs and websites engaged in the same good fight as Estate Number Five:
gatewatching
investigativeblog.net
Produsage.org
No Clean Feed
This is just a brief indication of how vibrant and active the Australian blogosphere really is, but the No Clean Feed campaign, which is urging the Australian federal government to desist from implementing mandatory internet filtering, is certainly an initiative in the blogosphere that might result in some serious action. We’ll will be watching in the coming months.
I signed the petition, after a brief moral dilemma. An entry on my other blog, Something Something Something Something, explains how I resolved that dilemma if you’re interested. If not, the information on the No Clean Feed website is concise and clear so that you can make your own judgement call.
Apart from the petition, there are letter templates for emails to the relevant ministers and advice on contact your Internet Service Providers.
Filed under: commentary, digest, freedom of expression, public policy, the No Clean Feed campaign, update | Leave a Comment
Tags: child welfare, freedom of expression, ISPs, legislation, online campaigns, public policy, Senator Conroy, the No Clean Feed campaign
Knowing where to start in a project like this is rather difficult, so I’m justing going to post this because it relates to something I’m drafting for the second post. It is a review of Antony Loewenstein’s recent book The Blogging Revolution, which I wrote for The Big Issue. As I begin to find instances of how the five estates cross, I’ll post those, but consider this one of the posts under the commementary on developments and ideas section of Blog UP!
The Blogging Revolution claims to present us with instances of dissident citizen journalists using the internet to effectively challenge their oppressive governments and state-run media. Instead, we get Antony Loewenstein’s account of complicity between Western multinationals, the Bush administration and developing nations to suppress these voices.
There is a disappointing lack of actual content from the bloggers, replaced by long summaries of each country’s political climate. Of the six countries profiled, only two (Iran and Egypt) sport blogospheres exerting enough public pressure on their regimes to be considered by Loewenstein as amounting to revolution. Yet, he chooses countries bearing evidence of US-led Western ‘liberation’ efforts actually contributing to the suppression of independent, dissenting voices.
The Blogging Revolution is too heavily focussed on Loewenstein’s own anti-US agenda intentions, merely dazzling us with speculation about a burgeoning fifth estate and then bottoming out on the evidence of its existence. Readers interested in an objective account of how citizen journalism is affecting social, cultural and political change would do well to read the blogs themselves.
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Tags: Antony Loewenstein, commentary, ideas, reviews, The Blogging Revolution
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Beware: Career Journalists Patrol These Waters
At a Melbourne Writers’ Festival event in 2008, I asked Guardian journalist Nick Davies whether he thought there was a realistic hope in citizen journalists holding the fourth estate to the account on behalf of the people. His adamant ‘no’ was informed by a range of dubiously substantiated opinion.
He said that readers of the media do not trust the quality of citizen journalism, because citizen journalists rely on the same sources of information that fourth-estate journalists do – namely, ‘the wire’ and the public relations departments of governments, corporations and churches – and this is because citizen journalists can’t afford to carry out the sort of investigative research required to establish legitimately critical and informed articles.
Well, readers of the media are losing trust in the fourth estate for all the same reasons, so it was reasonable for him to assert that the best answer was to restructure the media industry to redirect funds away from advertising and into investigative journalism.
However, it must be remembered that people like Nick Davies, though most likely honourable in their intentions, are susceptible to the sort of subconscious bias that would ballast their assumptions against reason. They have a vested interest in arguing down this line, because if citizen journalism takes off, they could be out of a job if they don’t go and start up their own blogs.
It seems obvious to me now, but as I carry out this project I must be sure to take career journalists’ opinions on the blogosphere with a grain of salt.
And the exchange reinforced the following ideas for me:
Filed under: career journalists, commentary, dubious mainstream arguments, ideas, naivety, skepticism | 1 Comment
Tags: Bloggers' Manifesto, career journalists, dubious mainstream arguments, estate function, information sources, naivety, Nick Davies, skepticism