As some Croakey readers may know, I’ve been involved in helping to establish the Public Interest Journalism Foundation, based at the Institute for Social Research at Swinburne University in Melbourne.
The PIJ Foundation, which is chaired by my Crikey and blogging colleague Margaret Simons, aims to promote and enable innovation in public interest journalism.
We are about to launch two of our first projects, and I hope Croakey readers may be interested in contributing to them.
More details follow below, together with some suggestions for how you might like to engage.
1. The New News Conference, to be held as part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, September 2 and 3.
This conference aims to bring together media innovators and those with a concern for public interest journalism, as well as to encourage community engagement in new media opportunities and to increase digital literacy.
According to the official blurb: “This conference will be about collaboration and creation, and about building new and creative relationships between newsmakers and audiences. This is an optimistic conference. It will go beyond tired old debates about bloggers versus journalists to embrace and bring together all those who are using new technologies to communicate and access news.”
The conference will include keynote discussions and panel sessions – both free and ticketed events – and will be open to professional journalists and the general public. It will also include an Expo space in which organisations and individuals using new media to advance journalism are welcome to exhibit their work. There will also be a series of workshops aimed at teaching digital skills to industry practitioners and the general public.
Everyone is welcome. The conference is open to professionals, students, citizen content makers and the general community. The Melbourne Writers Festival and PIJ would like to acknowledge the support of the Victorian Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development.
Are there any Croakey readers interested in contributing to the conference program? Or do you have some suggestions for who should be on the bill? If so, please contact me asap. We’re particularly keen to hear from those involved in Indigenous media innovation.
2. YouCommNews
This will be a website enabling members of the community and journalists to pitch stories they would like investigated. These may be print articles, photographic, broadcast or multimedia investigations.
If the pitch meets the PIJ Foundation’s criteria (around issues such as there being some public interest issue at stake), the Foundation will allocate the story to a journalist or team of journalists. The story pitch will be placed on the website and members of the public will be able to make pledges to help fund the story.
Publisher partners of the Foundation – which we expect will include a range of mainstream and specialist publishers – will be able to buy rights to publish completed stories. Or we will publish the story on open access on the website. (The website is based on the Spot Us project in the US).
We plan to formally launch this initiative at the New News Conference, and in the meantime want to gather some strong story pitches and to hear from potential publishing partners and journalists interested in registering with the site.
You or your organisation could participate by:
• putting together story pitches. What are some important stories you would like to see investigated? (Of course, Croakey is keen to see a healthy representation of health-related story pitches…)
• registering as a publisher partner with the website. Do you publish a journal, magazine, website or some other publication that may want to run PIJ Foundation stories?
• registering as a journalist with the website
• encouraging your networks to help fund specific story pitches on the website.
I hope that Croakey readers will flood us with suggestions for health stories deserving investigation. They may be about hyperlocal issues or of national or international significance. We are particularly interested in the sorts of stories or issues that might struggle to gain an airing in the mainstream media.
I will keep you posted on further developments. And look forward to hearing from you (either at the website or by email, which you can find at my website.)
Melissa Sweet: “This conference aims to bring together media innovators and those with a concern for public interest journalism, as well as to encourage community engagement in new media opportunities and to increase digital literacy”! “Are there any Croakey readers interested in contributing to the conference program”?
• Absolutely, yet for starters the Public Interest Journalism Foundation ought to tackle the lingered issue of the thought police impaired internet communication (alike the mainstream media role). Courtesy of the Rudd govt enforced internet filter in the public libraries as a prototype to the multi-billion dollars broadband conquest at the colossal cost to the fleeced taxpayers who awaited in vain for the vital healthcare delivery!
Clearly, “the individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” [Nietzsche]. Particularly, that success is one step from defeat: “If we really want to make things better I suggest we introduce a law that makes it an offence for politicians to lie” [Julian Burnside QC]. Indicting thus silver-tongued jellyback spiteful pollies, whose local electorate offices to set up for change the vital umbilical cord interface between the electorate and periodically chosen MP. Who must adhere to the representative democracy ethos.
Where just as vital on MP would be to serve the people, and not merely pleasing the insatiable powerbrokers. While applying vested powers along the democracy principles in relation to the real economy generation, creation of the moral law and order within the social responsibility to the effectively informed people. Solidly set on the equal citizens’ rights to the basic subsistence, healthcare, housing, education, unimpeded access to the internet and direct employment engagement venues with the real employers (instead of sustaining body-hire conglomerate).
Thus inevitably, local electorate offices to function as a vital communication exchange bureau for the active citizens participation. Towards the meaningful contribution via our local parliamentarian’s domain. With an ultimate goal on mind for the direct, participatory democracy by the people and for the people. Instrumental in the civil society evolution, onset in fundamental eradication all the sponging parasites who painstakingly feathered cuckoo nests in the ivory towers. Conditioned to serve the insatiable powerbrokers while forging this marvellous continent (if not for its archaic, vast wastage industries) into oblivion.
One may be excused for having dejected perception at times of being here just an alien visitor from some distant planet, who having to face a user pay consequences. Absolutely contemptuous to the principled citizens in a nation where successive generations of the youngsters grew and proceeded into adulthood without having a single elevated role-model. Someone to look up to, towards the impending achievements to come! Instead many forsaken, disenfranchised citizens, faced the utmost uncertain future to come.
As the countless blacklisted survived on the unemployable’s heap. Others lingered in the infinitive queues, just to access fundamental healthcare. Due to the absence Charter of Rights & Obligations in Australia. Where resolute dissidents made a stance to survive and at last to proceed with life in this so paradoxically awesome land of plenty, we call it home.