Chapter 4
Webdiary: Australia's Pioneering Experiment in Audience Engagement
In the early 2000s, Fairfax journalist Margo Kingston created something revolutionary-Australia's first political blog that opened genuine dialogue between journalists and readers. Webdiary became a battleground where journalism's traditional power structures confronted audience participation head-on.
Kingston's approach was radically transparent. She shared with readers which questions journalists were asking officials, published readers' opinions about controversial topics, and created a genuine community around political discussion. This violated unspoken professional norms and generated significant resistance from media management.
The conflict reached its peak during the Peter Reith telecard affair, where Kingston "went in hard" against a minister whose son had run up $50,000 in unauthorized charges on a parliamentary phone account. Kingston's transparency-sharing with readers which questions journalists were asking officials-violated unspoken professional norms.
Management pressure mounted as Kingston faced resistance from multiple fronts: Fairfax executives received complaints from Prime Minister Howard's office; pieces about the Sydney Peace Prize controversy were temporarily pulled after complaints; and even ABC management forced Phillip Adams to drop Kingston's regular segment. Despite generating significant readership and media attention, Kingston's health deteriorated while comment moderation became increasingly unmanageable.
By 2005, Fairfax proposed changes that would strip Webdiary of its interactive essence-eliminating Kingston's ethics code, reader contributions, and requiring editorial oversight of her posts. When an editor attempted to modify her content, Kingston "pulled the pin and went indy."
Stephen Hutcheon later acknowledged Webdiary as "trailblazing" in crowdsourcing and community engagement, noting that "Big Media still thought it was bullet-proof from digital disruption." Kingston was fifteen years ahead of her peers, a gatekeeper who saw her job as letting ordinary citizens into the national conversation rather than locking them out-a role no Australian mainstream journalist has embraced to the same extent since.
Chapter 5
Blogging as Democratic Citizenship, Not Journalism
In December 2001, I moved with my family to the United States, arriving in a nation still reeling from the September 11 attacks. Washington DC was awash with aggressive patriotic displays-American flags adorned homes and vehicles, while inflammatory bumper stickers and posters targeting Muslims revealed a nation rallying behind President Bush, who enjoyed stellar approval ratings after committing troops to Afghanistan.
The facade of American unity quickly revealed cracks. A neighbor named Katherine visited with wine and surprisingly apologized for President Bush, completely contradicting the media narrative of unanimous support. When I placed a small Australian flag beneath the American one at our rented house, an unexpected phenomenon occurred-neighbors throughout the community began displaying their own national flags alongside American ones. Spanish, Greek, Italian, British, and even Icelandic flags emerged, revealing the complex diversity beneath the apparent uniformity.
Before leaving Australia, I'd completed my PhD thesis examining the disconnect between policy experts and ordinary citizens in democratic societies. I'd observed how the public was increasingly reduced to statistical data points between elections, expected to "shut up and leave everything to our betters." Elite circles, including media, often viewed ordinary citizens as too ignorant to participate meaningfully in public debate.
My thesis had theorized the need for forums where experts and citizens could discuss democratic matters as equals. Then I discovered blogs-my academic theory suddenly materialized in digital form. Blogs created genuine excitement among people worldwide who found themselves transformed from passive audience members into active contributors.
I launched The Road to Surfdom in May 2002 using the free blogger.com platform. I never imagined it would last long or attract readers beyond a few friends, and I certainly didn't consider what I was doing to be journalism. We weren't setting ourselves up against professional journalism but attempting to participate in discussions where mainstream media set the agenda. To our surprise, we found a substantial audience.
Chapter 6
Why Blogs Succeeded Where Journalism Failed
The Iraq War revealed mainstream media's fundamental weaknesses. Major outlets like The New York Times fell for false intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, while the entire Murdoch empire uniformly supported the invasion. The problem wasn't just political bias but institutional identification with power-journalists befriending rather than scrutinizing those in authority.
