Mobile Journalism Futurism. Where do we go from here?

It absolutely blew them away. As the man who would be President of the United States of America made his way through a throng of people towards the stage, mainstream media (MSM) faced a searing problem they did not know.

They waited outside, cameras fixed to their tripod, but when John F. Kennedy started to walk through his adulators no one could follow him, except one person. Albert Maysles. Maysles was part of the new Cinéma vérité band of brothers, who were revolutionising filmmaking and what it meant to be mobile, swift, immersive, intimate and creative.  

Whatever you read about in mobile phone storytelling today can’t be told without these guys, and whatever you think you’re doing new in film making language in mobile, forget it, it’s already been done. Countless filmmakers like Ridley Scott were influenced by, particularly, Robert Drew, the father of Cinéma vérité.

Problem is we have short memories. The 60s might as well be a time tunnel, and even when we do know, we choose intentionally to ignore, otherwise we can’t make that claim of being the first, in say mobile, or immersive, or intimate journalism.

Robert Drew, his camera friend Albert Maysles, D.A Pennebaker and Robert Leacock changed the world in the 1960s. There’s a fine BBC film which backs this up too. I’m a philosopher, journalist, entrepreneur and educator and whilst undertaking my doctorate exploring the history, cognitivism and psychology of film through journalism, cinema, photography and video, I made it my point to track down these 60s heroes and try and understand through a new lens of multimedia, mobile and videojournalism what we might be missing today, and how we might benefit from their deep wisdom.

At the point that Maysles speaking at the Sheffield doc festival held his camera aloft, snugly tucking himself into Kennedy’s slip stream, in one unbroken 20 plus second shot, he nails it (see video below).

Soon after, in a hall of cheering fans, the shot fixates on the next @fotus’ hands fidgeting. Perfect. How could anyone wish for anything more? The explicit and the allegorical diametrically morphed into one sequence.

Like a 12-pound new born baby, mobile journalism had arrived with aplomb.

This is Primary (1960) and this is my interview with Robert Drew, which I played at Apple store in London. Primary is part of the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress.

History can’t be erased. ‘Mobile’, ‘intimate’, ‘immersive’, ‘cinematic’ — scratch the surface of film knowledge and authors such as: P.J. O’Connell, Peter Wintonick, Jill Drew, and Brian Winston lay out the case. We’ve been here before. ‘I don’t think much has changed since the 1960s in styles say Professor Winston, an Emmy winner and prodigious author of books. ‘…but I could be wrong’, he adds hesitantly.

Recently in a room of avid filmmakers wanting to learn the art of 21st century journalism on a mobile, we put on an experiment and hands-on practice to test various recently claimed theories. I show the delegates a 2 min of six videos and ask if they could categorically pick out the films that were shot on mobile. I’ve listed the videos and links at the end of this post.

Some get one or two, but the consensus is a degree of uncertainty. Thus far, I make the assumption, there is no universal or general lingua franca that the mobile phone, as a convenient camera, has spawned. However, there are pockets of cleverness, born of the use of using a small camera, which distinctly shows up. In a granular deconstruction of Philip Bromwell’s film by delegates, one picks out the coffee bean shot at 1.23. Bromwell places his camera in a pot, with Elvis, his subject, pouring coffee beans on top. Few cameras e.g. Go Pro Sony W800, could capture the same aesthetic.

They also pick out an aesthetic quality. Bromwell’s use of what in the business is known as extreme close up. In 1928 Carl Theodor Dreyer’ s Joan of Arcpublicly got there first. But perhaps by using the wide shot sparingly and more close ups we could be moving into a new framing ontology. And for trainers swearing by the mobile phone’s exclusive intimacy. Er, caution! In Salesman, a hard hitting seminal doc about Bible salesman in the US, by David and Albery Maysles there are several scenes that will have you likely describe as intimate. As the late Roger Ebert expressed:

The newer technology dovetailed with Direct Cinema’s philosophy of caring more about intimacy and immediacy than classical storytelling and slickness.

The verdict? Mobile phone journalism today as a movement that attempts to furrow an indelible stylistic path, different from predecessors, is still wide open — still in its infancy. In Moscow, working alongside Oksana, the Lynda.com of the region, she uses her mobile attached to a selfie stick to invade personal spaces, where the presence of the filmmaker would make things awkward. The camera is thrown around as the selfie stick gives rise to a crane-like effect.

