But this was a conference about journo’s using twitter and how it impacted on their practice. Good blogging never really got a guernsey because twitter is how journos–including the Canberra Press gallery engaged with social media. The focus was on journos, not bloggers, and the journos did dump on the new media crowd, including bloggers by implication. Hence the fightback by Papwworth and Stilgherrian.

A certain Mr Jonathan Green was no friend of the social media, as he defended traditional journalist values, even when Crikey continually transgresses these standards in its daily practice. He came across as a media conservative without even bothering to consider whether the content buried in objective standards of accuracy, background, context etc needed rethinking.

Crikey makes a lot of its money from its subscriber email – and that’s edited by Mr Jonathan Green.

Come clean. Does Crikey provide the fine editorship on Corporate Engagement or do you do it yourself, like other Oz political bloggers.

If I twitter about this post —read Cook on the internet evolving a new species of magpie reader—I would link to this post–so I would drive readers to your work. Since I’ve lost my concentration—another tweet has come in–my attention span has wandered, and I’v forgotten what I was going to do.

You do have a rather negative view of your readership.

BTW – why do people subscribe to Crikey – I suggest it’s because they like what they read and they believe they are getting something (including fine editorship) that they can’t get for free elsewhere – am I wrong?

Stilgherrian – Yes I hate listening to journos moan too but it is because there is very little on offer when it comes to funding journalism (as in something you get paid to do for a living) other than in traditional media. Might be one reason why the ABC is the darling of social media types – the ABC can actually fund this stuff. Unless someone comes up with a decent alternative business model (and I don’t mean relying on clickthroughs on google ads either) then journalism is dead as a profession and I think that is not a good thing all things considered. I’m sure journos would be keener to adapt if there was some more hope that adaptation wasn’t just an euphemism for extinction

Why should I pay for that “excellence” when the good work was on a Flickr gallery? Many of the user generated images were excellent enough to be hosted by News Ltd.

The ground has shifted away from the old media v the new media.

He began his talk by exploding the dichotomy of blogger versus journalist:

“However “journalism” in turn is glossed as “the occupation of writing for, editing, and producing newspapers and other periodicals, and television and radio shows”.

“So the question as stated is meaningless. Of course journalists are better at “It” — journalism — because they’re the ones doing it. If you’re not a journalist you’re not doing journalism, therefore you’re not merely bad at it, you’re not even doing it at all!

In other words they’re not two distinct groups fighting over the same resource. What makes a good blog, makes for a good new story too. Social media is a technology which lets you gather and ‘filter’ information to make new and different stories.

The dust example was ideal because it showed how users could work collectively to form a picture of an event in a way that no single new source, no matter how well qualified, could. The cathedral and the bazaar….

“We are excellent and people will therefore pay” may or may not be true. Do journalists and journalism as a trade really want to just assume they will? Or will we start to see more of a discussion from individual practitioners about how they’re going to adapt?

Yesterday’s session, “How Social Media is Changing Political Reporting”, didn’t actually provide any insight into how the craft is changing. It was just a long moan about how terrible is that established news outlets are declining and people fearing for their jobs — which is a valid enough fear but I’m not seeing the problem being addressed.