Monthly Archives: February 2008

Democracy and citizen media

Posted on February 27, 2008 | Leave a comment

Last week on New Media Mogul I raised the issue of democracy within ‘citizen media’ by talking about the athletes’ blogs at the Beijing Olympics. While the idea of a blog is to encourage its owner to write about whatever they feel like, athletes have been warned that they cannot talk about the performances of other athletes and other such things, which kind of takes some of the democracy out of their blogging experiences at the games.

This leads me to thinking more widely about how democracy functions in different ways and on different levels within the media landscape. From a holistic point of view, the mass media is democratic to the point that while the Government regulates mass media, the mass media is free to create and distribute any content that does not contravene these regulations without interference from the Government.

On this level, user-generated content enjoys a greater level of democracy, considering that its main means of distribution is the Internet and in Australia regulation of the Internet really only extends to pornography and gambling. So provided that user-generated content does not contravene these regulations, there is also the freedom to create and distribute any content.
Individual democracy within the mass media is tightly controlled by the corporations that control the proprietary media networks. Newspapers set aside pages where a careful selection of opinions from the general public are published on a daily basis. Some television shows also encourage interactivity – whether it is SMS voting, emails, letters or in some cases talkback. Talkback radio has been put forward as a particularly democratic medium, but ultimately while considerable time might be devoted to the opinions of individuals by this medium, not all callers can get through as their opinions may be too controversial or just not interesting enough.

User-generated content and the sites devoted to its hosting encourage a much more fluidic democracy – some sites will promote a dialogue between an individual who has created a piece of work and the viewers of that work, while other sites are read/write in the sense that users can change the work of others, or build upon it. This read/write process is known as collective intelligence and is encouraged by sites like Wikipedia and movements such as creative commons with its ‘share and share alike’ philosophy.
The idea of ‘collective intelligence’ is such an interesting one to me – never before has it been so easy for individuals to collaborate on creating media and the success of this collaboration will determine the success of UGC as an alternative medium. How individuals, sporting organizations and media professionals address the potential drawbacks of collective intelligence is essential, given the influential nature of media within society, and this is an area that I will be working on in much greater depth.

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Posted in Citizen Media

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The power of the collective?

Posted on February 20, 2008 | Leave a comment

In my last analysis on New Media Mogul I looked at the relationship between the mass media and citizen journalists and found that in the case of sports media at least, the mass media still plays a major role in setting the agenda for discussion and analysis. However while the mass media might still retain its powerful agenda setting function, does it having a bearing on the breadth of discussion surrounding a particular issue? What I am questioning here is whether people, given this unparalleled freedom of expression are making their own minds up about issues and contributing their knowledge on the issue, or are they still more or less guided by the opinions of respected journalists and commentators in the field.

This analysis will look at coverage of the AFL’s decision to expand their competition to 18 teams by 2012 and will compare the coverage that this news has received from the Herald Sun, The Age, The Roar and the Australian rules football news and discussion site, BigFooty.

The mainstream media has approached the AFL’s expansion plans from a number of angles. Reaction has been sought from the Sydney Swans, who until now have been the only team in a market that is still dominated by rugby league. Their view is that Sydney is not ready for a second team and so this move by the AFL has not been welcomed by the Swans. Another common theme has been questions over where the extra talent for these two teams would come from, with Paul Roos expressing this concern in an interview and Mike Sheahan discussing it in his regular column. There was also some reaction from Victorian clubs to the news that the competition would now comprise 18 teams, with Jeff Kennet particularly vocal.

On the specialist sporting websites The Roar and Footyheads, the discussion has been based around similar issues. The Roar’s article concerned a potential backlash against the Swans as the AFL tries to further establish itself in rugby league heartland – something that Paul Roos was confident would not occur, according to Guy Hand, a professional journalist writing on The Roar. Footyheads reported Andrew Demetriou’s agressive agenda for the AFL to grow the game.

Opinions submitted to the Bigfooty site and other amatuer blogs have largely concerned another issue – that it is soccer by way of the A-League that is a threat to the AFL in Western Sydney, rather than rugby league which already has a team there anyway, and the AFL may be making this jump into Western Sydney to draw away from any popularity that the region’s own A-League team might garner. This has been an issue that has not been so widely followed within the mass media, but has been debated vigorously on BigFooty.

