The Videojournalism Timeline & What next?

David's timeline of Videojournalism from 1994-2009 features films he has made since that period or features about that time that give some indication of the change in Videojournalism. Here

The Videojournalism Timeline: in 1994 it was a revolution. I can't tell you how excited I was. A Beta camera, Vinten tripod, Senheiser mikes etc.

You'd find us in the middle of Oxford Street, the camera on its tripod reporting live back to the studio, having informed the Satellite truck of our location.

We did something that the industry sneered at. No one would hire you post 1994 if you said you were Channel One TV.

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

I left after two years, not because I'd fallen out with it, but wanted a bigger challenge. I went to WorldWide Television News. There I learned a different craft, but after a year knew that agency work wasn't for me.

Videojournalist David reports from Paris. Note the camera used.

But it taught me well. From the BBC in 1987 (TV and Radio), to South Africa ABC News and the BBC World Service, Channel One and now WTN, I may not have known it but I was picking up workflows, practical ways of doing things that you could only know from being in these organisations.

Because along that path you're likely to bump into /get taught by the most amazing producers and execs e.g. Tim Gardam editor of Newsnight), Joy Hatwood (multiple award wining producer, Radio 4) etc.

From 1994 I kept my videojournalism skills going. When I joined Channel 4 News, undoubtedly the best news/ current affairs programme in the UK, there's really nothing like it, I put my Vj skills to use.

Similarly, I travelled in and around Africa helping to set up networks. In 1998 I bought a ticket to fly to New York to buy my first powerbook.

How mad that seems, but it was cheaper there and I could now start to edit my own films. Jon Snow, the presenter of Channel 4 News was amazed, when he asked whether this laptop and software could replicate the quality of Network TV.


A new era
In 2000 I wrote an article that brought me to the attention of the BBC who had just outbidded Channel 4 News to bring in Michael Rosenblum - the father of videojournalism.

Rosenblum must surely have Had the last laugh. I attended their inaugural meeting in Birmingham and kept my contacts going, till in 2004 the idea was floated by the Press Association whether I could introduce a programme for print journalists.

In 2005 that programme was launched and the Hull Daily Mail became the UK's first regional journalists to successfully embrace videojournalism.

There have been many breakthroughs since. Not least the wonderful time I had in Beirut or presenting in Montenegro, talking at SXSW and teh World Newspaper Forum.

There has been in my eyes a massive shift in videojournalism. In part it's the curiosity of trying to better a process that for me is 15 years old.

Cine-Video Journalism Anti Aesthetic II from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

In a lengthy conversation with a publisher I mentioned some of those which I have written, now buried in the indexes of this blog. We're now in the throes of writing that book, in tandem with new research from my own PhD programme.

I think it would be fare to say I love video and journalism and when the two collide, there is a new stellar arrangement which mutate and asks news questions.

The art of videojournalism is now absolutely nothing to do with multiskilling, in the same way Alice Guy-Blache, an ex secretary directed, did visual effects, painted back scenes for her own films. And this was in 1896.

The semiotics of videojurnalism is reflexive auterism for a medium long found to be wanting when it comes to change. Crassly put it is "total media" for it calls upon the the use of a multiplicity of media skills.

Videojournalism -Let go
Some are less obvious. Take radio for instance. As a medium it fires the imagination like no other. In videojournalism, learning how to use the microphone and acquire good sound is one thing, knowing how to write for radio and TV and understating the nuances of the two and voice is another.

It took me many years and many visits to the now defunct BBC Training Unit to understand.

The point we're at now is an interesting one. We've not yet reached critical for a paradigm within this art form to take place, but the debates we're having, the events we're attending where we talk and swap notes is the effect of the Phoenix from the Ashes.

Ashes because others that have come before us have made what's possible now. But are we really pushing as hard as we should?

Next year in conjunction with my work as an artists in residence at the South Bank I am looking to pull together a number of events that contribute to the work others before me have laid. I hope you can be involved.

Making a videojournalism story

Making a videojournalism story.

