bronwen clune

Last Friday I was invited to take part in a “creative salon” for the Perth International Arts Festival staff and I was so inspired that I thought the idea was worth spreading.

The idea behind it is very simple - get a few people who are innovators in their field and bring them together in an informal setting to share their passions and stories with a group. For the inaugral event I was invited with two other guests - Caroline Wood from Amnesty International and Ian Weir (Gordon Innocent) artist/architect and photographer to come and talk to Festival staff. Rania Ghandour, who is the media relations manager at the Festival and a person of inspiration herself, put the salon together so we could all stop and think about our passions/what drives us and the contributions we make to our area of interest. It was a fantastic experience and Ian and I have already asked Rania that she invite us to the next one

I learnt a lot as well - both Caroline and Ian are amazing people with the most wonderful stories. I love the way that Ian has this bullish passion for his art and just lives and breathes his ideas. He has an exhibition coming up in Artrage soon and I hope to catch up with him then and do some stories on his projects for the Norg. Caroline has this amazing magnetism and presence and this extraordinary calm and focus that for me is always a sign of a great learnt wisdom. She holds a full time job and is also the head of Amnesty International WA and must come across the worst of our humanity everyday, but she remains hopeful and, better still, is doing her part in making a difference. But the learning didn’t stop there, because the audience was as much a part of the salon as we were. So thanks to all the staff for taking time out of your day to come and share your experiences too.

Lastly, I should mention Festival Artistic Director Shelagh Magadza, whom I could spend hours talking to. I think I may have piqued her interest in Twitter - which somemone pointed out was like an everyday Creative Salon - and I hope that she joins. She has so much to share and is definitely someone to watch and be inspired by. Our Festival is is awesome hands and I suspect it will get better every year under her.

Enough lovey dovey from me - I must resume my battle position in the media war, but really it was a great event that helped me recharge my batteries and remember why I created the Norg in the first place. Now to take aim and fire
We can’t all have TED, so can I suggest a “Creative Salon” INS-TED.

I wrote a post up on the Norgdom blog which may be of interest to others as well about what makes a story “norgworthy”.

It raises some questions about our role as individuals in new media  and what contributions we make as citizen journalists to the “news”.

You can read it here, for those interested

Deborah Leavitt, who is the ABC Local Radio and Online Manager for WA, gave me a ring last week asking me if I knew anyone who may be interested in applying for two online positions they have in Albany and Broome. They have had trouble recruiting through traditional ads, so I said I’d write up a blog post and do a shout out on Twitter. She made the comment that they were finding it hard to attract university leavers to the roles, because they were more interested in creating their own media and setting up their own blogs/podcasts. You can guess what I thought about that

Still I think the roles are worth considering. The ABC has certainly been the front-runner in Australia in understanding and adapting to online media and if you are interested in working for a bigger news organisation then this is the best place to start. You’ll get the experience many other control media journalists are missing out on, by working in a cross platform environment - and that is where most future roles in news organisations will be. Working in a regional office is also a great opportunity - I did my time at the Narrogin Observer, attending pig and sheep auctions among other things. It means really getting to know the community you are working in and allows you to really engage with the people you live among and report on (which has its own challenges, but certainly a challenge worth taking up).

So here’s the job description as advertised (the same role also applies to Albany):

Local Radio Western Australia Broome has a vacancy for a highly motivated, multi-skilled program maker to work in multi media platforms. Based in Broome, working to the Program Director and referring to the Editor Local Radio Online, the successful applicant will have accomplished online publishing and radio production skills. Working as both part of a team and with sound, independent editorial judgement, the online producer will be responsible for the maintenance of the Western Australia Kimberley website with strong editorial contributions in text, audio, pictorial and video formats. There is a requirement to contribute to program planning and participate in operational and administrative activities of Karratha. The successful applicant will have sound production skills and may from time to time be required to produce one of the Broome Local Radio programs.

