A rewrite of an earlier post from way back when
I'd like to be involved in building a school for media makers; irrational ones who insanely believe they can make a difference.
To some extent they would be journalists, but I feel that's a redundant albeit necessary legacy term we're stuck with for a while.
Journalists ~ writing for a journal.. seems rather dated, just as we no longer rely exclusively on teleporting pictures - as in television.
Media makers are platform agnostic, they deliver to the journal, the TV, online, and all manner of sub constituents.
The advert would read: Only those with an absurdely irrational passion, who believe they can affect change need apply. Your purpose is to inform and interact. Anything goes. A petri dish of ideas which we'll use to push synchronous dialogue. Communities speaking to communities, countries speaking to countries, world speaking to worlds.
See told you it was cookie.
In the course of their growth, we would foolishly make them privy (electronically or otherwise) to that we feel uncomfortable, even shy away from reporting; poverty, abuse in families, racism, death, murder - all the while pushing them, testing to see where there is a higher sense of ethics that we could develop.
A fatally wounded coalition soldier, would you show the close up picture?
No?
Ok, does that need to be applied above the board?
If you've never seen death, strife, injustice at play, does that make you a lesser journalist?
Do you need to experience pain to understand pain? "Act my dear boy, act" the late lawrence Olivier told his co-actor Dustin Hoffman in the Running Man.
But there's no doubt, Walter Cronkite and many other journalists before and since have had their senses smacked when in Cronkite's case he returned from Vietnam.
We would also want to re-evaluate our relationship with the story. As a journalists we tell hundreds of stories.
Some stick, some don't some indeed are mediocre.
The Uptake.org's townhall weekend debate highlights more than any other event I have seen the schism between mainstreet journalism and grassroot, or as one mainstream producer claimed: "the far left".
It was journalist ambushing journalist: heaven's what's going on?
I asked Scott Rensberger - a 32 awards winning journalist, photographer, and possibly the first contemporary video journalist with a 20 year track record, what his favourite stories were.
Not supprisingly, he had many, and they were strewn across a wide geographical plate. There's something in that.
Bono and Geldoff ludicriously believed they could make a difference with music being a vehicle for change and change agents.
Financiers deluded themeselves many years back with The Marshall Plan and how we might rebuild a crippled dejected democracy and Europe.
Al Gore, we thought must have been barking mad when earlier in his environmental career he preached the mantra of global doom.
Of course I'm not any of the above, but there is an irrationality about how the media works.
It's unfathomable but every story they publish will have a banking purpose.
The net does that now with linking. So if I said this in 1994 I'd be even more deluded.
But our feat is to redefine the database for news and its agenda of hit and misses. I onced asked a delegate at one of my talks how many times she checked her stocks and shares. At least once a day, she replied.
It meant something to her, I concluded. It had value. But I added, today's news: Hurricane Katrina, The Tsunami, the Virginia shootings will soon fall of the agenda of our present "custodians" of the news. It may be inportant but something of more significance has come along to shift its from its temporal location. Never mind that. Someone's now saying, there's no possible way you can keep showing the same news every day.
No I didn't say that, but how do we pick and choose our news is something to look at and should we be blaming the news hosts for their lack of our choice?
The news would not be a showcase of us; perhaps there's no helping that, but the purpose would be seek a new discourse in how we tell it.
Concludes tomorrow....
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