If videojournalism can do anything, which involves readdressing our notions of what we think, and what is, then it goes beyond that of merely the cheap one -wo/man-band recording of events. And if it can dare to seek out its own aesthetic, we may have underestimated it. And if we can create bespoke site experiences, then there's no need to plead with the detractors.

Videojournalism can lay claim to its own Bauhaus. See Videojournalism definition on Mrdot here. Presenting at SXSW, I spoke about "the film is not enough" which I'll repost. There's still a lot of work to be done.

PART I






SXSW
The film is not enough - Presentation at SXSW - annual gathering of creatives attracting more than 10,000 people in its week. Thanks to the many people, such as Tony who rated the session as one of their best sessions.

Here's an extract of my 50 minute talk

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

Future of journalism

Firstly read Adam West's summation.

Introducing: the journalist of the future

This combines the technical skills the new journalist will need (plus the old ones), new ways of collaborating with audiences and journalists across the globe; and most importantly an entrepreneurial edge to create an army of “creative entrepreneurs”. more

-------------------

Very nice Adam,

But then you've been sparky from the go.One thing whilst the use of the word "journalist" is appropriate in situating your argument, could it be that the finder of news will not be called a "journalist" - an arcane word?

And could it be that if The Media Standard Trust et al work through a trusted-kite mark system to acknowledge journalists who meet the new "standard", it's likely they'll be further fragmentation, such that old style journalism will persist, new will hold its own and then there's the unknown?

The unknown presents an interesting scenario. I remember working in the dotcom boom of 2000 in Soho and whilst we knew web Mk II as we called it would happen, we couldn't envisage this.

Now, if we trend extrapolate, much of what we see now has intensified in the last five years of the web's more or less populous 15 years and the next disruption/liberation could be even more startling.

For IM6's, one of the names I have given it :Game theory; News grids; 3d web (metaverse) facilitated by game graphic cards; new non sequential narratologies, and greater filtering could be the norm. And the delivery of news could increasingly occupy public spaces.

In 2001 Viacom asked our company then to work on something called XTP ( Cross track projection) - visuals on the underground. Public space, also was a key point in Beyond Broadcast- Media Futures 2000.

Professional filters seems to be something lecturers will become, according to one former Vice Chancellor advising the UK government. I have got that link somewhere.

Anyhow's great stuff all the same.

david

Videojournalism at SXSW: inherit the media earth

Something's going on...

It's not what you think its is, because you can gather as much notes as possible, wield your pen like a sword in battle at Hastings, rubber neck at the design artisans whose work yield no formula for you to translate. But you have to let go

Something's going on.

When the day wraps you'll stand alone, gazing onto the streets and people below you.

You're tired. You can't quite figure it out. Will you be one of the new video-architects that will inherit the earth?

Everyone's doing video and if they aren't they could easily do so. Talk Video is cheap. So you're thinking how do I do it and do it differently.

Run to get creative- David checks out the morning landscape of Austin Texas

Dan Willis, an engaging entertaining speaker opened SXSW with his caveat: Birth of a Nation, DW Griffiths racist yet breakthrough movie that would inform many others of thinking scale, going creative, breaking away from the conformity of traditional structures.

It's a wonderful observation, and ascribes to a value of film making which Hollywood would later dine on in excess and still does: DO EPIC S**T.

Yet there are other examples, many. One of my favourites is Melies' Le Voyage dans la Lune in 1902.

What you have to recall about this time is cinema, the birth of the moving photographic image is new. There is no precedent.

Lumiere [ the inventor of film-cinema] as expressed by countless studies sees no artistic value in this medium: "Film" he says "is nothing more than scientific curiosity".

George Melies 15 years on from Lumiere's first "curiosities" produces a film of fantasy. It's never been done.


Video architect web journalists

The video-architects of today are themselves setting new courses, defining a semiotic game theory behind this new comms-art which is growing online.

The true scale has no where near materialised yet. The web I have said in previous posts, and you know is only a teenager and if you're grappling for the turgid sense of change, I'd advise you watch my colleague Mark's 1994 short news feature on Newspapers and the web.

Clay Shirky on innovations in publishing at SXSW.

Just as the mobile phone will soon change beyond recognition. Its ergonomics and design is at present superfluous around the contours of our face, video on the web - a 3d spatial grid will change.

