The New Media Index monitors and analyses the content on more than 100 million blogs and other social media web pages concerned with national news and public affairs, then compares the results to the stories in mainstream media.

The results vary from week to week, but seem to suggest that social media covers a wider range of topics, focusses less on “winner-loser” coverage. Sometimes topics of interest only to niche audiences nevertheless build up a head of steam because of the intensity of interest within that group.

Now. Who outed Sharon Gould? Even as I type these words, there is a great deal of boasting on the blogosphere about who tracked down the Sharon Gould-Katherine Wilson link first. Bloggers, pull your heads in. It wasn’t you.

In fact mainstream media journalists Bernard Lane and Justine Ferrari of The Australian made the connection as early as Tuesday afternoon – within hours of Crikey publishing the “Sharon Gould” material. As I understand it, Lane found a comment on a blog here by Sharon Gould, linking to this article by Katherine Wilson. Ferrari set about trying to contact Wilson, but couldn’t find her (she isn’t easy to find), and didn’t feel an allegation of that sort could be published without confirmation.

Quite impressive.

As soon as I heard that Ferrari was on this trail, I thought it was probably a matter of time before others joined the dots and Wilson was outed.

Yesterday, a number of people joined those dots and others all at the same time, helping each other along the way. Guys, impossible to say which of you waas first, so far as I can see. Tom McLoughlin worked it out and after dropping lots of hints couldn’t restrain himself in comments on “Gould’s” story in yesterday’s Crikey.

Minutes later, Nexus 6 , having previously speculated that Prince Charles was Sharon Gould, hopped in on a Larvatus Prodeo comment thread and said that they had identified the hoaxer.

But another blog contributor, Don Arthur, had in the meantime found Wilson’s email address and sent this message about two hours before McLoughlin was on the case:

Katherine, I’m thinking about writing a blog post about the ‘Sharon Gould’ hoax.I noticed that ‘Sharon’ linked to article of yours in a comment she made on the Age’s Your Say forum. So I thought I might as well ask: Did you write the Quadrant article?

Don Arthur

Arthur wrote this blog post at Club Troppo later in the evening. (Wilson did not reply to his email).

Meanwhile the guys at libertarian Catallaxy were also on to it, identifying Gould first as “weathergirl”, which is a name she used in blog debates some time ago. Catallaxy’s work on the evidentiary trail was spoilt by silly schoolboy abuse of Wilson and me by a couple of their contributors.

Catallaxy tipped off Helen Dale/Darville/Demidenko at Skepticlawyer, who updated her previous post on the affair accordingly. Meanwhile Larvatus Prodeo picked up the theme, and Mark Bahnisch disassociated itself from Wilson before saying:

Incidentally, I think this whole affair has brought out both the best and the worst of the blogosphere. But I might wait until some more water has passed under the bridge to expand on that comment.

And I await this with interest.

Meanwhile the debate ran hot on the original LP post.

By now everyone was on to it.  It was on for young and old.

It was clear to me by bedtime last night that Wilson was effectively outed, which had always been a likely outcome in my view.

The question was, would the mainstream media pick up on the story, or would it remain in the blogosphere? And if the latter, how much weight should the blogosphere carry in her decision on whether or not to out herself? Would it still be possible to maintain a veneer of anonymity while only the blogosphere had wind of her identity?

I thought it was only a matter of time before the mainstream media published what was already all over the internet. Crikey was also in a difficult position. If Wilson had held me to my confidentiality undertaking, I would really have had to fall silent on the affair, and that in itself would have likely been taken as confirmation.

I told her this was what I thought, and also that Crikey would at the very least have to report on what the blogosphere was saying.

Meanwhile, since I wrote this morning’s story, I have had fresh news of mainstream media journalists sniffing around the Katherine Wilson name.

Hence the decision Wilson made, and the result you see today.

It has been interesting watching my colleagues cover this story, and try to sniff out my source. I have to say I think the mainstream media has done a good job. All the journos who have rung me have been fair and professional, without necessarily cutting me any slack as I wrestled with the various ethical dilemmas. And they have been hot on the trail of the source. The reporting I have seen has also been fair to both me and the hoaxer, iand for that matter to Windschuttle, in my view.

The blogosphere, on the other hand, has been as you would expect very variable in its fairness, accuracy and capacity for detective work. Much of it okay, but a fair bit of unsubstantiated speculation about me, WIlson, Crikey and even Windschuttle.

Nevertheless, there is no doubt that the nimbleness and immediacy of online blogging has made the mainstream media look slow. The stuff that has been in the morning newspapers has been known to people following the story online for hours and hours before it goes on the printing press.

So, it would be nice to chalk this story up as a good one for the bloggers, but I’m afraid that, as usual, its more complicated than that.

