[THE THING] EVENT : Axel Bruns October 11 at The Thing at Postmasters

[events at bbs.thing.net]

The Thing & the Institute for Distributed Creativity present:

Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production
A talk by Dr Axel Bruns
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (Australia)

The Thing at Postmasters
459 West 19th Street
New York, NY

Tuesday, October 11, 6:30pm

Recent years have seen the emergence of collaborative publishing models 
in
key news Websites ranging from the worldwide Indymedia network to the
massively successful technology news site Slashdot and further to the
multitude of Weblogs. Such sites have been instrumental in debunking
political misinformation and providing first-hand coverage of unfolding
events from 9/11 to Hurricane Katrina, but also provide an important
corrective to the mainstream news media in their everyday coverage of
current events.

Building on collaborative approaches borrowed from the open source 
software
development community, their participants are gatewatching the news:
filtering through the reports of a myriad of news sources, collating the
news and adding their own commentary and analysis. In the process they
develop a style of dialogic and deliberative journalism which provides a
credible alternative to gatekeeping and other traditional journalistic
models of reporting and has enabled millions of users around the world 
to
participate in the online news publishing process.

Bio:

Dr Axel Bruns
Creative Industries Faculty
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia
a.bruns at qut.edu.au
http://snurb.info/

Axel is currently researcher-in-residence at the Institute for 
Distributed
Creativity. He teaches and conducts research about online publishing,
electronic creative writing, online communities and popular music in the
Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in
Brisbane, Australia. He is the author of Gatewatching: Collaborative 
Online
News Production (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), and a founding editor of 
the
online academic publications M/C * Media and Culture
(http://www.media-culture.org.au/) and dotlit: The Online Journal of
Creative Writing (http://www.dotlit.qut.edu.au/).

He is currently preparing Uses of Blogs (with Joanne Jacobs), an edited
collection of scholarly work examining the range of current approaches 
to
blogging (forthcoming from Peter Lang in 2006). More information about 
this
book and other research projects and publications can be found in his 
blog
at http://snurb.info/.

The Thing
http://post.thing.net/

The Institute for Distributed Creativity
http://distributedcreativity.org/