There is nothing intrinsically technically beyond wonderment about video. Every one's doing it; the illusion about its intellectual execution held fastened for decades has been shattered.

It is the "Fish and Chips", the "Pasta Bologneses", the "Pap and Chicken" of electronic communications.

When 19th Century Art under the auspices of Academy Le Baux were forced to moved away from classical metering, chiefly through the new impressionists, it was the dawn of the wondrous and exciting modernism.

This glimpses the new tear in the sky. The language of the new medium will likely emerge as bold as those that have trod this path before us. And they too will be ridiculed. "But this is not news@!£"

In cinema, the greats e.g. Kubrik treated their craft like the golden fleece. It wasn't enough just to think ambitious, to direct a scene, but to comprehend the medium's 'architecture'. Kubrik understood films malleability as did Hitchcock whose Pleasure Garden circa 1925 and the Lodger which follows lay the foundation for his later opus.

Space, dimension, the image-sentence informed, albeit sometimes subtly the deep recesses of what might be called "Kantian beauty".

We're drawn to an aesthetic. It does not trump all, for style over substance is unforgivable.

Celebrity pap over intrinsic inherent values feeds banality.

The question-statement I posed to an engaging and warm audience at SXSW, the question posed to the pragmatist futurists Henry Jenkins returned an answer that urges us to look at the whole product.

Visionary Henry Jenkins being interviewed by me [David] about transmedia.

In essence DO EPIC S**T

Hollywood's since upped its game in a bid to return costs and profit. De facto it's been playing with its form. The few blockbusters subsidy the loss making experiments it unveils to stay relevant in our times.

Videojournalism has some way to go yet, but we won't get there by aping past forms, by feeling smug at what was once, by assuming it it aint broke why fix it.

We'll get there by innovations, alchemy, of jumping of the edge: as an applied chemist I have some inkling from the evenings spent in labs trying to shape a substrate to match a chemical formula and failing.

But failure was one step away from transitory success. Transitory, because today what is relevant has no guarantees for its future.

The alchemists of the video age are out there. Channel One's defunct broken model, I told delegates at IM VideoJournalism presents an interesting spring board for a new generation.

"Come to the edge. He said. They said. "We are afraid". "Come to the edge". He said. They Came. "He pushed them and they flew"

Guillaume Apollinaire

The video feature Epic Mania from SXSW will be published soon.. [ I hope!]

David Dunkley Gyimah presented IM Videojournalism at SXSW from presenting at WeMedia where his work was cited for Elevating multimedia narrative through tireless experiments that push MM to a higher standard. He was a 2009 RTS and International Video Journalism Awards juror. More on david here

The tao of video journalism continued - making media

An interview with one of the world's greatest musicians and
composers Quincy Jones, but how many times can I repackage this?

Video journalism is badly in need of a neologism.

It's not nearly enough now to categorise a video piece with journalism as the apotheosis of video journalism in much the same way an astute writer in the 60s might have said there were writers from New Journalism.

Definitions vary across geographies. Film's inception spawned a slew of categories from German Expressionism to French New wave.

The exception, there are no ontological categories for VJism as yet, meaning it's so fresh a form that we're yet to assign prescriptive genres other than proclaiming a VJ piece as "breaking news" or "featured piece from a broadcaster or non broadcaster".

Categories have their purpose: in awards it's the difference sometimes of a few more hundred submissions. But for future generations I'm inclined to think, we'll likely hear of the "accelerated VJ" or "Photologue VJ" ~ more neologism.

Or not.

You could argue that in fact many video journalists are indeed not what they seem, whilst others actively, with good reason reject the claim.

The simple def for VJ is that person who does it all, but there's no accountability for style, substance or proficiency. You could be an amateur film maker, photographer, in broadcasting a P&D ( producer/director) but in video journalism you are who you say you are.

Does it matter? I'm not arguing either way, but attempting to dig deeper into process and production, setting out to refine some thoughts for 2009.

I might call myself a VJ, but don't deny I've P&D'ed network TV programmes, made promos, produced commercials, shot this and that... you get the picture.

