Club Troppo

I don’t imagine we’ll be running Best Blog Posts this year.  Certainly I won’t have time to be involved.

Moreover, we never actually anointed an annual winner in any event, just an undifferentiated group of 30 or 40 of the best from the non-MSM blogosphere.

However, if I WAS selecting a single best blog post for 2011, I wouldn’t have even a moment’s hesitation.  It would be Australian Exceptionalism by Scott “Possum Comitatus” Steel published this afternoon on Crikey. I had to stop myself from running into the street and shouting  “YES!!! EXACTLY!!! WHY COULDN’T I CRYSTALLISE IT ALL SO POWERFULLY? WHY CAN’T JULIA OR (GOD FORBID) KEV?”  It’s worth reproducing a substantial extract over the fold but do yourself a favour and read the whole thing. Moreover, although it’s a paean to Australia’s general excellence, all governments since Hawke/Keating and the Australian people generally are entitled to the credit:

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Apparently some US journalism academic named Tanni Haas  has written a book called Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World’s Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success .  I’m not interested in the subject per se, because I long ago concluded that the recipe was both obvious and inherently boring: adopt a predictable, aggressively tribal stance that will attract a loyal audience wanting to have its prejudices confirmed in a way that allows members to see themselves as the true cognoscenti without ever actually needing to think, question or doubt.

I’m much more interested in the comments of a couple of “top political bloggers” about the greatly increased tribalism evident today by comparison with the early days of the political blogosphere.   Kevin Drum, for example, says:

When I started out, there was much more of a tendency to engage with the other side.  Liberals and conservatives would attack each other, but we’d also engage with each other in at least a moderately serious way.  Today, you get almost none of that.  There’s very little engagement between left and right.  And what engagement there is tends to be pure attack.  There’s no real conversation at all.  That’s a difference that I think professionalization has brought about.  The political blogosphere has become more tribal.

Tyler Cowen agrees with the observation but has a slightly different explanation:

A good point, but I blame professionalization less than Kevin does.  Maybe some of us are simply are a bit sick of each other, and the accumulated slights and misunderstandings weigh more heavily on our emotional responses than does the feeling of generosity from working together in the same “office.”  I predict that a given experienced blogger is likely to feel more sympathy for new bloggers, but on average I doubt if the new bloggers are better or more tolerant.

Which means we mostly have ourselves to blame.

As I’ve already foreshadowed, in my view it’s unquestionably true that that there’s much less “inter-tribal” communication than there was when I first started blogging around 2002.  However I’m less sure of the reasons than Drum or Cowen.  Troppo tends even now to retain a greater level of “inter-tribal” communication than most other Australian political blogs, but it’s certainly at a much lower level than it was years ago.  I must confess I don’t miss visits from the Bolt/Blair attack dogs or their extreme left equivalents, but there were also at least a few occasions when interesting conversations actually occurred.  I have always regarded the ideals of deliberative democracy championed by Habermas and others as a tad naive, but I ‘m still attracted to the notion of “agonism” (as opposed to antagonism) propounded by Mouffe and Laclau:

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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion]

I spend my working life running an online media firm – WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day – with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. You can see the whole thing at the WorkDay Media site.

We’re trying to focus the inquiry a little more on what we might gain from the Internet’s transformation of communication, and a little less on what we might lose as newspapers inevitably dwindle.

It’s fairly obvious that Australians are relying less and less on information from “the mainstream media” – that is, existing newspapers, TV and radio stations. Instead they are getting and exchanging information from a far richer variety of Internet-based sources, from email newsletters to expert blogs to government and company records – plus, of course, Club Troppo.

This seems like good news. So why are we holding a media inquiry focused on mainstream media, and particularly on the newspaper industry?

The obvious answer is that the future for Australian newspapers looks pretty ugly. Once newspapers were the gatekeepers; now they are not. They are losing advertisers and readers to a fundamentally more attractive and efficient Internet. The media analyst Roger Colman calculates that “all metropolitan newspapers in print editions will be unprofitable, definitely, by 2020″.