Journalists are still of some use, after all. It’s the slowness of the medium that holds them back.

Well, its been just under a month since the first post on this blog, and you can read my Google Analytics report here.

Given that this is a start-up publication, I think I’m doing okay.

Traffic has slowed over the holiday period, but is by not miserable. Some people never rest! (although you can see the hollow spots on the weekends).

The peaks in traffic through December are notable, coinciding with NEWS – about Sue Howard’s departure from the ABC, and Peter Fray’s succession at Fairfax. Even the posts in which I said that Peter Fray was saying nothing got a lot of traffic. (Thanks Peter. Imagine what we could do if you actually said something!)

Google Analytics also tells me a bit about where the traffic is coming from. My biggest single source is, as you would expect, the Crikey.com.au site which drove almost 65 per cent of the traffic. Next comes Google searches, with search terms like”,mark scott christmas message” “sue howard”, “peter fray”, “alan oakley” and “bruce guthrie” driving significant amounts of traffic.

I am glad to say that over ten per cent of my traffic comes direct to me – meaning that people must deliberately bookmark or visit the site.This seems to be growing fast, which is pleasing.

Mentions on Larvatus Prodeo and my Twitter feeds (user name MargaretSimons) each drove about two per cent of traffic.

But these monthly figures don’t tell the whole story, because the pattern was changing quite fast as people got to know about the site, and there was a lot of variation depending on what news I had on the day.

There were days when visitors from inside the ABC made up to 80 per cent of my traffic. Likewise visitors from inside News Limited and Fairfax were in the majority on certain days. (Just to reassure you all – Google tells me the location of the network you are using – not the identity of your computer!)

And the peaks in traffic tell their own story. Breaking news, albeit news that is of interest only to certain journalists, drove my traffic figures above 1000 visits. On one day, almost all of these were from inside the ABC!

Let me know if this is boring, but if there is some interest, I’ll keep you tabbed.

Now Young has responded, and I have responded to her. Read the comments.

I think it is an interesting conversation, and I’m hoping others join in.

How do we know? Not thanks to the mainstream media, but because of Twitter and the blogosphere, including young media workers who are below the radar of most mainstream journalists.

The person who was threatened, new-media-man-about-the-web Nick Holmes a Court, is not the first nor the most vulnerable citizen ever to have alleged police abuse of power.  Yet the way this story broke is not only an interesting example of how new media can work faster than some journalists. More important, it shows that in this new world we are not alone any more, even late at night and on the street. We are not only citizens, we are networked citizens, or can choose to be so, and this is a powerful thing.

So what happened? Holmes a Court was near his Potts Point apartment when he saw police apparently conducting a search. He started to film them on his Blackberry, and they responded by threatening him with arrest, seizing his Blackberry, deleting the video and scanning his emails, text messages and contacts.

Initially shocked, Holmes a Court told his extended online network about this experience almost straight away – by posting a message on Twitter, where he writes as @nickhac. If you are on Twitterh and follow nickhac, you can read that Tweet, lodged at 10.42pm on December 19, here.

From here, his story was picked up by his fellows interested in new media. I first heard about it when Ben Grubb, an eighteen year old who runs a web hosting business on the Sunshine Coast, blogged about it here. He followed up with a podcast interview of Holmes a Court. (Today, Grubb is boasting that his coverage of the issue has led to 10,522 unique visitors to his site.)

I knew Grubb slightly, having met him at a Future of Journalism conference in Melbourne a few weeks ago. While middle aged journos like me were winging about our disappearing jobs, he gave us an example of someone acting as a journalist and with a job in new media without ever having been on the payroll of a mainstream organisation. I am not even sure he has left school yet.

Having been alerted by Grubb, and on the eve of going on holiday, I posted about the story here and here, encouraging journos to follow up.

I am glad to say they did – not thanks to me necessarily, but simply because they were linked and networked with the places where the story was being discussed.  Fellow Twitterer and Courier Mail journalist  David Earley was first and fastest. Despite holidays and the like, he did this story, which got on to news.com.au.

The Sydney Morning Herald then did this follow up a day later, written by another young journo with a presence on Facebook, the blogosphere and elsewhere. (Sadly it managed to get Holmes a Court’s name wrong, calling him Nick Hac, which is a version of his Twitter username.  Strange, given that his family of origin – yes, those Holmes a Courts – is surely one of the potential news angles.)

Holmes a Court has lodged a formal complaint with police, and doubtless we will hear more – if we Twitter and read blogs.

In his latest comment on Grubb’s site Holmes a Court says:

You are right in many regards, my story is representative of only one side of the event. And I’m sure the officer on the other side of the table would say i was being a jerk. Quite frankly i wasn’t respecting their “authoritah” and probably valued my own civil liberties above them getting the job done. A debatable topic.

