I wrote a book chapter which was published last year in the collection Australian Journalism Today that talked about journalism, digital media, and privacy. I quote from the draft here; this concluding section on “Journalism as a defender of privacy” seems relevant in the light of The Guardian’s outstanding work on the NSA scandal: Prominent …

Just a late arvo quickie on Crikey publisher Eric Beecher’s red hot go at The Drum, which the Australian featured prominently in its media section today. Key paragraph from Lara Sinclair’s story: “As a huge supporter of the ABC, I have been somewhat shocked at (the ABC’s) decision to create a website (The Drum) that …

I’ve been doing a fair bit of reading in preparation for a long essay on you know what. A couple of quotes I thought I’d share by way of a post this week. The first is from James W. Carey’s wonderful essay. “American journalism on, before and after September 11?, in the 2002 collection Journalism …

I am happy and sad this week as journalist Jennifer Bennett moves on from Sydney local paper the Wentworth Courier to the Campus Review. Happy because she’s a friend with a new gig and she’ll now be employed reporting on my sector. Sad because it brings to an end one of my favourite examples of …

(I’ve been asked to speak about social media and academic careers to the Pre-Fix event at the CSAA conference. In the post that follows I’ve chosen to speak almost exclusively about Twitter, for various reasons, not least I think because my presence on Twitter is the reason the organisers asked me. But in comments and …

I have just come to the end of my field work for the incivility project I mentioned in the last post. This research has been self-funded – that is, I received no money from outside sources, and I paid all of the project’s expenses with my own salary. It hasn’t been desk research, either. I’ve …

Pleading/lazyweb post – does anyone know where to sign up for the Australian Newspaper History Group email newsletter? All the emails I can find by Googling bounce back. I’d be most grateful if someone could let me know.

Caroline Overington today wrote on rumours that Meanjin will be going online only (She’s agreeing with Peter Craven’s view that if Meanjin goes online only it will “cease effectively to exist”): Craven doesn’t mean that it won’t find an audience, and will sink like a stone in the swamp that is the web – although …

This might seem like wisdom after the event. But I’ve actually been mulling over these thoughts on The Global Mail for a while. My reluctance to criticise the site until now, after it has lost its inaugural editor, might have had something with the hostile reception the site got on its first day. There were …

For at least the past year and a half, I’ve been thinking hard about the relationship between political incivility and digital communication networks. (That’s partly what led me into the collaborative journal special issue on trolling). It’s hard to wade into this area without taking one of a few fairly predictable normative positions – where, …