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Gatewatching, Gatecrashing: Futures for Tactical News Media
Dr Axel BrunsCreative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of [email protected]
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Tactical Media
‒ Traditional vision:• tactical vs. strategic• activists vs. mainstream• citizen journalists vs. industry journalists• online vs. print and broadcast
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Two Tiers of Media
‒ Herbert Gans, 1980:Central (or first-tier) media would be complemented by a second tier of pre-existing and new national media, each reporting on news to specific, fairly homogeneous audiences. … They would devote themselves primarily to reanalysing and reinterpreting news gathered by the central media – and the wire services – for their audiences, adding their own commentary and backing these up with as much original reporting, particularly to support bottom-up, representative, and service news, as would be financially feasible.
(Deciding What’s News, p. 318)
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Gatewatching
‒ Much tactical media is based on gatewatching:• watching the output gates of news publications and
other sources, in order to identify important material as it becomes available
• repurposing, recombining, recontextualising, reinterpreting mainstream news content
• discussing, debating, deliberating on the news• providing multiperspectival insight and commentary• acting as a corrective to the mainstream
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Yes, But…
‒ What happens next?• two tiers now well established• notable (but limited) effect of tactical media on the
political process in some cases• increasing interest in tactical media voices on
mainstream media side:∘ bloggers’ views as alternative to vox-pops∘ move of key pundits from tactical to mainstream media∘ mainstream attempts to systematically embrace tactical
media (BBC blogs, Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace?)
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Beyond Tactics
‒ Diversification of approaches:• emergence of tier intermediaries
∘ facilitating and moderating the engagement between both sides
∘ e.g. MediaChannel, Online Opinion
• development of commercial editor-assisted gatewatching sites∘ broad-based citizen gatewatching and open multiperspectival
deliberation plus standardised editorial/production approach∘ e.g. OhmyNews (Korea, international, Japan), Current.tv
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Beyond News Sites
‒ New modes of access:• entry through RSS feeds and aggregators (including
Google News)• diffusion of news reports beyond their site of origin –
newssharing• decline of the news brand?
‒ New modes of engagement and debate:• increased interlinkage and commentary from off-site
(links, Trackback, RSS aggregation)• still limited engagement from mainstream media,
though?
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Strategies for Tactical Media
‒ Making sure that second-tier voices are heard by and in the first tier• gatecrashing, not gatewatching
∘ e.g. MediaChannel’s “Media Access Toolkit”∘ but loses opportunity to explore different story formats∘ note the mistakes of Wikinews∘ danger of being swallowed by the mainstream?
• development of conduits which harvest citizen media content and feed it into the mainstream∘ e.g. Technorati, Current.tv, …?∘ potential for manipulation of the process – comment, link, and
Trackback spam, viral news hoaxes• establishing tactical media with commercial viability
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Beyond Tactical Media
‒ The post-Gansian mediasphere:• increasing interaction between the tiers• diversification, convergence, crossover?• commercial interest in citizen media
‒ A new era:• An end to strategies vs. tactics• A beginning of … what?