Blogs succeeded where journalism failed because we weren't constrained by access relationships. We could analyze public documents, read expert opinions, and scrutinize official statements without fear of being "cut off" by sources. We spent hours on government websites comparing statements against facts, offering alternative interpretations that mainstream journalists couldn't risk making.
The fundamental difference between bloggers and journalists was that we were readers while they were callers. Many early influential bloggers came from academic backgrounds where "looking things up" was standard practice, while journalists were trained to "use the phone" and maintain contact lists.
This wasn't merely a stylistic difference. Journalists are institutionally licensed to confront people in ways ordinary citizens aren't-it's much easier to get comments as "Tim Dunlop from News Limited" than "Tim Dunlop, the guy with a blog." So we adapted by becoming expert readers, using Google to access vast reserves of information, synthesizing what we found into posts that could be updated as new information emerged.
Our approach had distinct advantages: transparency, flexibility, and responsiveness. We didn't bury corrections on page 18 weeks later; we integrated them directly into our posts. We linked to opposing viewpoints. As Felix Salmon observed, mainstream journalists still haven't learned to "read" properly-to find, collate, curate and link to valuable material across the web.
We stumbled onto a communication method as valid as traditional reporting, perhaps sometimes better. The breakthrough wasn't just finding alternative information sources but how we presented that information-talking with readers rather than at them. We stepped outside top-down news dissemination and made it radically amateur, subjecting journalists to the same scrutiny they applied to others.
Chapter 7
From Amateur Passion to Professional Reality
By 2005, bloggers faced a sobering reality: despite exposing structural weaknesses in commercial media and government deception, our passionate discussions had little practical impact. Wars continued, Bush won a second term, as did Howard and Blair. Power remained unmoved by blogging's rise. The gap between online influence and real-world change became increasingly apparent, even as blog readership grew exponentially. Yet something fundamental had shifted in the media-audience relationship - readers were no longer passive consumers but active participants in news discourse.
The US blogosphere professionalized largely because its market could support the transition. The breakthrough came with Blogads, launched in 2002, which aggregated individual blogs into a single market attractive to advertisers. This innovation solved the key problem of scale - while individual blogs might have loyal but modest followings, collectively they offered advertisers access to millions of engaged readers. This allowed bloggers like Duncan Black (Atrios) to quit his economics professor job to blog full-time, earning reportedly over $5,000 monthly from advertising. Daily Kos followed, generating sufficient revenue to support multiple full-time writers. This influx of money hardened the line between "big" bloggers with traffic and those participating as engaged citizens, creating a new hierarchy in what had been a relatively egalitarian space.
The transition from amateur blogging to professional media accelerated rapidly. Matthew Yglesias moved from solo blogging to The American Prospect, earning the nickname "Big Media Matt" - a term that captured both respect and mild derision from the blogging community. Other bloggers followed similar paths-Kevin Drum to Washington Monthly and Mother Jones, Ezra Klein to The American Prospect and later The Washington Post, where he built Wonkblog into a major policy platform. Some, like Andrew Sullivan, built substantial reader-supported operations, raising $715,000 in his first six months of independence through a pioneering subscription model that would later influence many independent media ventures.
Meanwhile, established journalists like Eric Alterman and James Fallows adopted blogs as their primary outlets, lending institutional credibility to the format. The Atlantic's website transformed into a network of high-profile blogs. Eventually, blogs like Talking Points Memo and The Huffington Post evolved into full media organizations employing professional journalists, with TPM winning a George Polk Award for its coverage of the U.S. Attorney firing scandal. This wasn't simply professionalization of blogging but a complete transformation of media itself-journalists blogged and bloggers practiced journalism, blurring the traditional lines between amateur and professional content creation.
Australia's experience proved markedly different, lacking both the market size and the mid-sized magazines and think tanks that facilitated US blog professionalization. Australian bloggers struggled to attract advertising-even well-thought-out group ventures with legitimate business plans failed to secure funding. While Crikey and On Line Opinion managed to establish sustainable operations, they remained exceptions rather than the rule. The Australian market's limitations meant that most bloggers continued as passionate amateurs, maintaining their sites alongside day jobs, unable to replicate the financial success of their American counterparts despite often comparable quality and influence.
