How to launch a 24-hour station live in London - an expert editorial

London Live, which launches next week, will be a success writes former Newsnight and Channel 4 Producer, and Knight Batten Winner David Dunkley Gyimah

David will be presenting at the international journalism festival (april 30th 2014) on producing a radically different approach to 21st century news story forms from his 6-year-PhD research. (See what Apple say)

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Success for Londonlive however depends on how you measure success. At the very least the channel will introduce us to the next generation of TV stars and journalists, who can expect to be poached by the networks. Whether it will make good on its estimates of returns, at £25m, as highlighted in Greenslade’s Guardian article is a difficult one.

The degrees of excitement and mix of fear is palpable as the station nears its last countdown.  Some twenty years ago this November, 30 young journalists, including myself, experienced similar excitement. The article above from 1994 reads:

"150 people will have worked themselves up to that pitch of excitement which comes with  new TV channel Launch."

We were part of a newly launched station called Channel One, ironically owned by the Evening Standard, though in 1994 it was under different management then. Today, some of those Channel One’s graduates are household names or  respected industry  figures e.g. Chris Hollins on BBC Watchdog.

Channel One launched with the drums rolling to a newly acquired discipline called Videojournalism heralding a new beginning in storytelling. Before then there had been no documentation of videojournalism as self-shooting/storytellers in the UK, until an advertisement appeared in the Guardian in November 1993.

From the euphoria of its launch, to the hard reality of the keeping the dynamism afloat, Channel One lasted four years. Its little known legacy to videojournalism, multiskilling and trying to rewrite the rules of news hides a rich pedagogical history of successes and failures.

If you knew, in hindsight how to launch a 24-hour London station, would you not want to know how it ticked with Londoners?

Launching a 24-hour Network in London

The similarities between Channel One and LondonLive are evident, if not unfair. In my research I make no direct comparison. How could I? So it would be unwise to rely on trend or comparative analysis to compare the two. They are entirely different animals – in many ways, but share attributes.

For instance, Channel One started of London-based, LondonLive is based in London. Both recruited young media workers with diverse backgrounds. 

Channel One sought to rely on cross-pollination of broadcast and print journalism, which Londonlive sees as being its strong suit, and whilst LondonLive looks to spend 14m a year, Channel One, according to its Managing Director Julian Aston, spent 12m a year.

Channel One was spending a £1m a month. When you break down £12m, it can only buy you so much, even though Channel One was instrumental in driving down costs. Documentary forms normally costing £20, 000 were slashed to £5000 and less. 

With that kind of squeaky-tight budget, being innovative comes with the purse strings.  A reality check, however is how Channel One and LondonLive inhabit different social, technological and cultural ecologies.

STORIED Videojournalism, Past, Present and the Future from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Channel One launched during the nascent period of the Internet, and a burgeoning cable system that promised so much but never delivered.

Londonlive launches in the ferociously competitive world of digital, where  anyone’s a publisher, and young audiences have no allegiance to a brand, for brand sake. In digital, hyperlocal outfits and newspaper groups have proved they can amass viewers with the appropriate strategy. 

Premium information, which is free and readily sharable, as the Guardian explained its strategy at its Media Summit 2014 appears to be the name of the game, thus far. Green shoots indicating audiences will buy content appear to be breaking ground.

Videojournalism appeared to be the panacea for Channel One, and similarly has been lauded by LondonLive. The research I have conducted illustrates an interesting phenomenon regarding what constitutes videojournalism. 

A person with a camera who shoots and reports? Not really, there exist a matrix of issues that frame the form and hence, importantly, what you get from videojournalism. Otherwise, there is little distinction between one-man bands and videojournalism, and hence the final product.

In 2005 and 2006, when I was asked if I could help launch the Press Association’s Videojournalism programme, one of the hurdles to overcome was to reboot videojournalism from its predictable offerings. 

In my research I interviewed scores of newspaper videojournalists to uncover what worked and what didn’t. Then I took that study globally, and some interesting patterns emerged.

Like, Greenslade and I would like to see LondonLive succeed. The ingredients, the environment, the wherewithal exist. But for me the truly interesting apsect is whether LondonLive will kickstart the next TV evolution by producing a new form of television, or television news for that matter, or deliver credible programmes in the television we all know.

Presenting the new language of videojournalism at the International Festival of Journalism

Television teaches its audiences the grammar they need to decode ad enjoy programmes. Play it safe in a competitive environment and you’ll win audiences, but become indistinguishable in brand identity.  Opt for innovation and you have to ask the question, what’s your staying power?  

 Firstly, the audience needs time to understand what you’re doing, and TV like the premier league gives it managers too little time to show how bold they can be. Secondly, if you are looking to reinvent the wheel, how do you maintain this? 

Television, like newspapers, breed spoilers and copycats. If you're successful, the other side raises the stakes by pouring in more money into their venture (Sky vs BBC). Or otherwise stealing the talent team. That's the threat LondonLive faces. £14m a year soon become £24m to safeguard ideas. It's a poker game you win by looking nonchalant with your chips.

Television, according to a former Channel One producer Julian Phillips, who became a BBC executive, requires teams of innovative collaborators to continually test ideas and probe for distinctiveness. 

Greenslade, who contributed to an article on Channel One two decades ago points to a discursive behaviour pattern amongst Londoners, why local television doesn’t work. 

Kelvin Mackenzie put put it another way saying: 

"A house fire in Peckham is of no interest to people in Ealing. In fact they would be secretly pleased".