I wholly admit – was probably being a bit cheeky when i decided to film them. And to be honest I was deliberately making a point about the rights of the citizens to “police the police”. I didn’t expect the reaction I received though.…

All this has caused me to reflect. I have written elsewhere about other people – neighbours of mine -  who allege police abuse of power, and who have been terribly badly treated at the hands of the media.

So much so, in fact, that I have at timeshaad to remind myself of what is good about journalism.

Now I am wondering if my neighbours would have emerged in better shape had they been on Twitter, armed with a mobile phone that also took video, and with a bevy of media-savvy young people among their followers.

In other words, with the ability to get their story out there before the network of professional copy-hungry journos and their too-close-for-comfort police sources get to work.

I disagree with elements of Young’s essentialy pessimistic analysis. She says:”Even though we are spending more time with media today, we’re spending less time on news,” and backs this up with figures on declining newspaper sales and declining and ageing  audiences for television and radio news and current events.

My main point of disagreement is the definition of news. If you define news as that which is put out by big media companies, then the picture is grim. But that definition is circular.

The decline of mass media does not necessarily mean the decline of news. Indeed, it would be strange if this were so. Gathering and passing on news is a basic human activity. It preexisted literacy, printing and broadcasting. It will outlive them, I believe. But what we think of as “news” has changed in the past and will change in the future.

Jan Schaffer, the US Pulitizer Prize winner who now runs J-Lab, talks about “news ecologies” that are developing, using online social networks among other things. News is no longer only that which is put out by journalists. (In fact, it never was, but we were able to kid ourselves…)

The young people I know are very well informed indeed about the things that interest them. On other things, they may not have the kind of broad yet superficial knowledge that comes from reading a daily newspaper or watching a television newscast. Yet they are able to bring themselves up to speed with astonishing rapidity when they want to.

For example, a twenty something friend of mine who has taught me much of what I know about new media might not know why Australia intervened in East Timor, but if he wanted to know, he might do some of the following things: Post a question on the issue in Facebook or some other social networking site, and follow the links provided in the responses. He might perhaps join a group concerned with East Timor on Facebook. he might look on Twitter for members who know about or are interested in East Timor, and “Follow” their posts. These Twitter posts would lead him to other sources of information – blogs, academic articles and the like.

He would Google, and the Google search would send him to many places: some established media sites, but also to lobby groups and special interest groups and East Timor based bloggers. And that’s all without even mentioning Wikipedia.

Meanwhile there are many things that he hears about long before they make it into the newspapers and television news broadcasts. For example, he was telling me about this story to do with Google’s Chrome browser controversy in great depth a clear week before it made page three of the Age. He heard about it from a friend online, and a visit to a few sites gave him an in depth briefing from international expert sources in moments.

He was also able to tell me, earlier this year, that the later episodes of the TV series Underbelly were available online at a time when Channel Nine was protesting to me and other journalists that this could not possibly be so, because the episodes in question were not even out of the production suite. Foolishly, I trusted Channel Nine and not my friend. He turned out to be right – something he has not stopped rubbing in. Thus his online knowledge undermined, or could have undermined, the claims of corporate PR.

Young writes about the internet, but makes the rather dismissive observation that young people use the internet for “email, socialising …doing homework/research”.  Yet all these activities are often ways of accessing  and disseminating news. Young acknowledges this possibility, but then dismisses it by saying that figures suggest that when citizens search for news online, three fifths of their searches are for the names of familiar news outlets, rather than searches by news topic. Once again, the circular definition.

Yet research by Hitwise here in Australia shows that when a topic is in the news, there are clear “spikes” in the number of searches on the topic – and the traffic from these searches goes in all directions. Hitwise figures also show that of the traffic to print news sites 13.34 comes from Google topic searches. Social networking sites are also becoming significant drivers of traffic to both traditional news sites and news-based blogs. I’ve written more on social networking as a driver of news and other media consumption here .

Certainly there is cause for concern about the loss of  broad knowledge of current events. But we do also need to acknowledge that the concept what is news, and what consitutes current events, may need re-examining. After all, before the printing press “news” was what happened locally or could be passed by word of mouth, and “current events” did not really exist in the same way it does now.

We are living through a change at least equivalent to the invention of the printing press. It isn’t sufficient to say “this is what has been news, and this is declining, therefore news is declining”.