For that reason then what am I? And does the term alone VJ suffice, indeed for a generation of 90s talent who shot factual programmes on DV Cam? And also now generation?


In search of the VJ plus
The more intriguing aspect for me has always been the "whole". A body of work, a film, exists as is, but the transaction between the maker and audience still has connected dots with marketing, posters, campaigns and indeed the net.

Video online is as much influenced by the furniture around it; even when it's white space(-), the site design, the allure, the wow, ease of use - all matter if you're looking to build an audience.

Again multimedia, I have said in previous posts, is just the half of it.

At Future TV, one of first conferences of many digital media to kick start 2009, the body of knowledge in the sessions assumes compelling content is a given i.e you've already got Quincy Jones, but how do you a publisher or broadcaster become omnipresent?

Is that still possible?

If you're a broadcaster coming out of 2008, yep. If 2008 was a consolidation of the 2007 experiments, 2009 is where you're looking to reap those rewards.

For a more robust explanation of this read Dealing with Darwin by Geoffrey Moore. Here's an illustrative cycle well worth looking at for how innovation beds down and early adopters versus Early Majority

Those wise web guys and gals who showed you the big L, well guess what? You now know what they know and you've got the content.

On Future TV, this caught my eye.

CONFERENCE TRACK TWO: MARKETING & BRAND MANAGEMENT
7 counterintuitive strategies to succeed in a Web2.0 world

• How can you use the opportunities of Web2.0 to attract more customers?
• Are consumers expectations of instant, always on, and free content making revenue generation harder?
• What are the new rules of brand management that you need to bring to your organization to thrive in the social media era?

We're back to basics, updated for the 21st century. All the content in the world, the new technology to boot, and if you're a corporation not bringing it in, woops!

Because we're back to the fluidity of the brand. Did we ever leave it? Briefly, fleetingly, because for a moment everyone else's opinion mattered but the publishers.

The kerzillions of conferences during the 90s that we covered unveiling marketing plan after plan; now there's a whole new branch of social philosophers detailing how we consumers do what we do.

I'm fascinated by the the above, deeply, deeply so. It engages every aspect of the creative process I have come to know in design, film and marketing.

Because it engenders behaviour, value, desire - the qualities of desire, want, need and aesthetics.

• How do you know when something's good?
• How do you instantly reconcile that which isn't working with your ideas?

That's pretty much my 2009 thoughts mapped out. And as for video journalism why can't it be called videnouralism, other than the fact it's daft name.

The Future of Video Journalism - Conventions continues

The Future of VideoJournalism is part of a three post article looking at the conventions of videojournalism. You can read the most recent here and the first post here.

Cinema and Video Journalism meet

"You might call me a doc producer, and you might be right. You might say I make news features and I might consider this. You might say the pieces I made look like motion graphic packages and I might not disagree. And then you might say actually what do you make? ...
And I might reply all of the above and none so specifically. No one owns video journalism. It can neither be prescriptive nor easily defined. It is what is is to those that practise it".

1996 - West Africa, David reports and interviews US Special Forces training Ecomog soldiers, preparing for tours in Liberia.

Neither exclusively reportage nor videography, Video journalism occupies a rare and evolving genus. So much so that it's found itself at the centre of a tug of pedagogical and industry war.

At stake is the notion of dictating a prescribed set of rules, attract a following and have commerce do the rest.

If you disagree with the body politiks of any of its major communities, then you risk ridicule.

There's nothing new there. Thomas Kuhn captured our propensity for protectionism and a move away from fixed discourses in his pronouncements: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

So where might video journalism go?

The seeds lay in the past, even a more immediate one. Or as John McHale, a cyberneticists explaining American Culture would say:

"The future of the past is in the future. The future of the present is in the past. The future of the future is in the present"

The Immediate Past
In 2005 as the first UK newspaper journalists to practice Video journalism, the Hull Daily Mail, Liverpool Echo and Press Association journalists,rolled out of the Press Association following three intense weeks of video and narrative discourse, we all agreed on one thing.

Video Journalism is not TV.

There were reasons the regional journalists wanted it so; distinction, difference, a fresh outlook.