How an innocent small piece of tech could perform near the thresh hold of a professional cameras put us all in awe — all of which make today’s mobile journalism a viable, low cost option to filmmaking. That is its USP. Editing, post production, sharing to social media is something Robert Drew and friends could not do. There’s an economic imperative, but it mustn’t be confused with an excellence in film language. There is a reason why given a larger budget award winning mobile filmmakers opt for different equipment like the Arri or Red.

All this is not to say journalism using a mobile phone has had little to offer. What has been marvellous has been its equivalence — it‘s ’like having an army swiss knife to crack open a high security building. The true frontier often ignored is the skill set of the trainer or journalist. It’s a philosophy of filmmaking that enables one of the world’s most respected filmmakers Steven Soderbergh to produce a film on mobile called Unsane.

And here what we should be studying above all in reaching new audiences is narratives which get to the psyche of audiences. This ladies and gentlemen is Cinema and if you’re interested I invite you to read this article, The Information Illusion, I posted not long ago.

These films below, for a university, hotel and a corporate event in Jaipur were shot on mobiles.

Shot on mobile below

• 1 Base Culture Research — shot on iPhone with archive from beta etc. Shot by David Dunkley Gyimah https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0l6nGgjR3is
• 2. Mobile Film Festival 2017 — Trailer shot using a mobile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-2CCDF42A8
• 3. The Time Fixer (3 min. version for MFF2012) by Conrad Mess. Shot on mobile. https://vimeo.com/66014759
• 4. The King of Coffee from Philip Bromwell. Shot on mobile. https://vimeo.com/95273884
• 5. Crisis in Darfur Expands: Testimonials from Travis Fox. Not shot on mobile.
• 6. People & Power — Syria: Songs of Defiance Al Jazeera English Shot on Mobile. First major documentary by a broadcaster shot exclusively on mobile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnvPXspjLtU
• Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is part of the disLAB, a multidisciplinary course on innovation, storytelling and critical research. You can find more about the course from this below promo shot on a mobile and here

Viewmagazine.tv's David Dunkley Gyimah laments the lack of digital thinking to analogue problems

By David Dunkley Gyimah connect here with him. David has worked for some of the world's leading news outfits. He is a chair of the jury panel for the Royal Television Society Awards, the UK equivalent of the EMMYS. 

I'm planning on going back to Ghana at some point. It's where I was brought up in secondary school.

It's also an area, which is flourishing with new ideas and opportunities. Many of my friends whom I shared time with growing up have either gone back or are planning to do so.

Many of them have made an impact and for some it’s gone disastrously wrong. In the latter case it's for all sorts of reason, but there is a convention that I wish to share that helps us understand one of the main reasons, which is closer to your home. 

As a lecturer, I’m intrigued by three areas of making sense out of things.

1. common sense
2. learned sense
3. and deconstructed sense.

By common sense, I mean what we use to complete tasks by some basic common knowledge. How you email, how you like a friend's page on Facebook. You're almost expected to know, even though at some point you had to learn the process.

Try this exercise! In a room full of secondary school students, ask whose done anyone of those and you get a flurry of hands going up. 

Learned sense, yes it’s not a word per se, but it should be, is something you’ve had to learn. You actively engage it. Do you Pinterest, data scraping, create cinema? All of the sudden only a few hands are left in the air.

You top up your common sense, which is more cognitive (invisible learning) by actively learning. 

For instance everyone can read and comment on a film, but few people know how to critique a film based on implicit or symptomatic readings. So, John Lewis' cuddly animation of a paternal bear is not about Walt Disney type animation,  but a clever attempt by one of the UK's leading consumer's to let you associate nostalgia and sweetness with their brand.

i

How common sense is defunct
Thankfully, the common sense way of doing things in the media, the analogue approach is still widespread. We might live in a digital world, but even if you were Sherlock Holmes you'd be hard pressed to find digital's DNA way of doing things after a full day's snooping. 

Digital may purport to bring us closer, contract the world through eroding borders, but in making us digital penpals what are we doing with it that signals a change in cognitivism.

Twitter lets me know what my friends are doing and what did I do with that info? A digitised world, without a digital revolution.

Here’s the rub, if you are at college and the person delivering knowledge comes from the common sense, analogue world, then you might want to think about how your future is shaping up.