If I may (modestly) give an example. Four weeks ago this blog, which is mainly a source of news on media with an emphasis on journalists, did not exist. I gather my information from friends, colleagues, and the usual journalistic trick of wearing out the telephone keypad and some shoe leather. The audience at this stage is only just over a thousand strong – nearly all media workers or those closely interested in media. Before this blog came in to being that audience did not exist as a single, identifiable entity. I am glad to report that it is growing strongly, and there is no doubt that what drives site traffic most is news – about internecine ABC disputes, who is going to be the next editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, and so forth. Stuff that would not interest the great majority of the population, but does interest this audience-in-the-making.

Media workers being what they are, they gossip, and the contents of that gossip both finds its way on to this site (if I can verify it) and is also fuelled by this site. Bloggers link to this site. I link to bloggers.  When I have some news here, I Twitter about it, and Twitterers re-tweet my posts. And so it goes on. What I am doing here is news, yet it looks nothing like any traditional news source. The audience is niche, but if I do my job properly it will be intensely engaged. The boundary between “source” and “audience” is more than usually blurred.

This is my own little meta-journalism experiment.

More in the future on questions such as: “can serving an Australian niche audience pay enough to make it worthwhile”.

Sigh.

*Declaration: Inside Story is published at the Institute for Social Research, Swinburne University of Technology, where I am employed part time.

While I know we are going through a period of paradigm shift, with all the distress and chaos that implies, I think the future contains more threat than opportunity.

Which is why today I want to write about a new web based Australian publication that has started quietly in the last few months, built for nothing using open source blogging software, and kicking arse in the content department.

The publication is Inside Story.

Now, before I go on, I should declare that I have a number of conflicts here. The founder and editor of Inside Story is a mate, Peter Browne, who has also in the dim and distant past been my publisher. Browne is well known to journalists, having once edited Australian Society magazine, (that later became Modern Times), worked at the ABC and also presided over the UNSW Press’s short series of Briefings books.

Another conflict: Inside Story comes out of the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University, where I am employed part time. Also, I have written for it and expect to do so again.

So, take all that into account when I say that I think this publication is a prime example of what can now be done with very little, how it is possible with almost no publicity to get noticed and read by a small but engaged audience, and, forsooth, that the decline of newspapers is not necessarily the end of intelligent material on issues of current affairs, written in an accessible fashion.

I won’t go on about the content. Have a look for yourself. It is international, thoughtful and falls nicely between journalism and the academy. Writers include David Corlett, Peter Mares and Geoffrey Barker.

Inside Story had a soft launch in October. It wasn’t really meant to attract much attention. Browne was negotiating a regular print outlet as a partner to run the best articles from the site. The Australian National University were talking about coming in with more funds. He was waiting for those moves to come off before making a big noise.

Yet despite getting almost no publicity Inside Story – which is free to read – already has 1837 subscribers, and around five and a half thousand page views a week.

What’s more, a number of its major articles have been picked up by the mainstream media. Three pieces have been reprinted in the Canberra Times, and one in The Age. Two authors have been interviewed about their pieces on Radio National, and another piece, Xan Rice’s “The Mobiliser”, an extraordinary first person account of the end of a Sudanese refugee camp, is shortly to be reprinted in the New Statesman.

Browne built the site himself, for free, using the open source Wordpress blogging software. For copy he draws on Swinburne University’s network of researchers, as well as his own contacts in journalism and publishing.

What is more, Inside Story pays its contributors on a sliding scale. Less for salaried academics, and rates for freelance journalists that are not laughable by industry standards – not that the pot of money is unlimited.

I think this is the real divider between the various online publications. Those that pay have some hope of sustaining high quality copy. Those that don’t become aggregators of stuff produced elsewhere, and forums for the intensely involved and interested, rather than for disinterested journalism.

The fact that Inside Story can pay is, of course, a product of its home inside the university sector – but if the American experiments teach us anything, it is that universities are one of the places where high quality journalism might have to be incubated and reinvented while new business models emerge.

So, amid all the gloom, it pays sometimes to look at the new things that are happening, and could not happen, without the new technology.

More on new and hopeful things in the week ahead, if I have time away from reporting gloom and collapse.

And the stats make it ludicrous to suggest that journalists can afford to ignore phenomena like social networking and blogging.

Here are a few facts to mull over:

• Eighty nine per cent of Australians use the internet daily or weekly
• Fifty five per cent of Australians go online more than eight times a week
• Forty per cent of Australians read a blog or used a social networking site in 2007-8
• Thirty nine per cent of Australians between the ages of eight and seventeen have an online profile
• Seventy two per cent of internet users go online to catch up on news, sports and weather – making accessing news number three in popular uses, below email and banking.
• Blogging and social networking are the fastest growing internet applications.
• Two in every ten Australians belong to an online community or social network, with Facebook more popular than Myspace.
• One in every ten Australians has written a blog or uploaded content to the internet