State-of-play: Blogging and podcasting in Australia today

“Broadband is the key to the success of any of these online services”, according to Australian Record Industry Association's (ARIA) chief executive officer, Stephen Peach. ARIA tracks a decline in music sales in the past 12 months to the recent upsurge in broadband usage in Australia, which makes illegal music downloads, among other things, much easier.

Australian media, particularly print media, has also been slow to embrace blogging. Nevertheless, blogging is now seen by many news media companies around the world as a way of driving traffic to their sites and of breaking out of their traditional news cycles into more continuous flows of reportage and commentary.

There have been some experiments in Australia, particularly during the last Federal election campaign when the ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald sites hosted journalist-written blogs. But we are a long way from seeing anything like the Le Monde (Paris), IndiaTimes and Ohmynews (Seoul) experiments in this country.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the local arm of IDG media, the publisher of several IT magazine titles, is proving to be far more adventurous. It recently started a 20 minute weekly podcast called Computerworld Live based on its magazine Computerworld and its deputy managing director maintains a blog called filtered, perhaps the only blog by an Australian media executive.

The Pew Center also found that around 75 million Americans (equivalent to over a third of the number of actual voters) used the Internet in last year’s Presidential campaign. They went to the web: “to get news and information, discuss candidates debate issues, or participate directly in the political process by volunteering or giving contributions to candidates”.

So far, the basic tools of blogging are just starting to emerge in Australian politics. The ALP offers RSS feeds on its news releases and several politicians now have blogs, including Malcolm Turnbull and Andrew Bartlett.

Nevertheless, Australian bloggers have not yet generated the sort of media attention that well-known coups (Dan Rather, Trent Lott, Eason Jordan) have won for blogging in the USA. These “affairs” showed that blogging could change agendas and we are still waiting for some high profile agenda-changing from Australian online media community.

The closest Australia has come to this sort of notoriety-driven publicity for online media in Australia has come from the efforts of Stephen Mayne and his team at Crikey! This sort of approach and energy is probably essential to shake the audience out of its traditional media consumption habits.

Beyond the traditional media and political parties we have seen several new online offerings in the past 12 months.

New Matilda which has been going along for nearly 12 months has had some good writing but little audience participation so far and is not really living up to its charter to be a forum. So far New Matilda has not moved to embrace blogging or build a relationship with Australian bloggers.

The On Line Opinion journal started down the path of working with bloggers when it set up its Domain page during the last Federal election. The Domain, which provides feeds and links from about a dozen Australian political bloggers, shows the depth and breadth of Australian political blog commentary.

A more recent online entrant (launched 21 March) is the Your Democracy site which promises that “politics is not a spectator sport”. It is a Margo Kingston (SMH author of the popular Not Happy John book) inspired operation which harbours some ambitions to create a local version of the successful US moveon.org.