I couldn’t write the post without adding that I also think the ABC should make a real investment in getting up strong citizen journalism initiatives in these smaller regional areas. There’s a fiesty passion that comes from living in a small community that could be very well harnessed by someone like the ABC. I won’t be surprised if that is what eventually happens.

If you are interested in the roles please contact leavitt.deborah at abc. net.au

Flickr and Getty Images have announced a deal where Getty Images will peruse Flickr images looking for anything that can be used in magazines, newspapers and other publications. If they find any suitable images Getty will contact photographers directly and share any revenue with them. As far as I have read there is no financial arrangement between Flickr and Getty. It’s a really interesting arrangement and anyone who has spent time (I can get lost there for hours) looking at Flickr “interestingness” photos will know that there are some amazing images out there done largely by amateurs. This is a great example of the internet opening up opportunities for content creators and producers outside control media. Ironically though those images are being sold back to control media

So I wonder then what this will do for creative commons - if people release photos under a full creative commons license then it’s a good assumption that those images will be discounted by Getty as they have no “intellectual property” which can be monestised . There are a lot of amazing images that people share under cc - most images on this blog I source through Flickr cc and it would be a step backward if these stopped being shared. I guess the opportunities and number of images that can be used by Getty will be limited, so the impact might not be that great. There is still no news on what sort of payment photographers will get, and that could also factor how many images remain copyrighted on Flickr.

I’m interested to see how this develops and what other people think about this.

Some months I feel like a sad excuse of a blogger and this is one of those months. My excuse - time, travel and a lot on my plate. But it doesn’t help shake that feeling of regret that I don’t make a bigger effort. So before the timeframe to blog about Pubcamp really becomes embarrassing, I better stop with the excuses already!

Pubcamp was an event put on by itechne, of which I know very little about other than it took the initiative spear-headed by my Twitter associate Jed White to put on an event to discuss the future of media. The event was held in Sydney and then Melbourne and I was lucky enough to be invited to both to debate the subject that: “The world of new media choice is a dagger to the hearts of content producers and creators alike.” You can guess that I was for the negative. The topic came about through a discussion with my opponent Richard Walsh who firmly believed this to be the case. Actually, less so by the time we got to Melbourne as we had been trading emails on the subject and I made some inroads to his thinking. Jed also invited me to give a presentation at the Melbourne event and I’m told they should be available online shortly. I did have grand plans of writing out my talks here, but I’m afraid that may take a while

But I did want to mention one of the terms I coined in my presentation. Whenever I hear the term “mainstream media” it’s always fallen short for me in regards to what it describes. In fact a lot of online media sites, some not considered “mainstream” still operate under the same principals of what we are trying to break away from. It occurred to me the difference between media as we know it and the media we are trying to foster in the future is about control. So I prefer now to talk about “control media” over “mainstream”. Control media seeks to “control” content distribution, information, its audience. Its journalists even I guess the alternative term for new media then could be “free media” - it works on lots of levels, but I haven’t fully thought that one through yet.

I also just wanted to add some thoughts into the ring about the event. For me it was a great opportunity to get together and put the future of media in the spotlight - outside of overpriced and often stuffy conferences that really don’t open the issue up for anyone to contribute to. Both events were free - and I’m sure they would have not been cheap to put on - which meant that every day people genuinely interested in media could come along. And come they did. There was a great Twitter turn out and really I think the Twitterati added the edge to the event. It’s not important to me that we didn’t really leave with any real conclusions, but rather that there is an obvious and passionate desire to reconstruct and improve on media as we know it. I’m sure answers will flow as we move forward, but I do hope that we leave some of the shackles of the past in the past. There’s no point in trying to control media in a free media world and the sooner we let go, the sooner we’ll start to find answers. I’m happy to be one of the first to jump, hopefully I’ll land before the others - either that or be splattered on the ground. Care to join me?

Image found here and used under Flickr cc.