Chapter 8
Crossing the Divide: My Journey into Mainstream Media
After years of independent blogging, I unexpectedly received an offer from News Limited, Australia's most conservative news organization-one I'd frequently criticized. The opportunity came through Hugh Martin, who had moved to News Limited to head their online operations. News Interactive was a small subsidiary that ran News Limited's websites but employed few journalists of its own, relying mostly on content from the company's mastheads.
When meeting Hugh in November 2005, we discussed my role with remarkable straightforwardness. He suggested I simply move my existing blog to news.com.au, but I preferred keeping Surfdom separate. The only caution came when Hugh reminded me that News Limited was "a pretty conservative organisation," implying boundaries would exist without explicitly defining them. We settled on naming my new blog "Blogocracy," perfectly capturing the democratic spirit I wanted to maintain.
One significant difference between independent blogging and mainstream media was News Limited's insistence on moderating comments before publication. While I preferred the immediacy of unmoderated comments that defined blogging culture, the company's legal concerns prevailed. This reflected the traditional media's top-down control model that Rupert Murdoch himself acknowledged-a centralized world where editors determined what readers should know.
Blogocracy launched on November 6, 2006, making me the first Australian blogger employed by mainstream media. Despite some criticism from purists who viewed me as a "sell-out," the response was largely positive. In my first post, I emphasized citizenship over journalism, positioning the blog as a space where normal people could discuss issues after journalists had gathered the facts. Starting with just 14 comments, the site quickly built a dedicated following of regular commenters.
My blogging freedom at News Limited hit its limit when I defended psephological blogger Peter Brent against The Australian's editor Chris Mitchell. After Brent revealed Mitchell had threatened to "go" him personally for criticizing the paper's political reporting, I wrote a measured post questioning this abuse of journalistic power. The post was promptly removed following an angry call from Mitchell to News Interactive. This incident perfectly illustrated the culture clash between independent blogging's bottom-up reader relationship and mainstream media's top-down hierarchical structure.
Chapter 9
The Art and Science of Comment Moderation
Moderating Blogocracy's comments section became my most rewarding yet difficult task as participation grew. The challenge wasn't just volume, but maintaining relationships with people I'd never met, responding appropriately to criticism and praise, and facilitating complex discussions about divisive issues.
I declined News Limited's offer of professional moderators despite the crushing workload of approving and responding to comments from early morning until late afternoon. Unlike Andrew Bolt who accepted company moderators, I remained committed to the independent blogosphere's ideal of conversation, wanting to personally host discussions where people could gather as equals.
I didn't mind criticism as long as it was factual and temperate, and I valued building a diverse community including conservative voices willing to challenge me. My ultimate goal was creating a space where readers could not only talk but be heard by those in power.
This approach created an unsustainable intensity-maintaining meaningful relationships with hundreds of commenters discussing deeply personal political views created genuine, intimate connections that demanded constant attention. To manage this pressure, I introduced lighter discussion topics on Wednesdays and Fridays where we discussed everything from dinner recipes to music, providing common ground between political opponents and a welcome pressure release.
I rarely disallowed comments unless they were genuinely offensive or potentially libelous. Actual banning was even rarer-I issued only a handful of temporary two-week bans and permanently banned just one person in over two years. In retrospect, I was too forgiving, believing abusive commenters could transform into valuable contributors. This undermined the community structure, creating an environment too hostile for less aggressive voices-the libertarian's dilemma where unregulated free speech actually undermines freedom for quieter community members.
Despite these shortcomings, the community became largely self-policing, with regular readers often addressing problematic behavior themselves, demonstrating how online communities can develop their own standards of conduct when given time to mature.
