creative industries
Gatewatching:
Collaborative Online News Production
Dr Axel Bruns
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
a.bruns@qut.edu.au
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Industrial News Production
‒ Traditional news process:
(from Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, 2005)
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Against Gatekeeping
‒ Gatekeeping is outdated:
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media scarcity no longer exists
too many gates to keep
journalists’ judgment can (and does) fail
‘all the news that’s fit to print’ is patronising
Fordist production model
citizens want to be active and involved
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Towards Gatewatching
‒ New form of collaborative news produsage:
• observing what news passes through the gates of
news and other organisations
• highlighting those news items which are of relevance
to the community
• publicising rather than publishing the news:
gatewatching rather than gatekeeping
• adding commentary, analysis, and discussion to the
news
• post-Fordist production model, involving users as
producers of news: they become produsers
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Produsing the News
‒ Gatewatcher news process:
(adapted from Bruns, Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production, 2005)
‒ Variations on the process are possible
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Gatewatching and the News
‒ Rise of alternative online news:
• in news-related blogs and collaborative online news
sites
• e.g. Indymedia, Slashdot, Kuro5hin, Plastic,
OhmyNews
• often in response to perceived shortcomings in the
mainstream news media, as a corrective to the
industrialised news process
• creating a kind of open news
• but not replacing the mainstream news media
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A Second Tier of News
‒ Commentary and occasional first-hand reporting:
• blogging as a ‘random acts of journalism’ (JD Lasica 2003)
‒ Realisation of model envisaged by Herbert Gans:
• ‘a second tier of pre-existing and new national media, each
reporting on news to specific, fairly homogeneous audiences’
• ‘devote themselves primarily to reanalysing and reinterpreting
the news gathered by the central media, … adding their own
commentary and backing these up with as much original
reporting … as would be financially feasible’
• multiperspectival news – ‘a conception of alternative news’
(1980: 318)
• ‘making a place in the news for presently unrepresented
viewpoints … the bottoms-up corrective for the mostly top-down
perspectives of the news media’ (2003: 103)
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Towards Deliberative Journalism
‒ Multiperspectival news allows for deliberative journalism:
• ‘It would underscore the variety of ways to frame an issue. It
would assume that opinions – not to mention majorities and
minorities – do not precede public deliberation, that thoughts and
opinions do not precede their articulation in public, but that they
start to emerge when the frames are publicly shared.’ (Heikkilä &
Kunelius 2002)
• ‘If contemporary American journalism is a lecture, what it is
evolving into is something that incorporates a conversation and a
seminar.’ (Dan Gillmor 2003)
• dialogic deliberative news coverage is inevitably continuous and
unfinished rather than ‘written up’ and complete
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Open News and Open Source
‒ Open source approach to news:
The basic idea behind open source is very simple: When
programmers can read, redistribute, and modify the source code for
a piece of software, the Software evolves. People improve it, people
adapt it, people fix bugs. And this can happen at a speed that, if one
is used to the slow pace of conventional software development,
seems astonishing.
We in the open source community have learned that this rapid
evolutionary process produces better software than the traditional
closed model, in which only a very few programmers can see the
source and everybody else must blindly use an opaque block of bits.
(Opensource.org)
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Produsage
‒ Examples of produser-led content creation and
collaboration:
• open news
• open source
• open content repositories –
e.g. Wikipedia, ccMixter, Flickr
• collaborative knowledge communities –
e.g. Google Earth
• produser communities around commercial products –
e.g. The Sims, Trainz
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Political Implications
‒ Towards post-Fordist politics?
• growing effect of produser news on political process
∘ towards more dialogue and deliberation,
∘ or more argument and conflict?
• produsage as a sign of active, DIY citizenship
• rear-guard battles by governments and news organisations against
citizen journalists (e.g. Iran, China, Nepal, etc.) – but not only in
authoritarian regimes
• conflict between alternative and mainstream media coverage (e.g.
Howard Dean campaign)
• digital divide opening between traditional audiences and new produsercitizens?
Is it possible to harness produsage to support a move of citizens
from being a passive audience for to being active produsers of
democracy?
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Shameless Plug
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