Catherine Eibner invited me to be a guest on the inaugral Geek Girl Blog Podcast last week. The Podcast will be focusing on women in IT, across a broad spectrum of areas. We chatted about running a Web 2.0 start-up. I had great fun recording it and it was fantastic to meet Catherine in person - she’s become a close personal friend and it’s good to have found someone to share the aches and pains of running a company, juggling kids and having a life. The podcast is hosted on The Podcast Network and you can listen to the show here.

In the pic is Kate Carruthers, Jodie Miner, Catherine Eibner, Bronwen Clune and Alison Young at Pubcamp Sydney.

PS. I thought afterwards that I should have mentioned some great “male” supporters I’ve had, who also work in the Web 2.0 scene - all whom I count as good friends especially Cameron Reilly, Richard Giles and Duncan Riley.

YouTube has long been the soil bed of many budding citizen journalism initiatives and now its taken steps to recognise and encourage the efforts of those users with the launch of a Citizen News channel. They have employed a news manager to locate and bring together citizen journalism efforts around YouTube and pull them into the news channel.

According to the YouTube blog:

Thanks to better, cheaper, and easier access to video equipment, there’s an amazing amount of news being reported on YouTube every single day by citizens in all corners of the globe. You’re conducting interviews with local community leaders, doing weekly reports on the latest campus news for your school television station, and investigating untold stories you think the world should know about. This stuff is fantastic, but we want to see more from you all and to bring more citizen journalists into the fold.

It will be interesting to see how the channel is used by people - I can’t imagine it being used as a news destination site because the breadth of news interest is just too wide and a lot of citizen journalism content is very localised (hence my decision to launch local norg sites). But, it’s definitely going to be an interesting showcase of how people are using online media to produce and distribute content. The possibilities are endless - at the very least it should help people recognise the potential that we all have to create, distribute and engage in news.

Here’s an introductory video from the YouTube news manager Olivia:

I read last night that Scott Karp received US$2.75M funding for his company Publish2, which is described as

An online news aggregation platform, designed to empower journalists to discover, organize, and rank the most important news — to benefit their own reporting, their newsrooms, and all news consumers on the web.

I like Scott’s thoughts on media and hats off to him that he’s done more than just dwell on ways the media landscape is changing, but taken those ideas and is doing something with them.

From what I’ve read Publish2 is a tool for “professional” journalists and I was intrigued to read this on the Publish2 website, describing how it works as a news aggregator:

The emphasis, by the way, is actually theirs. Things is, I have a couple of problems with a few of the concepts behind Publish2 and admittedly it is only from my limited understanding about what they are trying to do:

1. If news organisations are using it as a guide to rank importance and emphasis on a story or even do research it is just further diluting the different perspectives/voices or alternate concerns of a particular issue. If information is “easily accessible” then it’s just likely to be rehashed. If wrong information is easily accessible, it just becomes an accepted truth.

2. The point about “taking back control” is SO problematic - in fact, there’s a little WTF? that goes off in my head every time I read that sentence. So journalists set up their own “digg” to decide what’s important - so what? What does that add to anyone outside of being a journalist and then again - so what? Unless journalism has been about writing stories for other journalists and I’ve missed something, then again - so what? Isn’t it much better that journalists understand what is important to their AUDIENCE - the amateurs.

The pressure on journalists to be better at their job is greater than it’s ever been before, but the key to improving the media landscape is not to add to the false kingdom of journalism, but for journalists to go and and get dirty with the amateurs. Publish2 sounds like it’s just adding to “professional” media’s problems.

It’s not even really ‘news’ anymore that the newspaper industry has experienced the worst drop in advertising revenue in more than 50 years. But I found this quote from the Newspaper Association of America’s latest report quite interesting:

“Even with the near-term challenges posed to print media by a more fragmented information environment and the economic headwinds facing all advertising media, newspapers publishers are continuing to drive strong revenue growth from their increasingly robust Web platforms,” John Sturm, president and CEO of the NAA, said in a statement. 

Could this be a tipping point?

Wrote a post on the norg this morning and went to Google blog search to do my usual browsing (I’m one of those odd fish that prefer browsing over RSS when I have the time) and already found my post indexed by Google. Wowsers that was fast!