Television’s continued dominance stems from this integrity of the analogue. If the media is the message, then digital turned out to be the slave master of analogue, because digital hasn’t changed the message. 

It’s quickened it, even given it wings to fly off in all directions, but a bit like putting a Ferrari shell on a mini engine, who are we fooling? It's still the model we so love and subscribe to nostalgically - just like the Lewis commercial.

The deconstructed sense interrogates common sense and what you’ve learned in an analogue world. The really innovative managers have it. Whilst other executive return from a conference and buoyed by what they’ve learned at a social network festival command their staff to implement a social policy. The justification is someone else tried it and it works.

The deconstructed ask about phenomenon and why it works. What is it that digital could do to create a new fabric of knowledge flow, to create new solutions to old problems, to reframe common sense and what we’re learning in our quasi-analogue and digital ecology.

Take the calamity from Typhoon Haiyan. Another typhoon, another human tragedy on a large scale, and our analogue response is near enough the same.  Russell Brand was right about politicians and the complicity... well it envelops media as well, you could argue.  

From a response and communication position, having read, seen, and even is cases witnessed porn-disaster - the gratuitously well-made up correspondent selling voyeurism of a hapless people, is this still the media response?  

It's much of the analogue same; this is not the media’s fault. We’ve gone digital might be akin to a flat screen television, higher fidelity, and green screen, but the social dimension, and I don’t even need to use the word “social”, is wanting.

Is the notion of reportage, which is just over 50 years old in television, so immovable that in 2013 we’ve not been able to devise an alternatives to address, in this case, human suffering?

Not our job, the analogues with common sense will say. But that’s precisely the problem. Any one who deconstructs the status quo knows there’s something wrong, but the source of their solution comes from a place, which is itself deficient. How could a digital thought process look at this recent tragedy? Here's a scenario.

A digital solution to one major problem.

Reporters get to the disaster scene with their equipment. No aid agency is present yet. Their feeds first go to a coordinated response of the Disaster Relief Agency. Survivors on the ground are handed 'pennys'. These are prototype transmitters and cameras. V. Cheap. They connect to a crowd map similar to Ushahidi, which combined with Touchcast [see previous posts] gives control over to viewers. Correspondents curate the info flow.



What is the Ushahidi Platform? from Ushahidi on Vimeo.

The Philipines is digitally mapped. That technology and process already exists through the military. A series of mobile - make shift outernet systems are implemented [ see apple presentation]

Matched across different territories e.g. Hyde Park, Times Square and strategic locations in the Philippines citizens can openly communicate with each other. The Philippines is digitally mapped to give the impression how the disaster would look like in your area [see wag the Dog - the Sarajevo scene]. This creates empathy.

Students learn from students in Philippines in adirect contact exercises - a new form of empathy journalism

The whole event is scheduled into an educational module - "Digital Responses" facilitated by the Disaster Relief Agency. School children, universities and business's around the world have access. How do you solve such huge intractable problems? This involves a new form of empathetic ( digital) journalism. It is cause and effect. How do you use journalism to uncover a problem, then what do you do to help?

You can even pick your doppleganger – someone in the region who shares your same birthday and likes by data scraping medical records from the cloud.

School Children talk to other school children, university PR and journalism courses to Philippines equivalent. Everyone maps out different solutions accordingly. One major feature is the game theory approach. Mobile copters provide further images, the feed from Philippines is costing you one cent, but once you get on board, you can set your own tariff, which is money paid to help survivors.

Using similar tokens in Moshi Monster e.g. price card, users pay to be involved in the real life exercise. Payment is direct to survivors. which users control. But by doing so you’re explicitly paying to the relief of survivors.

The whole event is paid for by philanthropists, so there is no conflict between analogue rules of objectivity....

David Dunkley Gyimah in Ghana

David Dunkley Gyimah with US Special Forces in Ghana circa 1996. David is a senior lecturer and International award winning videojournalist. This year he is one of the chairs of the Royal Television Society Awards. His PhD he is completing looks at digital and news filmmaking.  For more on David's work - all on one page go to guidelines videojorunalism.

Postscript
Channel 4 News twitter response which led them to look for a family stricken the typhoon was an example of a digital response.

The Theory of Videojournalism Practice - from viewmagazine.tv

How Cinema is coming back to your TV and computer

By David Dunkley Gyimah. Connect with him on Google 

Google "video journalism" and there's a slim chance viewmagazine.tv or Mrdot.co.uk, two sites I created may appear on the front page.