Many of those who fear for the future of “the mainstream media” in Australia – like academic David McKnight, or publisher Eric Beecher – are concerned about how we will reproduce the activities of big newspaper newsrooms as newspapers gradually go out of business. They believe this is a very important question.

But this focus on the media past signals a failure of imagination. Big newspaper newsrooms will not be recreated in online form. Facts, news, analysis are all going to have to come out in different ways than they have in the past.

And they will. They already are. You have to be enormously enthusiastic about the old media environment not to believe this: the new media environment, for all its faults, is far better than what it is replacing.

Media thinkers worry that online sources would never have uncovered a Watergate scandal. They’re probably wrong, in every way. Now more than ever, the truth will out. Richard Nixon’s corruption was mostly uncovered by official investigators; Woodward and Bernstein, great journalists that they were, were merely conduits. In the age of the Internet, Watergate might have evolved over weeks, not years. Just in the past year we have seen yet another new information innovation – Wikileaks – whose model suggests secrets will be harder than ever to keep in the decades ahead.

There will probably be times in the future when Australia will look back at some event, some scandal, some development in the society, and say that newspapers might have done a better job than the new information sources. But we suspect those cases will be few and far between.

New online players would already be even more numerous in traditional media areas such as politics, public policy and business if not for the presence of mainstream media, particularly newspapers, whose large online presences are hugely subsidised by their traditional businesses. This is certainly the biggest bar to the expansion of many online information ventures, including WorkDay Media.

Australia has entered an age when media can be created, transformed and transmitted far more easily than ever before. Australians who believe in the importance of an informed society should treat the 2010s as an era of huge optimism and opportunity. For there is every reason to believe that the Australian society of the next 20 years will be better informed than ever before.

Facing such a future, it makes little sense to try to impose a more restrictive regime on the dwindling existing “mainstream media”, or to subsidise its continued existence. We can improve the Press Council. We can have governments make more information available to citizens. But there is no need to choose this moment to impose either a new regulatory regime or a new protection scheme.

This is a moment to embrace the information future, not to embalm the media past.

At CDU Law Online – Colourful lawyers, police and the media (the Adam Houda wrongful arrest saga).

My blogging time over the last few days has been absorbed by creating a “social media presence” for my employer CDU Law School.  It involves not only a blog but also Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn facilities.  It’s been something of a struggle to convince the powers-that-be that it’s a good idea but we finally achieved it.  We’re even employing a consultant to teach us how to link them together to maximum benefit, given that my knowledge of Facebook, Twitter etc is fairly scanty because I’ve tended mostly to steer clear of them (apart from a desultory effort at using Twitter as the vehicle for a short-lived revival of Missing Link).

Anyway, this time a group of law academics has decided to share the load of maintaining a flow of blog posts and tweets, with admin staff moderating comment box activity.  Accordingly with a bit of luck the whole thing might be sustainable.

I will probably mostly post over at CDU Law Online for the next couple of weeks at least, with links here at Troppo.  Thus I’m drawing attention to a post I wrote today titled Catgate Unhinged.  It’s worth a read IMHO, and I’d also value any feedback readers may have on the overall site.  Feel free to post a comment too; no-one has as yet. Some of you might also be interested in subscribing to the Twitter feed which aims at abstracting a wide range of legal stories and cases each day.

After his first week of blogging back in 2002 John Quiggin observed that blogging "technology seems ideally suited for individuals and small groups, with no obvious way of scaling it up to corporate level."

Maybe he’s changed his mind. This week Quiggin suggests that The Australian makes more sense if you think of it as a right wing group blog than as a newspaper:

Looking at the Oz now, it’s easy to imagine it as a rightwing group blog that started up in the Triassic era of blogging (say 2002). Lines weren’t drawn so sharply then, so the contributors included some a bit more leftish or just less ideological than the group as a whole. Over time, some have been pushed out, and the others have been forced to demonstrate group solidarity on appropriate occasions, such as attack from the left.

By now however, a tribalist mode of groupthink has taken over the blog. Its members spend a lot of time reassuring each other that, in spite of all contrary evidence, they are right about everything. Even when they are demonstrably wrong on some particular point, they are still right in a way their opponents can never be. Conversely, no matter how bogus the argument, if it’s on the right side it has to be backed all the way.