The other issues that concern BigFooty contributors could be described as ‘small picture’. Someone has pointed out that the AFL will be obligated to keep all 18 teams afloat after 2011 if it is to sell a 9 game per week television package. Others are talking about the finals structure of an 18 team AFL competition, while it has also been pointed out that areas like Canberra, Darwin and Tasmania have been ignored in this expansion of the national competition.

These are all important points, and have no doubt been omitted by the mass media because of the limited space that the mass media can give to any one issue. This then is the value of user-generated content, at least within a journalistic context. Combined with the coverage and analysis provided by the mainstream media and professional sports sites, citizen sites like BigFooty can give an issue the breadth that would not have been possible without this sort of technology. Certainly there is always talkback radio for this, but the advantage that user-generated content sites have is that there is a permanent record of a user’s opinion on the issue. Consequently, users are using forums like BigFooty to bring their own opinions on certain issues to the fore, and in the processs creating a wealth of knowledge around an issue that can be harnessed by others. This has been termed collective intelligence.

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Posted in Sports Media

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Blogging for gold in Beijing

Posted on February 19, 2008 | Leave a comment

It has emerged that athletes will be able to keep blogs for the first time ever at the Beijing Olympics, coming up later in the year.

Rebecca Beisler in Melbourne’s mX reports that “experts have labelled the move an attempt to modernise the games and reach Gen Y. It has also raised speculation that athletes may use the blogs to make political comment. The International Olympic Committee has said blogging is a ‘legitimate form of personal expression’ but athletes must follow strict rules.”

It seems that the IOC has decided that athletes cannot talk about other athletes, cannot post audio or video clips of Olympic events and cannot disclose any confidential information. Clearly the IOC is trying to protect its brand here, particularly with the lucrative broadcasting revenue it receives from selling the rights to the games, which could be diluted if athletes were to post their own personal audio or video from the Games. However, while the athletes might be relatively easy for the IOC to control, it will be interesting to see what measures they put in place to stop citizen journalists and other creators of user-generated content who are attending the games from creating and distributing content. Whether they end up collecting all camera phones and digital cameras off people as they enter the stadium will be interesting to see.

Getting back to the article in mX, Australian athletes won’t have their blogs censored by Australian Olympic officials but they have been warned to watch what they say because anything could be used as a direct quote in the media. This is sound advice, as the blogs could change the way journalists do their jobs at the games. Instead of having to interview athletes to get their opinions on different issues, journalists could simply read through the athlete blogs and collate the information they need. As blogging and other forms of user-generated content take off, this could be a preview to the sort of role journalists will play in the future.

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Posted in Sports Media

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The discursive nature of citizen journalism

Posted on February 13, 2008 | 1 Comment

Recently a number of sporting sites have emerged that mix the pursuits of professional journalists usually recruited from established mastheads with the views and opinions of fans who sign up to the site and are encouraged to contribute articles on their favourite sports and topics. There are meta sites which encourage articles and discussion on most major sports such as The Roar and Sportingo, and specialist sites that deal with individual sports like Footyheads for Australian rules football and Cricketwoman, which deals with women’s cricket.

One of my research interests in the area of user-generated content is establishing the relationship the mass media has to the content produced by so called citizen journalists on sites such as this. It is possible that it could be a symbiotic relationship, where the mass media produces content that citizen journalists absorb; then these amatuers pick up on the thread ad continue reporting and articulating on it. On the other hand perhaps there is a reactive relationship; whereby citizen journalists establish that some topics within the mass media don’t receive the attention they deserve and seek to rectify this situation.

By analysing the websites of The Roar, Sportingo and Cricketwoman I hope to establish that as far as a relationship between the mass media and user-generated content goes, it is the case of the former, and the relationship is very much symbiotic. I have chosen these three sites because they are similar in their aims and design, but different enough to be able to make some valid points about the nature of the relationship that citizen journalists have with the mass media.

The Roar is an Australian site that features the work of some prominent Sydney sports journalists such Spiro Zavos from the Sydney Morning Herald. It seems to mostly cater for articles and discussion surrounding rugby union, rugby league, Australian rules football, cricket and soccer but devotes a section of the site to other sports. So in theory an article could be written about any sport on The Roar.

Sportingo could almost be seen as the English equivalent of The Roar, although it does not promote the work of professional journalists on the site and most of the articles seem to come from amatuers, although there is editorial control over the content of the site – this is no Wikipedia. Reflecting its different heritage it devotes itself to covering rugby, tennis, cricket, cycling, basketball and football (soccer), although just like The Roar it welcomes submissions about other sports and featured an article about the recent American gridiron Superbowl on its frontpage.