Its SEO rankings is not the result of link baiting, or a successful optimisation campaign, but that the sites reflect the discipline of videojournalism at a time when there was little knowledge on the Internet about videojournalism.

There are two main periods, 2005, 2006 when Viewmagazine.tv and Mtdot.co.uk were built, and then an earlier period in 1994 in the UK, when I learned the craft and there were around 100 people in the world who could count themselves as videojournalists.  This clip below comes from 1994. The full documentary will be published online at some point.


Birth of a station - Video Journalism revolution from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

In 2005 viewmagazine.tv won the Knight Batten Awards in the US for merging videojournalism with a new approach then to online publishing in layout, css, and Flash.  It used magazine layout and embedded video. That is you clicked the video or picture on the web page.

It might be difficult to understand this as a revolutionary concept when it's so commonplace today, but in 2005-2007 it didn't exist. This is a meeting I attended at the BBC in 2007 when they were trying the idea of embedded video. You'll notice the video does not have any play buttons because at the time, Flash's play button was not as common, and for aesthetic reasons I wanted the videos to be free of the buttons.

This is a feature on an Online News Association gathering at  Reuters who were pioneering the use of mobile camera filming.

There were two main concepts that guided viewmagazine.tv.

• the articles needed to reflect new ideas in journalism, and written according to the rules of Jakob Nielsen. By new ideas that meant expanding the repertoire of journalism stories and secondly writing them in a hip way- something like a Wired Magazine piece 
• and the imagery and video used a standard idea today of embedded video, where in some case the videos had hyperlinks.

The Batten Awards described viewmagazine.tv as follows:

“This interactive magazine foreshadows the future with its use of hip new story forms and highly video-centric Web tools.”

-2005 Batten Advisory Board Judges

It might be difficult to understand what this meant at the time, because YouTube had yet to launch. In fact the idea of shared video was frowned upon. When you visited a website the idea was to keep the reader in your site at all costs.

Here's an example of viewmagazine's pages in 2005:

menu page - where all the pictures are moving

The menu page include Jay-Z meeting Prince Charles and an exclusive photo show with Bob Marley

David in the US

In 2005 filming with your camera was still rare. This shot comes from Times Square, where I sat one evening to watch what people were doing

Can you Trust the Media

One of the results from winning a couple of awards that year was the number of conferences I was invited to speak at, which also gave me the opportunity to meet and interview some of the leading theorists at the time e.g.  Dan Gillmor and Craig NewMark (video report here).

You can find this report on the Restoring the Trust website. What was unique about this gathering, was that the overall documentation by the conference providers gives a clear indication about what was happening in 2005.

Digital Cinema

Computers, broadband and affordable cameras had as much an impact on videojournalism as digital cinema and the first edition was able to document this. The result of this was an invitation to speak to the BFI, the British Film Industry and to share ideas on videojournalism

Nato war Games

Probably one of the more extraordinary reports, because the effects of 2005/2006 affected the reporting of an industry, which appeared immune from digital, War.  In a two week period, working with an international team we looked at how reportage was being affected in the digital age.

In this report above we explored how mobile phones in 2005 would change reporting

Videojournalism revisited.

International Videoournalism Awards Berlin from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.
8 Days (2005) on the site MrDot.co.uk reflected the birth of videojournalism amongst regional newspapers in the UK. It won the International videojournalism Awards in Berlin. The story is about the first regional newpapers in the UK attempting to understand videojournalism. Yet the sub plot is about the theoretical work of their training - which was how I trained them. Below is a trailer of 8 days.




8 days: VideoJournalism from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

2005 and 2006 therefore are crucial periods in videojournalism and digital history. Firstly, there was hardly any theory in any textbook in English about videojournalism. Facebook was something that existed only in university colleges, as this extract from speaking to an American academic referring to 2006 illustrates, and average broadband speeds in the UK were 2mbs.

So what informed the theory of those that would write about videojournalism? Appropriately, a wealth of material is derived from  interviewing other videojournalists, but there's a catch, which I share in a detail in my research.

In 2009 in an hour presentation at SXSW in Austin, Texas, I talked about how the framing of videojournalism could produce skewed results if not executed properly. In this clip from presenting at SXSW I'm talking about how videojournalism is being used in a multimedia capacity, however this was not its primary aim.


