Monday, June 1, 2009

ABC Regional Hubs and Hyper-Local Citizen Journalism

Its not often that I find myself in agreement with columnists in The Australian, but Mark Day's analysis of the Federal Government's decision to support the ABC in developing online regional hubs is to me pretty valid. The decision has been criticized by regional media interests such as APN, Prime Television and Rural Press (owned by Fairfax Media) but, as Day notes in relation to hyper-local online media hubs, "Where have the APN and Rural Press people been these past 15 years?".

The decision is consistent with recommendations made by Stuart Cunningham, Axel Bruns, Jason Wilson and myself to the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy's Review of National Broadcasting in the latter part of last year. It points to the affordances of new digital media technologies in re-scaling the mandate of public broadcasters to the local and regional and not simply the national, while also opening up new opportunities for including citizens as media participants in ways that Web 2.0 technologies allow.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

HI terry
Long time no see. very interesting development... and gasp.. i think i agree too!

Terry Flew said...

The ABC's role becomes particularly interesting if Murdoch and others are thinking about user-pays online news.

antipodes said...

As the ABC MD has said often enough: The times suit public broadcasters... And congratulations to you & your colleagues on your submission to the PB Review: It's difficult not to believe that more than a little of it informed the broadband hubs project and the general views expressed by the minister in his response to public submissions.