While Singapore’s The Strait Timesonline operation is comparable to any of Australia’s newspapers web presence, Stomp is less concerned with serious news coverage and more focused on capturing the youth demographic. It is not a traditional news service; much of its ‘citizen journalism’ content in the Singapore Seen section is reminiscent of the sort of stories you might see on A Current Affair or Today Tonight in Australia.
Stomp is moving towards social networking and Club Stomp, its social networking site, is one of the most popular sections of the website. While being sensationalist in tone and content, it is arguable that Stomp is contributing to creating community in Singapore, with its commitment to publishing user-generated content, plus Club Stomp and the popular talkback forums.
Australian newspapers have also developed new sites in an attempt to engage young audiences. One of the regularly cited contributing factors to the demise of the newspaper in modern society is that young people just don’t read them – something of which I was sceptical until I heard a young Triple J talkback caller recently tell Youth Minister Kate Ellis that if the government want to communicate with kids these days it has to be online. Forget newspapers! It struck me perhaps because throughout my youth the Saturday paper has been something of a ritual.
The absence of a young audience spurred Fairfax to develop The Vine. While its focus is on entertainment – music, fashion, films etc. – it does have a News section and invites readers to send in newsworthy content. The Vine’s Community section publishes user-generated content – blogs, photos, video etc. – and seeks to give regular contributors exposure for their work through pages such as Featured Citizen (today it’s The JamTeam but their profile looks a bit thin) and Top Contributors. There is also Vine TV and Vine Radio.
It is a comprehensive site, but I suspect it hasn’t secured as much youth traffic as it would have liked. That could be partly due to a lack of publicity.
OhmyNews is a Korean news site that relies on citizen reporters for content. OhmyNews International is the English arm of the operation, and feature stories from Ukraine to Kenya. The site features links to Korean and world news, as well as Science and Technology, Art and Life, Entertainment and Sports stories. There is also an opinion section, which features profiles of featured writers and a talkback forum.
OhmyNews’s commitment to citizen journalism is reflected in the site’s CJ link. ‘Citizen journalism is here to stay’ declares one of the stories in the section. The front page of the site features the ‘Buzztracker’ – showing daily news ‘hotspots’, and OMN is always looking for new citizen reporters. CyberJournalist.net put out a call on OMN’s behalf before the Olympics looking for people to report from Beijing.
OhmyNews is a strong example of how citizen journalism can work - and be reliable and attract a wide audience at the same time.
Antony Loewenstein is a freelance journalist, author and blogger. He has recently published a book, The Blogging Revolution, which I have not yet had a chance to read, but I have listened to an ABC Fora podcast of its launch.
Loewenstein bemoaned the state of Australian media, citing the decline of Fairfax as an example. While not claiming to be a ‘blog evangelist’, he suggested the current void in investigative journalism could be filled by bloggers, or citizen media or network journalism.
While Loewenstein made the point that in Western media, bloggers tend to leach off mainstream news sources. In non-Western countries however, blogs often provide the only reliable source of news, and form an alternative to state-run media.
He used the quite horrific example of Egyptian police officers using video they had filmed of each other raping men in custody as a tool for intimidation. They would show it to those whom they were trying to coerce presumably. Bloggers in Egypt got hold of some of this footage and exposed the police’s brutal tactics, and forced the government to answer for this terrible behaviour.
The term blog has come to refer to an impossibly diverse collection of online content, operating as a sort of umbrella term without giving any specific information about what you are likely to find when you visit a blog.
Margaret Simons has attempted to address the lack of insightful vocabulary available to adequately analyse blogs. Speaking on The Media Report, she discussed a system she has come up with that incorporates nine categories.
One of these categories is the ‘Digest Blog’, where material from around the web is collected to one site, using links or summaries. Some digest blogs feature commentary, though not all do.
I would put CyberJournalist.net in this category. Brief posts under headings including Future of Media, Innovation and Citizen Journalism inform about developments in the online media world and provide links to useful content.
The Blog Scan is particularly relevant, with links to lots of recent postings from blogs elsewhere on the web.
Tips and Tools offer online writing tips from CJ.net founder Jonathan Dube – I liked his reminders to keep it ’short and sweet’, and to ‘break it up’. This section reinforces the sense of community CJ.net tries to foster, taking advantage of the technology it analyses and advocates. You can contribute to the site through comments and wikis and you can submit your work.
CJ.net can give some invaluable tips on where to find great online content. I found a link to Vanity Fair’s Blogopticon at CJ.net, which in turn has provided hours of entertainment.
Oh my News [I'm looking at the English-language International site] is a remarkably successful model of citizen journalism. Before addressing the journalism side of things, I think it is interesting to consider how tech-savvy South Korea is as a society. Access to broadband in SK is so widespread it is enough to make an Australian weep.
A friend of mine, Ms A. Rassall, has spent a lengthy stay in South Korea, and these are some of her observations of its cyber-assimiliated society:
The best bits were the technomarts…floors and floors of gadgets sometimes 8-10 stories high. One for cameras one for computers one for phones with tv screens on the top so people could receive the free broadcast straight to their mobiles. It was totally surreal to be on the trains every day and to be the only one not watching tv. In idea it’s forward thinking I guess, but in practise it feels old school because the phones are often larger than we’re used to seeing and it feels a bit like an episode of lost in space.
Film-quality footage used to be a prerequisite for broadcast, whereas now amateur video and stills have become perfectly acceptable to air and publish. Amateur footage offers immediacy and intimacy that traditional film does not. Due to access to so many media outlets, and near-saturation levels of media exposure, audiences now hunger for new angles and unseen footage of big media events, like the World Trade Centre bombings in 2001 and the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. In these cases it is often likely that the first images captured are from mobile phones and digital cameras, and even though they may be shaky and out of focus, they possess incredible news value to audiences who want to be shocked.