David presenting at SXSW on IM Videojournalism from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Many scholars and practitioners will state their understanding of videojournalism. The predominate discourse is that it is a derivative of television journalism, which has resulted in many practitioners from television speaking knowledgeably about the form, otherwise the polar opposite is a documentary Cinéma Vérité approach.

This theory is further supported by research of videojournalists.  To understand videojournalism is to seek out the practice of videojournalists, but the question is where did those videojournalists learn videojournalism, and how do they define it?

That narrative we know today begins to creak, when you come to realise that what you might have thought of the source of videojournalism may be incorrect. Today, videojournalism resides, or so we're made to think in the institutions and corridors of the web.

There are two issues to contend with, firstly broadcasters, publishers, imported the form from elsewhere, but where, is the question. Whilst the web has proved enormously fertile, the form that comes across through research is often too diffusive and sometimes lacks the appropriate provenance to create credibility around the form.

That does not mean there are not some brilliantly original videojournalists around, but you have to dig deep to find them out.

In my research I have come across three organisations who started from a blank canvas and wrote the guidelines. That is from the ground upwards they devised a set of theories and practice and my research shows how these were fundamentally different to what is known today.

French philosopher Michel Foucalt had a name for this phenomenon. He called it discursive formation (search discursive formation inside the book) and scholar Paddy Scannell provides an easily digestible description that essentially says how institutions perform a discursive formation by changing something to suit their own systems.

Amongst the nearly 100 interviewees for this publication include senior managers who were responsible for bringing videojournalism to the major broadcasters, and those on the ground with first hand experience of trying to forge something new, such as Brian Storm of the brilliant Mediastorm and Michael Rosenblum, who remains a legend.

Click here for article about the UK's first videojournalism station, Channel One TV

Brian Storm from Mediastorm

Michael Rosenblum

Can we look to operate a different form of journalism in the 21st century? Not only do we have to, but if we don't the industry will atrophy. The reason is simple. Videojournalism is a language, and like any language if it fails to add to its lexicon it become irrelevant.


Cultures and society are also dynamic and as they change we need systems that change to meet their needs. Imagine having a mobile phone from 1990 as your operational phone now. Yep I know what you're thinking.

So devising a way to communicate with dynamic societies as twitter and Facebook have shown are not just coincidences, but a form of natural selection.

Can videojournalism entertain values akin to emotional journalism, whatever that may mean? I have been visiting Cairo since 2006 and on one session after presenting a delegate said something that I'd like you to listen to. Is she right?


What is Video Journalism? from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

What is a videojournalist has become a tested and vexed questions and the reply is predicated on who you ask. To define it as someone who films and reports is correct, as I do too, but it is inadequate. To believe it is about a person who can film and report their own becomes flawed at some point. It's like saying  The judges at the International awards defined videojournalism, or at least my entry by different criteria.


Why is videojournalism described by a person filming their own report insufficient, because the practice of filming and reporting your own reports has already been done. What videojournalism is becomes an academic exercise of little importance, if the theory that underpins it is not unique.

That word "uniqiue" is not to be used lightly, but there are fundamental characteristics that distinguishes videojournalism from any other form. The evidence stems not from 2005 alone, but in the UK 1994 and over those years there has been two opposing stories that have emerged.


The Future of Videojournalism from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

The first I have already mentioned i.e. holding a camera. The second, chances are you know very little about but from my research emerges a universal narrative that has been lost, subsumed into this generic, or television narrative.

That's a shame, because it is by far the most exciting and far-reaching development yet and is in danger of being written out of history. For instance in 1997 we (myself working with CNN International took the traditional form of videojournalism to Ghana and South Africa for this ground breaking series on the continent.

african videojournalism - USA from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Article from Communications Africa 1997

But then whilst I'm not comparing those videojournalists to the likes of Vertov, Vertov's Man with a Movie (1929) camera was dismissed by his contemporaries as mischief making.

I don't believe we can wait for a revisionist history to set the story right.  My involvement in videojournalism stems from the three periods: 1994 with Channel One TV, the first videojournalism station in the UK; Being invited to share ideas with the BBC's videojournalism scheme in 2001 and working with the UK Press Association in 2005 to help launch their programme.