Mine emerged from the 18 years or so in the media, many of which involved working either as a journalist, producer, reporter and in some cases video journalists for some of the most respected networks around.

What I had experienced and seen what Video Journalism could do was different, not always necessarily better than TV , but different, tailor made for this new web platform.

The wondrous nature of video journalism's origins give some idea. TV its most obvious cousin emerged from the silent movie reel with a lot of help from radio.

In fact the first coterie of TV reporters e.g. Cronkite (US) Dimblebee (UK) almost exclusively came from Radio, and before that print. They were the finest of their time.

The classical nature of TV news mirrored in many respects Hollywood's formulae for story structure and resolution. But whilst different genre conventions began to evolve in film e.g. avante garde and documentary, TV News maintained its set of codes, though different house styles emerged for different corporate authors.

For example ITN reports differently to BBC; ABC will have its house style as will CBS. If anything the form that creatively mashes up TV with a sub genre e.g. 1st person narrative versus omniscient is documentary.

Video Journalism has thus gestated from TV, where as a broader, richer canvas would be a hybrid of cine/photographic language and radio/TV reportage, which a growing number of VJs are reveling in.
Scott Rensberger, [right. pic] one of the US's most celebrated multiple award winning video Journalists talks to David.

The latter sets up an interesting proposition. In order to critique film/video we need to comprehend some of its language and distinguish our analyses from the audiences' expectations.

The former of these resides in what might be referred to as an evaluative assessment. Who's the audience? Did it satisfy their needs? Were the graphics good? Did it meet what often is a reference to classical story arc?

These are instincts often you build up and again depending on the target audience will differ from one group to another.

An interpretive analysis of film presents huge problems and is the stuff of critics, whom themselves may differ in opinion, but they often have one thing in common: a rich historical understanding of the product.

Video Journalism's Achilles
Why is this problematical now?

Because whilst you wouldn't ask someone who's had a limited knowledge of newspaper design to present to the board a critique and launch of a new newspaper, it has parallels in an interpretive analysis of video, if your knowledge of video is limited.

This is by no means qualifies only those with the scars of a camera to talk meaningfully about video journalism. I personally wouldn't dare profess to knowing it inside out. I am a student of its form with a particular perspective.

Whilst conversely not having looked down the lens doesn't disqualify those new to the genre. You don't need to have been a video journalist to understand any of the forms of the video journalism.

Our collective televisual maturity provides some fallback.

But it does mean when we critic its form it would be expedient to have a broader understanding of analysis deployed. Story form, a play with the form, comparative analysis, technical innovations, tone and delivery - just some of the things that matter I would say in Video Journalism's increasing diversity.

This last statement sets up a segue for point of this post: "the many forms of video journalism".

The future of video journalism is and will be a break into different forms, as witnessed at the 2006 Video Journalism Awards in which you could distinguish between genres like: breaking story, video feature, independent, self reflexive and so on.

And then there's the unknowns, or trend extrapolated thinking knowns [ sounds tautological, blame Rumsfeld, better still Lacan].

Unlike the media of television which delineates its product linearly, notwithstanding styles such as Flash backs and Flash Forwards, the web is spatial, and so we might well see a style emerge that captures spatial story telling. In 91 Manovich gave us a reason to see this with THE FAMILY at 56k modem speeds.


For more contemporary and innovatory forms I strongly advise to look at Richard's Multimedia Shooter.

That void is being touched with multimedia, but we still can't be sure of the shape of things to come. When video hyperlinking breaks, what next?

• When the video configurational size jumps from 620 to full screen, what next?
• When virtual life meets real life, what next? [ incidentally I'll bring you a report from the Science Museum, in which I hosted a panel of some of the UK's most talented multiplatform story tellers including one who mixes real and virtual life using his mobile]
• What happens with holographic video? Remember wag the dog!
  

What we can hope for at the moment with this nascent form is a healthy debate and discourse.

No one owns the form.

At the moment it is without form [ unless you prescribe to its TV tendencies], we have the ability to create a new visual stanza that just as TV borrowed from its antecedents, it takes and moves on to boldly......[ you're ahead of me :)].... gone before.

