• Margaret Simons
• The Content Makers, Crikey

Read the full text

ABC Mark Scott - Media140 Sydney, Neerav Bhatt / flickr

09 November 2009Margaret Simons' account of some of the highlights and lowlights of the first day of Media 140 are outlined in The Content Makers.

The low lights came from conceptual confusions, it seemed to me. Namely the several highly respected and competent journalists who, quite apart from being clearly terrified by the arrival of the audience in the news making process, also can’t tell the difference between:

A platform, and a process. Twitter, which is undoubtedly in my mind the greatest single disruption to traditional news processes so far this decade, is a platform. It is not a journalistic process. Just as people can have inane or boring telephone conversations, so too they can have silly Tweets. But to say, as so many persist in saying, that bloggers don’t check facts, or that Twitter is unreliable, is as silly as saying that telephone conversations are unreliable. The fact is that some are, and some aren’t. When a blogger checks facts or reports with care and integrity, then they are engaged in a journalistic process. When a journalist regurgitates a media release, distorts or miquotes, they are not engaged in such a process.Journalism is the process. Many people can do it in many different places and using many different platforms. Twitter (and facebook, and blogs) are platforms.

Objectivity and integrity. As I said in my presentation yesterday, the word objectivity is frequently deployed in these debates, but rarely examined. What do we mean by it?

Read the full article

And do view this excellent image by Neerav Bhatt of Mark Scott's presentation at Media 140 in full on flickr here>