Chapter 10
The Media's War Against Its Audience
The term "trolling" originated in early internet communities as a specific description of deliberately provocative online behavior, often involving posting inflammatory comments to elicit emotional responses. However, its meaning has undergone a significant transformation in mainstream media discourse, where it now serves as an umbrella term for any online behavior that journalists or public figures find objectionable. This semantic shift reveals a deeper power dynamic between traditional media gatekeepers and their increasingly vocal audience.
In September 2012, Sydney's Telegraph launched an aggressive anti-trolling campaign, sparked by online attacks targeting media personalities, most notably television host Charlotte Dawson. The campaign's framing was telling: it consistently portrayed media professionals, celebrities, and politicians as victims while casting ordinary social media users as potential perpetrators. Notably, the campaign focused almost exclusively on Twitter, conveniently ignoring similar or worse behavior in the comments sections of News Limited's own digital platforms, where moderation was minimal and toxic comments flourished.
The Telegraph's editorial stance exposed the campaign's underlying motivations - a territorial dispute between established media institutions and emerging social media platforms. While traditional media outlets vigorously defended their own freedom of expression, they expressed growing alarm at their audience's "ever-expanding opportunities" to challenge, fact-check, and critique their work in real-time. This hypocrisy became particularly evident in the behavior of prominent mainstream commentators like Piers Akerman and Miranda Devine, who regularly engaged in provocative rhetoric and personal attacks that would be condemned as trolling if coming from anonymous Twitter users.
Academic Jason Wilson's analysis frames these anti-trolling campaigns within the context of historical "moral panics" - manufactured media crises that create identifiable "folk devils" threatening social order. In this case, the anonymous internet user became the folk devil, while journalists positioned themselves as defenders of civility while grappling with technological changes that threatened their traditional role as information gatekeepers. By expanding the definition of trolling to encompass virtually any form of online criticism, media organizations attempted to reassert their authority as arbiters of acceptable public discourse.
The broader debate about online civility masks a fundamental power struggle over the control of public conversation. While genuinely abusive online behavior deserves condemnation, such incidents are often weaponized to delegitimize legitimate criticism and public participation in debate. The systemic impact of misleading reporting, inflammatory opinion pieces, and coordinated media campaigns far exceeds the harm caused by individual online comments. The core issue isn't anonymous posting or social media behavior, but rather the democratization of public discourse and the resulting tension as previously voiceless citizens gain platforms to challenge established media narratives.
Chapter 11
The Path Forward: Reimagining Media's Relationship with Citizens
Media organizations now possess unprecedented surveillance capabilities, tracking exactly what readers consume and how they engage with content. Yet despite this wealth of data, many legacy media outlets still struggle to survive. This paradox stems from how the political class interprets audience data-concluding that ordinary people are disengaged from politics, then creating content that reinforces this assumption in a vicious cycle.
Media organizations often misinterpret audience data, assuming viewers' disinterest in politics rather than considering their presentation might be the problem. Despite claims that people only want sensationalism, research contradicts the "echo chamber" theory of social media. Studies show internet users are actually more exposed to diverse political opinions than non-users.
The fundamental issue isn't that Australians are disinterested in news (over 80% regularly consume it), but that they're disengaged from how politics is conducted and reported, creating a vicious cycle where inadequate coverage leads politicians to behave in ways that further diminish public interest.
For democracy to function properly, ordinary citizens must have meaningful ways to participate in public discussions. We can't dismiss people as "disengaged" without examining how media itself fails to engage them. The technocratic approach that leaves decisions to experts or demands expertise before participation is fundamentally flawed-while experts should advise on methods, outcomes themselves are for citizens to decide.
Democracies need mainstream media more than citizen journalists, but that mainstream media desperately needs to change. Beyond simply adopting new technologies, they must fundamentally reimagine their understanding of what constitutes news, how it's gathered, and how it's presented-while preserving the skills that allow them to function as a fourth estate.
The key is better audience engagement: journalists and editors must respect their audiences, listen to them and learn from them before writing stories, not just count clicks afterward. It's both radical and mundane-a return to the fundamental principle that journalism exists to serve citizens rather than treat them as products to be sold to advertisers.