One which takes into account narrative and exposition, montage and sequencing [ spatial as well] and the new technologies that are likely to come on stream.
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• The Future of VideoJournalism is part of a three post article looking at the conventions of videojournalism. You can read the most recent here and the first post here.

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David has been nomintaed as a 2009 wemedia finalist game changer for creating Integrated Multimedia Video Journalism, as a viable training course. To vote for him, please go to wemedia

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David Dunkley Gyimah is researching the Outernet for his Phd, integrated multimedia video journalism and is researching with a colleague a Video Journalism doc, a remaking of Darwin's cell theory.

For more on David's ideas around videojournalism go to www.viewmagazine.tv, in which he's about to add some fresh material.

Broadcasters squaring up to Newspapers

Internal reviews and policy implementations are an ongoing affair within any media outlet.

Often its a genu-reflective of their direction and how management need to stem the hemorrhaging of viewers and readers.

Sometimes it can be an exercise in self-indulgence; ignoring the obvious signs as scaremongering. This thing called the Net, it won't survive, was the tune being sang by many a management in the early days.

Now, mainstream media has more or less adopted the free-for-all tools of participatory info flows, but that might not be nearly enough.

There lies an inherent attitude thing. What do our viewers think about us?

First you've got stop your readers from drifting, then you've got to up the ante, get bullish and win them back, then drive the numbers up.

The two require different strategies and due to the nature of the wisdom of crowds, require constant attention.

The problem Labour are going through reflect that as much: first we've got to stop the rot, then steady the ship, then drive the new message. Place the wrong one in front of the other and you're in danger of being ridiculed.

In the 70s/ 80s and 90s, specialist pollsters were almost exclusively responsible or judging the health of a network and prescribing medicine that ran along the lines of: counter programming, tent polling and hammocking - a process of running a new show or item between two successful shows favoured by NBC.

The net rendered the more austere of these redundant, though many schedulers still work around similar processes.

In the last couple of months the BBC in particular has been pushing its offline to the web with regular announcements on radio and TV of added value online.

Not just an extension of the same but by a neat trick of changing the direction of a story at the last few seconds of the item, and then telling the listeners there's more on line.

Digital experts refer to this as a second shift aesthetic.

Within the BBC and a number of broadcasters it has not been lost on them that newspapers are making heavy inroads into web audiences, so the debate is skewing to how do we ( media) extend the shelf life per item of our correspondents.

How do we use the web for more breaking stories? How do we keep the audience in our garden.

Watch out at some point for perma links on TV, more cross talk between the online and offline teams in hand overs and perhaps another new favorite of "ploughing".

The latter I'll explain in a visual theme I'm working on very soon.

BBC - "Web is the new home to innovation"

Sent: 30 August 2002 13:01
Subject: Re: David meeting with Stuart Murphy yesterday
Hi David,
I’m on the case with all this. Was really excellent to meet you.
Stuart


It was for me a simple idea, glimpsing a future of the web; video online.

And for the hour or so with the commissioning editor of BBC 3 the future had arrived.

A film looking at young people in intel and plastic surgery in Ghana met with Stuart's effusive approval.

Both would be accompanied by web promos, viral, made for the attention challenged, which months earlier I'd used with some success working for Lennox Lewis, then gunning for the undisputed title against Mike Tyson.

But 2002 was not quite there; modem speeds averaged 56k and video journalism was to many an anagram for a sexual disease. TV ruled. Yeeah!

In 2004 Viewmagazine.tv became a sandpit to exercise my digital demons; test what could work: embedded video, zoo video, hyperlinking, mash ups, a push from where once video journalism occupied the frayed edges of the media.

It appeared to be working, if awards are an indication of that. Now the web was the only black.


BBC Ariel - Web Innovation
At the BBC today for a meeting, I picked up their in house journal: Ariel.

In it veteran TV maker Mark Harrison, who heads up their multiplatform productions, is extolling the BBC to harness new talent for making TV online.

Ariel's Features Editor Zoe Kleinman reports Mark saying: "that young people with creative ideas won't wait around for an exec producer to give them a TV commission and instruct them to stick to a format".

