Fellow Australian Trevor Cook has written a great post on the state of ‘new media’ including blogging and podcasting in Australia. He comments that whilst there is incredible growth in the medium of blogging that Australia is really yet to see bloggers rise in prominence as has happened else where.
‘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.’
This is something I’ve been pondering a bit recently. A couple of Australian newspapers have tinkered with ‘blog of the week’ type columns in their technology sections (usually featuring overseas blogs) but outside of this I’m yet to really see blogging mentioned in any real depth in the main stream media here. There is a growing number of the general public who seem to have heard of blogs (I notice a lot of people have some vague idea of what they are) but overall there is little prominence of blogging or individual bloggers despite the numbers of quality Aussie bloggers going around.
This is something I’d like to see change and am keen to work on being a part of – however I wonder what can be done. There are only so many contacts that we as bloggers can attempt to make with reporters – perhaps we need to engage a PR expert like Tony to get blogging’s profile up here.
Read Trevor’s article at Trevor Cook describes the new media, including blogging and podcasting, now available to consumers
