New Roles in and for Journalism in Australia, Iraq, and Polynesia

Brisbane.
The last AMIC 2008 session this afternoon starts with a paper by my colleague Jason Wilson, our research associate on the Youdecide2007 project and its follow-ups, and he presents especially on the experience and lessons from Youdecide. There may be a need for a structural modification in the role of conventional journalists, and a change of attitude towards working with citizen journalists.

Youdecide ran during the lead-up and up to the 2007 Australian federal election; it was a practice-based project and the first step in an ARC Linkage project between QUT, SBS, Online Opinion, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. It offered aggregated hyperlocal content, crowdsourced from citizen journalists in local electorates and coordinated by a small team of site staff led by Jason. It gathered some 2000 registered users, and 230 articles from over 50 electorates were submitted to the site during its lifetime. (There was also a weekly YD07 TV show on the Briz31 community television channel.)

Users could submit text, audio, photo, and video content to the site, as well as comment on one another's stories, and the site demonstrated that there was an appetite for this kind of project in the country - if from some areas and demographics more than others. Obviously, the focus was on original content (departing from the gatewatching and commenting model still very prevalent in citizen journalism), this was fairly successful.

Some of the aims for the project were to identify the audience base for citizen journalism and the relationships between citizen and mainstream news media; additionally, however, the site also provided an insight into the operational approaches to running a citizen journalism Website. This latter aspect is what Jason is focussing here especially, and he highlights Toby Miller's concept of the 'preditor': the staff member who performs both a production and editorial function - producing and organising content which in part is sourced from other sources, including citizen contributors.

The labour involved in being a preditor combines four aspects: content work, community work, networking, and technology work. This combined work represents a structural modification of the conventional journalist/editor role. Content work here means editing user contributions to ensure adherence to legal and regulatory requirements (and Jason notes that up to 30% of OhmyNews submissions are rejected for legal reasons, for example), as well as creating new news content to guarantee the continuing flow of content, to provide a model of best practice for contributors, and to draw in new users; networking means making links with existing news channels, organisations and colleagues, as well as pushing out and pulling in content within the networked news environments; community work refers to providing potential contributors with training, site-specific information, and mediation, providing both structural and personal solutions for users' needs, and cultivating 'super-contributors' who are major sources of content and can become strong advocates for the site; and technology work means on-site technology work with the content management system and its look and feel, off-site technology work on content, networking, and community work using a variety of auxiliary applications, and meta-technology work (measuring the effectiveness of the service and tracking user uptake and participation).

The implications of this are that the role of the preditor combines elements of traditional journalistic work with a variety of new elements; this has implications for organisations moving to harness user-generated content, developing independent initiatives, or providing journalism education. It is grounded in a less competitive and more collegial and community-oriented understanding of journalism practice - a social network model of journalism, perhaps.

The next speaker is Ben Isakhan from Griffith University, whose focus is especially on the Iraqi media in the post-Saddam era. There now are many different levels of Iraqi media, from the US/Iraqi government-controlled mainstream media to media ogranisations controlled specifically by Kurdish, Shia, and Sunni groups as well as by smaller minorities and secular political movements; further, there are various forms of objective or professional media dedicated to the ideal of an independent free press, as well as various media outlets for specific topics and audiences (sports and arts media, student and children's media, political satire publications and U.K.-style tabloids etc.).

Research into this divergent, ad hoc, volatile media landscape so far is very limited, and focusses mainly on the alleged role of the media in enhancing ethno-sectarian divides and the funding of and interference in Iraqi media by foreign and domestic powers (from Coalition powers to regional neighbours). Such coverage may obscure the fairly positive role played by the media in the 2005 elections and referenda. More positive examples in this context include Radio Dijla, which operated talk-back shows debating the proposed democratic models for Iraq, the free or nearly-free screening of campaign advertisements for a variety of parties as well as electoral process information on many television channels, and the Kurdish Hawlati ('Citizen') newspaper (as well as many others), which publicised lists of candidates for the upcoming election and thereby uncovered the Ba'athist past of some candidates (former Ba'athists were officially banned from running for office).

The Iraqi media played a crucial role in debates around the October referendum on a new Iraqi constitution; constitutional proposals were distributed on radio and television (thus informing illiterate voters), and even Islamist newspapers such as Al-Adala highlighted the potential for a democratic renewal brought about by the downfall of the Saddam regime. During the December election, a variety of media from streetside billboards to radio, television, newspapers, and mobile phones were used for political advertising, debate, and information in significant detail; there was free political advertising in many media forms, and there were also non-partisan advertisements encouraging citizens to vote.

The net effect of these developments is that in isolation, Iraqi media can be seen to have clearly partisan tendencies towards ethnic, religious, and political groups; at the same time, these groups do not live in isolation, and in total, therefore, Iraqis were very much exposed to a wide variety of diverging points of view throughout the various political campaigns - so together, these media informed the Iraqi populus on how and when to vote as well as about the key candidates, parties, policies, and agendas. Collectively, they offer deliberation, debate, and discourse and re-establish a participatory and engaged Iraqi public sphere and promote democratic change, enabling Iraq to navigate the still difficult road ahead.

Finally we're on to the third speaker from a Brisbane university, Mark Hayes from the University of Queensland; he reflects on his experience reporting on the effects of climate from atolls in Tuvalu and wider Polynesia overall. he introduces the term vaka vuku as a shorthand for epistemological Oceanic research; it is no retreat into idealised traditionalism or nationalism, but present a complex and deep corrective to western idealisation or globalism - similar to Bauman's 'liquid modernity'. One very tangible form of liquid modernity for Tuvaluans is the gradually increasing seawater seepage over recent years, in fact, as well as the increasing problems with waste storage on Tuvaluan islands.

Islander elites often complain about western-style democracy as an imported form, and in the process also attack their mainstream media as part of the same problem; they respond to media conflicts often by fabricating the deportation of Western-born media operators (such as the recent deportation of Australian-born newspaper editor Russell Hunter from Fiji in response to the publication of a range of well-sourced articles about tax evasion by a senior figure in the Fijian government, later alleged to be Mahendra Chowdry). Hunter may have been removed purely in revenge for publishing these articles, in relation to the uses made of electronic surveillance as part of the 'war on terror' by Fijian authorities (which may have picked up on emails between Russell and other newspaper figures in the country about the scandal), or as a precursor to the release of the Fiji Human Rights Report, a controversial and highly politicised document which highlights alleged problems with the Fijian media.

Mark's suggestion in this context is that Polynesian journalists should position themselves in the tradition of being orators and and speakers of the chiefs, and marry this in a very careful way with some of the imported concepts of Western-style journalism. This would militate against the claim that journalism is an alien Western concept, and would allow for the development of a strong indigenous culture of journalism in Polynesia.

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