A Sixth Estate?
Posted Oct 11, 2004 in Politics
The Australian media hasn’t been very good at keeping government accountable, and it’s about to get worse with the new all-conservative, all-the-time Australian Senate. Cross-media ownership laws will doubtless be abolished and Murdoch will be rubbing his hands with glee at the prospect of buying up every last remaining independent traditional media outlet.
Which leads John Quiggin to speculate about the role of new media, and, specifically, blogs, in this brave new deregulated world
The other big question is technology. Would it be possible to put together something readable as an online newspaper, using blog software as the basis rather than the more elaborate content management software used by the Internet versions of mainstream papers? [...]
I would say yes. Blog-style CMSes are evolving rapidly, but already are substantially better than most of the horrendous websites developed for traditional newspapers.
Furthermore, I think it’s going to be a matter of extreme urgency that designers, journalists, and technologists begin to collaborate, to develop a more effective response to the shrinking and lessening of our media.
Nick Caldwell
perhaps it’s fate that the media no longer does its job, but at the same time self-publication has never been so easy/prevalent.
the next issue will be credibility – hey, i read it on the net…
Traditional media coasts on trust; trust that it earned years and years ago. Trust systems online are still under development.