It wasn’t always this way . Michael Stutchbury writes: "yours truly commissioned Quiggin (along with The Weekend Australian‘s Christopher Pearson) to write a column in The Australian Financial Review in the mid-1990s." As for Christopher Pearson, it’s hard to imagine him writing for the Fin now.

Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ‘The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur‘ where I suggest that blogging isn’t about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I’m attacking a straw man:

… just who is saying that blogging is intended to replace professional investigative journalism? And who says it is ‘either/or’? Can’t we have both? One would have thought we had got past this tired "pro" versus "am" debate and got to discussing what makes good journalism irrespective of how the writer is employed.

My post was born out of frustration. While I was skimming through a piece at the The Drum I read this comment by Flubber: "the task of serious investigative political journalism is being undertaken by a dedicated cohort of political bloggers, such as Grogs Gamut, Larvatus Prodeo, The Political Sword, and others." The claim was ridiculous but nobody on the thread questioned it.

Back in 2006, Andrew Norton offered a more realistic view of what popular political blogs might aspire to:

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Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur, he writes:

Most mainstream commentary about politics … is tedious, biased echochamber nonsense from pundits with no other life experience than mooching around the Canberra Press Gallery.

Alex argues that the commentary and opinion appearing in newspapers like the Age and the Australian: "is not of any higher quality than the average tertiary educated blogger."

I don’t expect we’ll ever be able to settle this question to everyone’s satisfaction, but maybe we can make a start. Here’s what we’ll do:

1. Go and find your favourite examples of opinion and commentary from an Australian newspaper or blog
2. Post the title and a link in the comments thread. If you like you can also explain why you think it’s a good piece of work.

For this exercise, let’s not get into a discussion about what’s wrong with mainstream media or start criticising particular bloggers or journalists. Let’s concentrate on trying to find the best examples of good writing.

When we’ve got a decent number of examples I’ll create a new post and comments thread so we can compare notes.

A popular writer at leading Australian political blog The Political Sword has hit back at "pedantic" criticism of her work. Responding to a series of posts at Club Troppo (an obscure political blog frequented by boring middle-aged men) Feral Skeleton writes:

Some stuffed shirts don’t even realise that their boring little blog has taken to scandal-mongering about someone who writes on another, more popular, blog just because they don’t play by their ‘rules’. How conservative these pathetic, so-called ‘radical centrist’ individuals seem to me with their tut-tutting and new, even more sensorious drivel.

Not that they are going to stop me blogging. I have been going since long before ‘Club Troppo’ came on the scene. With original, thought-provoking blogs that people enjoy reading. And I will be here long after their tendentious little, boring as bat’s pee blog has dried up and blown away due to lack of interest. Which is the way it was sputtering along until they decided to gin up interest in what I have done recently. Which increased their readership, marginally it seems to me, but just goes to prove how I am the interesting one and not them. As in, if my blogs weren’t so powerful, interesting and enjoyable, no one such as they would be taking the time to create a furore about them.

Remember when bloggers uncovered evidence that Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary Securency was using money-laundering techniques to channel suspected bribe money to a company in the Seychelles? Me neither. Journalists at the Age and the ABC broke that story. Investigative journalism takes time, persistence and hard work so it’s no surprise almost all of it is done by professional journalists. Yet I’m constantly reading comments like this:

If you didn’t know already, the task of serious investigative political journalism is being undertaken by a dedicated cohort of political bloggers, such as Grogs Gamut, Larvatus Prodeo, The Political Sword, and others. They are not paid and do it for the love of it, hence they are also not subject to the whims of a proprietor. You’ll get more analysis of policies here than in a month of Sundays in the local rags or TV stations.

There’s some great stuff on Australian blogs, but it’s hardly a replacement for the work of professional journalists. Writing in your pajamas after work might keep you out of reach of the truth-throttling tentacles of teh evil Rupert Murdoch, but it doesn’t leave much time to phone your sources, search public records or crunch numbers.

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