Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009

Stilgherrian’s links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009:

See what happens when you don’t curate your links for ten days, during which time there’s a conference which generates a bazillion things to link to? Sigh.

This is such a huge batch of links that I’ll start them over the fold. They’re not all about Media140 Sydney, trust me.

Continue reading “Links for 08 November 2009 through 18 November 2009”

Sunday Thoughts about Journalism

“Oh no, here we go again!” I can hear you say. “Stilgherrian’s kicking off about ‘the awful journalists’ again.”

No. This is just me pondering five stories about journalism this week. Grab yourself a cuppa and follow the links before tackling my discussion, because this’ll be a long, meandering essay — one in which I’m exploring my thoughts rather than reaching any conclusions. Yet.

  1. Veteran columnist Frank Devine used the pages of The Australian to attack Crikey publisher Eric Beecher in Keep Beecher from the hack lagoon (yes, every newspaper headline must be a pun, or the sub-editors are whipped), and Beecher responded in Beecher v Devine: The threat to public trust journalism.
  2. Another veteran journalist Mark Day (interestingly, also in The Australian) regurgitated a variation of the standard journalism versus blogging debate in Blogs can’t match probing reports. Stephen Collins’ excellent response is The Hamster Wheel.
  3. I was taken to task for my “unbalanced” commentary on Senator Stephen Conroy’s keynote speech at the Digital Economy Forum. Read the comments.
  4. The Rocky Mountain News was taken to task for (mis-)using Twitter to report a child’s funeral.
  5. The MEAA held The Future of Journalism conference in Brisbane yesterday, and from first reports the usual journalists vs bloggers “debate” emerged.

OK, back? Cool. Here we go…

Continue reading “Sunday Thoughts about Journalism”

Links for 05 August 2008 through 08 August 2008

Stilgherrian’s links for 05 August 2008 through 08 August 2008, covering all topics from Ma to Me:

Links for 04 August 2008 through 05 August 2008

Here are the web links I’ve found for 04 August 2008 through 05 August 2008, posted automatically using a coat hanger, three melons and a small well-brushed poodle.

Defining “citizen journalism”

I’m not a big fan of the term “citizen journalism”. As I’ve said, adopting the label “journalist” will inevitably annoy those who think they are the “real journalists”. And we’re all citizens anyway, even curmudgeonly journalists.

But I haven’t though of anything better. Neither has anyone else yet, so we’re stuck with it. We might as well agree on what it means.

As usual, Wikipedia provides some good background. But Jay Rosen recently repeated his Most Useful Definition of Citizen Journalism:

It’s mine, but it should be yours. Can we take the quote marks off now? Can we remove the “so-called” from in front?

When the people formerly known as the audience employ the press tools they have in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism.

There are other definitions, but they will have to be discussed in the comments.

I used quote-marks in my headline and first paragraph because I believe that’s how you denote the item of language you’re discussing. But from now on, I’ll use the term “citizen journalism” without quotes — except just then, because I was denoting again.

Does this definition work for you? Got a better name for it?