My return to journalism via Twitter was enabled by several readers and contributors to Webdiary, which I’m told by online media academic Axel Bruns was the world’s first Mainstream media interactive blog. I’m now committed to telling my story in journalism in a professional memoir, which will comprise part of a PhD. In A collaborative thesis by @margokingston: Stories of citizen journalism with Webdiary and @NoFibs, I launched a new No Fibs series where I hope Webdiary and No Fibs readers will tell their stories, which I will reference in my thesis. No Fibs’ chief sub-editor and arts editor Michael Burge wrote the first post in the series, Voyage to the […]
Sssshhhh, don’t tell the media, but politics is changing from the ground-up, by @ariadne_syd
March 21, 2014
Ariadne Vromen, @ariadne_syd Source: The Conversation University of Sydney 21st March 2014 Political participation in Australia will soon be about hope – and the transformation of citizenship engagement in this country. Here is why. Traditionally, Australian political participation was centred on, and supported by, the electoral system, political parties and major political organisations. Most media commentators tend to focus on the electoral system as the main way of consolidating political support and bringing about change. They assume citizens make political choices to participate and/or express themselves based on rational, self-interested, often economic, calculations. When citizens have been mobilised it has usually been done by unions, political parties and environmental organisations. These have […]
Ordinary people speaking with an extraordinary voice @MargaretOConno5 reports
December 13, 2013
By Margaret O’Connor @MargaretOConno5 13 December 2013 It’s Monday December 2 and thirty degrees. The nation’s capital is sliding into a languorous warm late afternoon. I trundle into the Parliament House car park and try, with difficulty, to find a park, because northeast Victoria has come to town. Inside the House of Representatives Chamber, the public seating area opposite is a sea of orange t-shirts worn by enthusiastic Indi citizens, the ones who showed us a thing or two about ordinary people claiming back influence and control over Australian politics at the September federal election. Down below, newly-elected Clive Palmer MP arrives and sits next to Cathy McGowan MP, the […]
The intellectual grunt behind @Indigocathy Indi victory: @sarah_capper report
September 20, 2013
[clear] By Sarah Capper Sheila’s editor 20 September 2013 When Jeff Kennett lost the “unlosable” Victorian election in 1999, the Victorian Women’s Trust’s Mary Crooks wasn’t overly surprised. In the years leading up the state poll, in her new role as Executive Director of the VWT, Crooks designed and led the ‘Purple Sage Project’ – which involved a community ‘kitchen table’ dialogue process with some 6000 people across the state. During this time, over 600 female and male group leaders (76% were women, all of whom had been taken through briefing sessions, many in country Victoria), met in their own groups of up to ten people. These individual groups met on […]
As a fact-checker, the facts are the story: @MediaActive reports
August 19, 2013
By Peter Clarke 19 August 2013 Half-way through the second week of the 2013 federal election campaign, the ABC’s vaunted fact-checking unit finally went live – on-air and online. You would be forgiven for asking ‘why not earlier?’ It’s a fair question. The other two principal Australian based fact-checking outfits, Politifact Australia and the election fact check unit at The Conversation have been displaying their wares and vigorously marking out their territory during the election so far as the ABC’s unit, admittedly a much larger and richer set-up, worked through the minutiae of sorting out their in-house infrastructure and the details of the approach to their mission. This has included very practical […]
Michelle Grattan’s best work is yet to come
February 9, 2013
By Margo Kingston February 9, 2013 Michelle Grattan. I’ve loved her and hated her over the years. One invariably has a complicated relationship with a great person. Soon after the 1993 election, under pressure from then editor of The Age Alan Kohler to step back from day-to-day journalism, she left her spiritual home to become the first female editor of a metropolitan newspaper, The Canberra Times. Its owner Kerry Stokes made her promises he failed to keep, and two years later she resigned rather than accept a huge payout to leave quietly. I was one of her journos at The Age Canberra Bureau when she took that job, and was pissed off with her for […]