A similar point was made by the Corporation's Director General, Mark Thompson, when I interviewed him.


Mash up intro viewmagazine.tv from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

TV is spent of new creative ideas, Harrison is quoted: "It's (TV's) scope for innovation has run out".

He points to Bloody Omaha - a youtube video by BBC graphic designers as the most visually exciting piece of work in the last twelve months.

All these hit the spot.

Video journalism, a craft in itself and Siamese of the web, requires different stanzas and visual themes that TV would still consider ill conceived.

Video hyperlinking dismembers the exposition, while the Outernet and multiple screens asks filmmakers to think beyond common visual parlance.

It's no surprise that in one respect graphic designers should be the ones to light Harrison and millions of us' fires. In Digital Diversity, an authored feature aired in Berlin cinemas (sorry Flash had no video controls when I made this so I'll have to re-export), and features such as Ones and zeros for graphic-based magazine's like Blue Print, I've waxed much prose about them.

"It was the graphic community who first got the net; consider what Hillman Curtis would do with a camera; Rob Chiu treats a canvas like he's Pollock; Nine months is the most seminal piece of web multimedia ever; and who can forget the original breakthrough movie 405 by Bruce Branit and Jeremy Hunt - the Blair Witch for online film making"

And the one thing all of the above have in common is they're all graphic designers or visual creatives.

Geekdom is cool
Ahh 1998 the cool era of geekdom, the dogtown of web films, when the geeks traded bit rates and bytes and as a subscriber to the first Computer Arts mag, Production Solutions and Video Age, I might actually make a confession today: " Yes my name is David Dunkley Gyimah and I was a geek, but I'm dry now and have been for many years"

There's something about spatial thinking, that unlike journalism which confides itself to a linear set of parameters: "who, what,when,how and why", allows visual linguists to see beyond the journalists' end point.

TV's 3d becomes the web's 4d, a kind of i-axis (one for the mathematicians - go on you know you want to) and an integrated multimedia video journalism approach to media maker.

"I must think spatial; I must think spatial".

Online then, the final product would be a compositional configuration unlike its TV delivery.

In part its boils down to the skill set within this this evolving construct; nothing is impossible with After Effects, Combustion, Commotion or Flash.

Here's a game: bark the last four pieces of software at a journalist friend and see how the react; then do the same for a graphic designer and listen to them tell you how Gladiator or Saving Private Ryan was created, or Tron, slash, my visual favourite 300 was eked together almost entirely in green screen.

Video Journalism is a sibling of the web age bringing together film making, motion graphics, code, tagging, 369, and an emphasis on right side thinking.

That much I have said in the face of raised eye brows and the odd guffaw.

But it can only be good for the industry to see other professionals, particularly within established media such as newspapers and broadcasters, thinking and rallying the troops.

It makes what we all do all that more acceptable.

Call to arms
Harrison's ask is for the BBC to think beyond TV schedules acknowledging that the skills for the future, as trained storytellers are already in house and that would be true for a vast organisation such as the BBC.

But the seeds for a departure from TV to Kansas-is-going-bye- bye movies, may not necessarily lie in the paradigms of traditional story telling. It may be a whole new discipline in itself and TV grammar style rules which make great TV, may not always suffice.

It would be a bit like a native Indian circa 1700 acquiring a musket for the first time and placing it within their bow, believing if it zinged and fire at the same time as a projectile ..... yep you're ahead of me.

The other story I like pulling out in my quasi comedy act, is that of travellers finding new land only to be met by natives who speak a 'primitive' language'.

Captain: "Giles go over there and communicate with those people, you're a linguist
Giles to natives: "HEY YOU ( really shouting) DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH, YES ENGLISH?
Natives: ( Stare with bemused expressions)

100 years on all the Islanders are speaking English - a superior alphabet-numero system
1000 years on historians discover those travellers wiped away a highly complex and unique language.

Perhaps in time, the new dawn could embrace emerging talent both within and outside the corporation with a whole new commissioning process.

For it's possible, history has shown us that the disruptive forces that have brought traditional and citizen TV makers, for want of a better word, together, now, may have a bigger surprise in store.

We're averaging 4-8mb at the moment.

