Blog

London.


I've arrived in occasionally sunny London for the Transforming Audiences conference, which kicks off with a keynote by Liz Bird. She notes that conversations about the death of the media audience go back some decades now; the idea of an 'audience' no longer fully captures the reality of media usage and participation, and Web 2.0 and similar phenomena have only provided an even more pointed reminder. There is rhetoric about 'the people formerly known as the audience', but of course these people - audience or not - still matter to us. What is the nature of the dynamic between media and their users, and how may this dynamic be researched further in the current context?

Brisbane.


The final speaker in this ANZCA 2009 session is Bronwyn Beatty, speaking about the YouTube election debate last year, hosted by New Zealand's One News. This follows similar events in other countries, chiefly the US - it is part of an ongoing YouTubeification of politics, some have said.

TVNZ had an agreement with political leaders in New Zealand for three debates between the two main candidates. For the final of these debates, it invited video questions from its audience, uploaded through YouTube. This was framed as participating in the democratic process, and closely followed the model established by CNN for its debates between the US presidential candidates - TVNZ selected 'the best' of the user submissions to show to the candidates.

Brisbane.


We're now in the final session of ANZCA 2009, which starts with a paper by Mary Debrett. Her interest is in the politics of accountability and risk-taking at the ABC, and she begins with some reflections on the social value of trust - it serves as social glue, generates social capital, manages social complexity, acts as a solution for risk, and is a prerequisite for forming self-identity. Trust and authority are constantly being raised, invoking active trust in which trust is always contingent.

Trust is an especially important point of difference for public service broadcasters , of course - they need to be seen as independent from vested interests, as delivering fair and independent news, reflecting national culture and identity, serving diversity through representing minority voices, and adressing audences not served by commercial media. Public broadcasters position themselves as trusted brands in the media landscape.

Brisbane.


The final speaker in this ANZCA 2009 session is Jane Johnston, whose interest is in the economy of news agencies - and she begins with a couple of hoax press releases which were converted into mainstream news stories by the Australian-based press agency AAP. Such stories were widely published by a number of Australian mainstream online news sites and newspapers.

This is great success for the press release writers, but it was conversion into stories by the AAP which created such wide coverage; it highlights the role of press agencies, and points to the near-monopoly of the AAP as a news agency in Australia.

Brisbane.


The next presenter at ANZCA 2009 is Toija Cinque, who continues the discussion especially of public broadcasting in the online environment. The Net increases the diversity of information available to inform the citizenry, of course - but public broadcasters continue to be bound also by their charters and need to adddress their obligations.

Journalism is now becoming more a process than a product, and this provides journalists with less and less time to ascertain what is true and significant. This may mean that the public now gets more pure opinion than factual detail - and crowdsourcing information from users only adds more problems with fact-checking to this process. This also pertains to the use of hyperlinks on news Websites, of course - one reason why still so few mainstream news Websites link to information outside of their own sites (in addition to the desire not to provide easy avenues for users to leave the news organisation's own site).

Brisbane.


The next session at ANZCA 2009 starts with a paper by my colleague Terry Flew, who is also the chair of the conference. He begins by noting the old trope of the journalist as hero (as embodied for example by Messrs. Woodward and Bernstein in the Watergate affair), and its decline (Glenn Milne is the anti-hero in this context). There are substantial impacts of Web 2.0 technologies on contemporary journalism, of course, and there are serious questions about the future role of journalism. News organisations have most trouble, in fact, not in coming to terms with new technologies but with this new lack of deference to their once powerful position.

Brisbane.


The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Michael Galvin, who focusses on a number of trends related to medical tourism and makeover culture. There are now a number of operators offering package travel deals which offer makeover holidays that include tourism, beauty treatment, and cosmetic, elective, or even very serious surgery components - often offering trips to destinations like Malaysia where the costs for such procedures are substantially cheaper.

Websites advertising these services provide brochure-style information about the getaway hotels as well as the hospitals involved, and potential clients are positioned both as potential patient and potential tourist - packages offered include the 'mummy makeover', for example, and describe a fairytale makeover story. (The Singapore tourism board similarly has a special 'Singapore health' brochure.)