Cricketwoman is a specialist site that is devoted to women’s cricket. It features a news feed from online news sites such as Yahoo! News and BBC Online that provide articles and results for women’s cricket matches. Just like The Roar and Sportingo it welcomes submissions from amatuers concerning women’s cricket.

The Roar and Sportingo are well populated with new articles appearing every day on a variety of different subjects. The Roar appears to have two new articles written by citizen journalists uploaded today along with three articles from its ‘expert’ journalists along and a story from the newswire. Sportingo appears to have seven new articles written by its army of citizen journalists appearing for today. In stark comparison, the Cricketwoman site does not appear to have ever receieved content from any citizen journalists, and actually appears to have been overrun by spammers. Its sole purpose appears to be as an aggregator of content about women’s cricket from other sites.

When examining the sports sections of Melbourne’s two daily newspapers, The Herald Sun and The Age, there appears to be a direct relationship between the content featured in these mass media publications and the relative popularity of posting amatuer content to these online sites. Today The Age sports section featured 2 pages devoted to cricket, with only one article concerning women’s cricket. There was also a page assigned to Australian rules football, a page for athletics, along with articles about horse racing, rugby union, cycling, motor sport, rugby league and an entire page for soccer.

The Herald Sun sports section features much the same mix of articles with three pages devoted to Australian rules football, a page for cricket, and articles concerning swimming, athletics, rugby league, a page of racing, a page of soccer along with motor sport and iron man. However unlike The Age, the Herald Sun did not feature any articles about women’s cricket.

Women’s cricket never features heavily within the traditional media, and a Factiva search revealed that most recent articles concerning women’s cricket have appeared in suburban newspapers. The North Shore Times, Preston Leader and Macarthur Chronicle have all recently featured articles concerning women’s cricket, and there was also one article that came from AAP’s newswire. The problem with women’s cricket has always been a perceived lack of professionalism and therefore lack of interest from the traditional media in general.

This lack of media interest seems to have a flow on effect to fans of the sport, for while issues in other sports are heavily and regularly opined on The Roar and Sportingo, neither site featured a single article on women’s cricket. While it is not quite clear how much editorial control there is over these two sites, there would appear to be nothing stopping a fan of women’s cricket from contributing an article and yet there is no evidence that anyone has. Added to this, the Cricketwoman site could be easily found by anyone interested in the sport, as it ranks highly in Google and is cross referenced on Wikipedia, yet it is falling into a state of disuse.

It would seem to me that one of the opportunities created by user-generated content is the ability to produce media that differs from that found within the mass media, and greater coverage of women’s cricket would be an example of this. It should be noted that the leading cricket website, Cricinfo, devotes a section to women’s cricket. However surely if fans and players of the sport took an active role in creating media surrounding the sport it would help to raise its profile, and perhaps the organisers of women’s cricket should put in place strategies to encourage fans and players to contribute content on user-generated content hosting sites such as Cricketwoman, Sportingo and The Roar as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace that also host media.

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Posted in Sports Media

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The Harbhajan Incident: A case study of the changing media landscape

Posted on February 11, 2008 | 1 Comment

By now, e veryone who follows cricket should have heard something about the series of incidents involving Andrew Symonds and Harbhajan Singh. This blog doesn’t concern cricket, so I’m not going to get into it but if you’re not familiar with it, then I’m sure a search of Technorati or Google will fill you in on all the necessary details.

However, the concern of this blog is the ways in which different sections of the media have dealt with the incident. The mass media dealt with the incident in such a way that the issue became political, with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Governor-General Michael Jeffery commenting on the issue. It almost became a diplomatic issue as well, with suggestions that relations between India and Australia were strained because of the incident. There was also restraint shown by media operators who would have suffered financially if India refused to play anymore cricket on the tour, namely PBL Media and News Corporation, and the publications and services operated by these two companies were less critical towards India than other media operators such as Fairfax were.

However, a completely different slant on the issue could be found online at Youtube. The video depicts a man dressed as a monkey running onto the field dressed as a monkey, dancing and rolling around and evading security staff at the Adelaide Oval for as long as possible. The video then ends with an editorial, stating that the incident between Harbhajan and Symonds should have stayed on the field, it didn’t need to be dragged through the media and consequently the general public had no right to be involved in it. Cricket is a passionate game played with intencity and occasionally in the heat of the moment things are said that shouldn’t be, but ultimately it is a form of entertainment, and having fun while playing the game should be a key element. In a stunt that wouldn’t look out of place on The Chaser this group attempted to show the lighter side of the incident and bring some fun back into a cricket series that had become overtly politicised.