Unlike the US, where cable and independent programme making is a billion dollar industry, with big profits at stake, in London that market place is yet to break.

Londonlive however could prove everyone wrong.

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The BBC's secret weapon - The future of Television. I have seen it. I call it Media shift

Touchcast strengthens second screen viewing 

By David Dunkley Gyimah. Connect with him on Google 

The future of Television, where multimedia has been pensioned off.  Medium specificity is no more. And instead  media shift - fragmentary media mimics our psychological understanding of narrative, in a diffused medium on one platform. Confused already?

It works. I have seen it and by the time you finish reading this you will too.

Simply put,  what if you could bring the Net, Cinema, motion graphics, the photo play all together?

On the one hand we're recycling the famous Plato's Cave illustration of simulating Cinema before it became the cinema, you and I know.



For film scholar Robert Stam it is Bakhtin's carnival, "an anti classical aesthetic that rejects formal harmony and unity in favour of the asymmetrical, the heterogeneous, the oxymoronic, the miscegenated".

We are in a super post modernism era. The future has folded back onto the past. It's the 1920s again, everything is possible before theory, process and the battery hen farm approach usurped our dialogical thinking.

I blame the institutions, which have spawned institutional ideological  thinking. There was a time when something meant something without an authority having to validate or remediate it.

So what is about to happen next should make you gasp because it is the institution that is helping to change our thinking. Focault called it Discursive Formation "[ institutional discourses with the nominative power to produce that which they speak of"]  Read Scannell's Media and Communication.

So if you're a disruptive individual there's room for you to score big.


Inside the BBC's think tank
It is a non-descript building removed from its new state-of-the-art fanciful buildings in central London. Tucked away on the fifth floor is the BBC's version of the Earthscope project.

It is here where a select group of people have been tasked with seeing the future of television; the BBC's own RnD.

David  Dunkley Gyimah at the BBC

And see they have. The BBC has had many firsts; more recently, the iPlayer which has turned into an unparallelled success.

But what is about to happen will turn our concept of television viewing upside down. It's a fairly bold statement and not a day goes by without someone proclaiming this or that is the future of television.

For some it's the fidelity of 4K television, talked up by this year's blockbuster movie The Hobbit. It's so real you can smell it.  Other experts  more presciently point to the future in this Guardian newspaper op ed.

I have been an avid prospector myself, winning a Knight Batten award for Innovation in Journalism and being one of the jurors for innovative media on the UK's highest television journalism awards.

Occaasionally, I get the opportunity to sneak at something e.g.  

• The FT's diamond newsroom back in 2007
• The Press Association's videojournalism scheme in 2005 - which I helped launch

So I hope I come with a bit of  knowledge of this area.

London Live
Across London, an equally exciting project is gripping media land - the launch next year of London's 2nd 24- hour television news station.

Truth! Someone from #Londonlive should send a spy into the BBC. The idea of linear television will continue to work with narrative, but how we access the narrative and its own 'cause and effect' causality is about to be disrupted.

In fact it already has, we just haven't been paying too much attention.

The BBC yesterday did two things to signal its intent; the rnot-so-new Director General Tony Hall provided an internal key speech for the BBC's vision and where next?. The BBC also showcased internally to staff, this new television, and the oohs and aahs flowed.

There own pilots which I have seen, I won't divulge, but I can talk about my work, which resulted in Charley, one of the futurologists from Touchcast spearheading the BBC project.


Spatial filmmaking

In 2001 A friend introduced me to the writings of  Lev Manovich and his ground breaking book, The Language of New Media.

We had an idea. What if media really became spatial as opposed to linear? That idea dovetailed with one of the mega projects at that time. I was asked to be a videojoutnalist for the Lennox Lewis camp as he was fighting Tyson for the undisputed heavyweight crown.

Myself and a colleague took a different approach to looking at the sport of boxing, from a grass root level and the result was this circular film called The Family. It had a beginning, but no middle and and end.

For Manovich, this approach was no big revelation. One of the UK's most exciting cinema scholars, Mark Cousins calls its schema plus variation.

What Manovich revealed was the template for filmmaking before it was Hollywoodised. Spatial cinema already existed in the the Zoetrope and Napoleon's triptych, so this new thing we stumbled upon was a variation on that spatial theme.

That idea went further to conceptiualise the Internet, outside called the Outernet, which  was first featured on Apple's website in 2006.

In 2006 I gave it a fairly obvious name: video hyperlinking. The Economist picked up on it in this article. The Economist wrote:

.. at viewmagazine.tv, a website that is experimenting with hypervideo, the term “drilling” is used to describe the ability to click on a talking head during a sound bite to summon an entire interview. 

What the BBC has achieved, which is only the tip of the futuretv-berg is video hyperlinking of varying sorts.  This is a visual manifest that you control, one that provides endless possibilities. It's like television in its nascent stage so it would appear we're still thinking linear.

But I have it on good faith that we'll soon be experimenting with the Touchcast on viewmagazine.tv. IT can't come soon enough.
 

Solo - a film about videojournalism from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Now here's the big reveal. Imagine everything you read here, you had control of on a platforms which collapsed video around my tweets, blogs, external links, links within links and that you could influence the direction, even add to the narrative.  That's touchcast.

Davd Dunkley Gyimah is the creator of viewmagazine.tv. To contact him email David (at) viewmagazine.tv (dot ) TV.

I'll demo my Phd thesis into the future of videojournalism. Read more about David Dunkley Gyimah's career