There as also various articles in the late 90s and early 2000s that I write for specialist magazines, such as:

• The Producer for Sony magazine (See below)
• Videojournalism for Creation magazine
• and the new Visual artists for Blue Print 

But if I was able to be excited, beyond the various trainings that I have given in the US, China (see below), Tunisia, Egypt, Serbia, then it has been the 100,000 words that form the thesis that painstakingly provides a rhetoric of what and how videojournalism works as discipline that is different in every conceivable way to television journalism and the increasing trend for documentary  Cinéma Vérité.

In investigating the latter, I had the rare opportunity of interviewing some of the architects of Cinéma Vérité who were responsible for its birth e.g. Albert Maysles and Robert Drew.

David with Albert Maysles at the Sheffield Documentary Festival

The methodology I submit to make such a claim stems from what social scientists call an autoethnographic approach. I have worked in videojournalism, television news as a reporter, and producer, for the BBC, Channel 4 News, ABC News and ITV, so I have a perspective of videojournalism from working in the field. In this package below, is the classic television news reportage for London Tonight in 1997.


Reportage ITV's London Tonight from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

A strong autoethnographic statement is also predicated on how trustworthy the writer is. That is do I have any credibility when talking about news and videojournalism. Jon Snow is perhaps one of the best known news presenters in the UK who provides this in support the statement of credibility



jon snow on david from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Yet videojournaism's representation to use that horrible word, "postmodernism" is a postmodernist variation of television. This is a clip, a  music break as part of a bigger videojournalism story in China. Notice how one of the young women in offering me food addresses me (David) behind the camera.


EAT from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

The thesis examines the practice with a historical eye and a look to it future and I should make it available within a couple of months.



David Dunkley Gyimah is going through the final edits of his 100,000 word thesis which examines the future of news in videojournalism. He currently works for the University of Westminster and s a consulatant for several companies including Soho Theatre as their knowledge transfer associate. You can find more about his work from Viewmagazine.tv

Renewing your approach to communications - critical writing and video

David gets ready to talk at his session on IM Videojournalism at SXSW 09

One of the achilles of traditional journalism was it avoided exegesis, which is a critical understanding of issues.  No, that was left to the artsy literature folk.

Perhaps it was right to do this; journalism and audiences have broadly been served well. The evidence has been in viewing figures and the existing use of the word "Mass media".

In the 1950s as TV News was being created, the experts baulked at anything being beyond 2 minutes. Goodness that's a whole 120 seconds.

That approach combined with the sign of the times contributed to the adoption of television's most powerful media and language theories - Myths.

Myths in lay person's language means fables e.g. superman flying, Nike running faster than lightening, and so on. But the myth in media form is about the illusion of reality TV reposits, as we come to acknowledge.

We love a good Myth. Men are better drivers than women, people less well off are less intelligent, and the hero always wears a white hat, are just some of them.

And television in its short hand syntax to tell you a story plays on myths, otherwise it wouldn't only bring you stories of people suffering in drought regions, when there might be many other stories in the region.

The Net and you were meant to veer away from those perennial myths, and to some extent we have. Twitter allows for many more stories to be traded, though the super myths still reign. In any case, just as a technology like Twitter emerges, the phenomenon of re-mediation kicks in.

Here, those traditional media relearn the new skill, adopt it and et voila use it for their old myths again. You can't win?  But oh, but you can, not all old media is able to, or wants to match the new. There might be institutional reasons, or cultural reasons

This is not about who's right, but that simply if say you're playing basketball, you're not allowed says the institution of Basketball to kick the ball, otherwise you're playing football.

On the net, coupled with what I would call the flattening of cultural norms. Some people playing basketball want to kick the ball. What Chinese teenagers want today on closer observation you could posit is no different from California youngsters seek. Yes there might be differences, but those desires have levelled far more than perceived in the 1960s.

Yesterday, in a lecture, we broke down the story form of myth into component , and how playing on old myths we could conjure up relational new ones. That's where we're inching towards, but need to do more. Because for all the technology and learning about new apps, it means nothing if it does not bring about susbstantive change.

And by change, not just the speed of transmission of information, but of enriching and supportive ones.

After all the biggest myth is that we've entered the world of social network, but until social issues of the kind that assist each other and humanity are prevalent, rather than those that pit "them and us", we've made little progress.

Fiftyyears on we still, when we have the chance, don't want to be critical.