Whether a majority of Australian or Indian cricket fans would agree with this group’s interpretation of the incident, it is diffucult to say. But from a new media point of view, it is interesting to see this sardonic interpretation of the incident coming through a piece of user-generated content while the mass media was concerned with the politics and diplomacy angles of the story. The reasons why the mass media strayed away from portraying the incident in this way are also interesting. Perhaps if The Chaser had been on air at the time they would have made light of it, but every active section of the mass media was treating the whole incident very carefully indeed.

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Posted in Sports Media

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The Ties That Bind?

Posted on February 4, 2008 | Leave a comment

I was listening to the Huey Lewis song ‘Happy To Be Stuck with You’ and the line that goes ‘We share the same phone number, all the same friends and the same address’ got me thinking. Couples who are living together are really not so inexorably linked as they once were – they might still share a landline number and a physical address, but almost certainly they will have their own mobile phone number, their own email address and individual access to other communication services such as social networking sites. I don’t actually know whether there is any research that demonstrates the effect of this move towards communication infrastructure that is individualised and unshared on how people form relationships and maintain them, but it seems interesting to me.

It’s also a segueway into a discussion about what is happening to the media landscape. Just as couples sharing a house used to be limited to sharing the same communications infrastructure, and as Huey Lewis suggests, this made them happy to be stuck together, perhaps it was also true that these same people were happy to be stuck with the services of various media companies because there were so few alternatives. Now that there are alternatives, it will be interesting to see how fickle the loyalties of media consumers will become, and how fractured the media landscape will become, as large operators are replaced with a myriad of small operators.

We’ve already seen The Bulletin shut its doors for the last time, and reading between the lines, it seems that the fickleness of media consumers was to blame for the demise of this once extremely influential publication, with PBL Media citing falling circulation numbers as more and more people turned to the Internet for their news and opinion. It begs asking this question then – what are people looking for in their media and is continued excellence in production of innovative and original content the key to survival in the digital media age?

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Posted in New Media

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Facebots

Posted on February 3, 2008 | Leave a comment

When The Matrix was released in 1999 it seemed like fantasy. The idea that a computer program would be in control of everything and humans were just the battery cells powering the computer as they were plugged into a virtual reality simulation that occupied their minds seemed unbelieavable. Although this scenario is not something that’s ever likely to occur, sometimes when I look at the evolution of Facebook I wonder if the creators of The Matrix might have had more prescience than we might have otherwise thought possible.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m a huge Facebook addict – I generally check it several times per day, using both my computer and my mobile phone to do so but sometimes it gets me wondering. It gets me wondering about how radically the software is changing the way I communicate with my family and friends, and just how beholden I am becoming to this program.

For example, I don’t really need to ask my friends how their days have been anymore, instead their Facebook status will let me know. If it tells me that ‘Clare has had a crap day’ then I know that something has happened to my girlfriend today and she probably needs cheering up. Likewise I’m less inclined to ask my friends how their weekends were – if I wasn’t already doing something with them, then chances are someone took along a digital camera and has already uploaded photos so I can see exactly what went on. Even relationships don’t warrant as much discussion as they used to – if my friends happen to break up with their partners then Facebook will tell me so and likewise if they find someone new in their life, Facebook will tell me that too.

There’s a satirical graphic doing the rounds on the Internet at the moment, entitled ‘Pensionbook’ that is meant to be Facebook when Generation Y grows old, with recent deaths instead of birthdays and colostomy bag applications and as ridiculous as this is, it gets me wondering about how communication practices are evolving for my generation. First of all mobile phones came along and we’ve become integrated with them, to the point that most people cannot leave the house without one. Now Facebook has come along and is available on any device that can establish an Internet connection and launch a web browser. It seems as though along the way, communication has been grossly simplified.

Perhaps this is a good thing in this fast paced world we live in, and perhaps Facebook allows us to pay more attention to the people we care about in our minute amounts of spare time by concentrating the happenings of our lives into a news feed. Then again, Matrix style, we could be becoming increasingly dependent on the application until one day we won’t be able to do anything unless Facebook says so.

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Posted in Social Networking

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