Creating a dialogie of videojournalism

Sometimes you feel boxed in

Some things don't add up. And when they don't our immediate reaction is to purse our lips and become dismissive. Some things too manifest themselves as a revelation, but seem so obvious that we feel the need to be dismissive.

I encountered both today.

In building a new narrative for videojournalism using established theories, I came unstuck.  Then it became obvious. However this revelation lay outside of the discourse of its common established theory within communication.

In History as Art: Art as History, the author's note: Art provides students with new languages and with a new set of visual tools and methods to process and articulate their ideas. (p.6)

There's more, but then as I said it should have been so obvious, but on the other hand in academic journalism studies it might not; purse your lips.

Art offers a powerful expression, less understood in formal circles where genres are rooted. You know its journalism because of its conventions; its objective and impartial. These are powerful forces that have shaped generations.

And the only way we deconstruct genres is by theories. The word theory in academia has a more profound ring to how we use it in everyday parlance.

Because in pedagogy, someone wants proof. Prove it is the retort. You say the web is different, or videojournalism is something else, or multimedia is a new language. Prove it! Critically! Logically!

But then proof itself is abstruse in communication and the arts. There is no right and wrong, but theories more suited, by the theoritician, towards deconstructing their puzzle.

As Robert Stam puts it.. Theories do not supersede  one another...and they can be playful, even anarchaic.

The words and songs of artist and pioneers yield fresh ideas, which are absorbed, tested, and verified towards theories, and if they are new are compared with others. But how do you know to give credence to these. Therein lies another conundrum. And that's how circular it is.



 

How do we report the economy in a manner that articulates more profoundly the implosion about to grip Europe, as Italy sits at the precipe of a massive financial calamity?

New Horizon For Cinema Journalism

Berlin 2006, Video journalism Awards

Berlin, 2006 in a cinema house, I'm showing a clip to a group who have kindly stayed over from watching a film I made called 8 Days.

It featured the UK's first regional newspaper journalists being converted to videojournalists.  It was a story in a story. For in the first case, it was a film about how they performed and secondly a film building on cinema Journalism.

I'd been invited to Berlin as a finalist for its International Videojournalism Awards. The outcome, me taking the top prize for an independent can still generate high pitch wheezes.

At the ensuing lecture - an ecosystem I often get too excited with -  I would talk about cinema journalism and the photojournalism praxis. Way back in 2006 I didn't coin the word but it was a regular theme in lectures. In 2007 in this article written by journalist Zoe Smith she partly reflected on a number of films I showed to express a contemporary visual language on the up.

Image from Second Genertion, 1999

It still is, talking in 2002 for  Flash on the Beach,  and in 1999 using a digi-beta to film and direct Second Generation - South African's young urbanites voting in their second election.

In 1994 I made first time voters for the BBC - a documentary whose greatest honour was that the South African Broadcasting Corporation aired it a day before their historic election.  No other foreign made documentary was aired on their domestic stations on the eve to end apartheid.

In 2005 as a videojournalist labouring with the Sony A1, one of the facets of cinema which is shallow depth was achieveble only via pushing the zoom to maximum. That is squeezing the aperture, but thus also limiting the field of vision.  The added complications was a loss in steadiness whilst going hand held,which would lead to a technique I would develop  built on NYPD's russian footstep - a name coined in Soho.

That changed in 2009 with the 5D.  Now the 5D is synonymous with cinema, when oxymoronically cinema is much more complex than that. You might even phenomenologically see it as a state-of-mind. We could have a five hour chat abut that.

a fifth of tape collection

Film is not just my profession, which was crystallised around 1994 as one of the UK's first officially recognised videojournalists, but also a hobby. It's also become a new mission in an intense five year study in which a number of figures have generously given their time for me to explore a canvas I so look forward to sharing with you.

This all came to the fore today looking at the thousands of tapes Beta, DVcam, DV sitting in my garage which I'm about to digitise. It's a sort of living experience shedding light and context on factual film making and the concept of cinema journalism.

There is an interesting junction we're approaching which taps into Documentary scholar and Emmy Winner Brian Winston's notion debunking technological determinism.

By that I mean as we pay heed to less and less what the equipment can do, important though it may be, we're begin to relive the 70s-80s - a period when ideas meant more than anything else.

The film makers amongst you will recognise it was a period when Cinema was losing its currency, ideas were on the wane and it would take a new breed of thinkers to turn that around.