In a world of 100mb standard we'll be hyperlinking ourselves through presence reality and a host of story telling techniques which will make TV, barely 50 years old, seem like a walk on the heath.

And then the next generation of young people may not even gives us notice of their intent. We'll need each other even more.

Disclosure: emails are a personal communication and as a member of and active endorser of Chatham house rules, I have only published a benign part of mt email exchanges with BBC 3's commissioner, Stuart Murphy.

David Dunkley Gyimah started his broadcast career with the BBC in 1987. He's now a senior lecturer and practicing VJ doing his PhD in storytelling innovation. He is one of the jury members at this year's International Video Journalism Awards in Mainz

Future Reportage - BBC, Videojournalism..6 ways and more- circa 1999

Multiple Video Journalism Reporting - 6 ways plus BBC and beyond from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Future reporting 6 ways. Here's one amazing adventure of a story from my archives 1999, dissected five ways and what I would do differently today .

I'll deconstruct the making of the multiple reports and the gear I took e.g. DV monitor, Sony Pro radio, Hi 8 etc. later this week

It was an extraordinary voyage. Ten days out to sea on a live aboard searching for a wreck, HMS Majestic, with a descendent of the Commander-in-Chief of Gallipoli and a crew of professional and serious sport divers.

My own drama included a near serious accident miss 40-50 metres down being caught up in a ribbon current and hyperventilating.

I almost ran out of air.

We found what we believed was the wreck in a series of day and night dives - the first time the Turkish military authorities had allowed us into the DMZ (demilitarised zone). There were still active shells.

The result of that report was deconstructed 6 ways:

BBC Radio: The 9 minute radio report went on the BBC World Service, a popular programme called Outlook.

TV: The TV version made for BBC3 didn't make air, so I posted it online.

I blogged and wrote a detailed article about the incident on my first site mrdot.co.uk, then viewmagazine.tv

ARTICLE

MULTIMEDIA SITE WITH BBC RADIO REPORT WITH PHOTOMONTAGE FILM PLAYING AT TOP OF PAGE. STILLS TAKEN FROM HI-8 VIDEO

NB: you'll notice there are no controls on the short film. This film was republished on the web back in 2003/4 when Flash 6/7 did not have controls. Wierd huh!

I made a Flash promo that was used to sell the idea, which BBC 3's commissioning Editor Stuart Murphy was interested in. Though truth I'm not sure they quite understood it back then as I must have shown it to at least half a dozen BBC execs.

FLASH PROMO

NB: the thing with this promo is its 120k in size, so that meant I could email me it as a viral on a 56k modem which was in use back then. If you double click the info button, you'll see a bit of animation.

I didn't write the article for Diver Magazine, but I am mentioned by its journo and if I'd known the journo well enough could have.

We got a slew of pics, some onboard and underwater to accompanying the report.

UNDERWATER PHOTOS

The year is 1999. One report divied up 5/6 ways. It's not rocket science. Trouble was the industry did not entertain the idea of being multiskilled back then.

So how might that change today?

Integrated Multimedia Video Journalism

I'd have made a series feature with more after effects - an anti-aesthetic film.

I'd develop a far more sophisticated Film multimedia site to this one, showing the coordinates etc of where we dived. This one has the Flash "photo montage" report.

WEB PROMO SITE

I'd have got my network together to stream on something like Livestation to braodcast live

I'd have networked this article with web 2.0 apps into a community of divers and also those who may have be more intimate with Gallipoli.

I'd have created a series of visual big screen interfaces e.g. IM6 and mobile promos.

FLASH PROMO SITE

It would have been scalable xml/php data so I can network it into any number of stories, particularly education.

I'd create a more robust sound slide show than the aforeshown.

The idea of multi-reporting though as demonstrated at Nato's War Games works more effectively along the lines of Swarming where we can also create multiple entry points into the piece.

So what sort of skillset would be required for this. Here goes: FCP, AE, Radio, Pod, Flash, Director, Photoshop, Cool Edit, Dreamweaver, CSS, PHP, XML, Blog.... and a CONDOM, oh and a PADI diving certificate.

I used a condom on a long microphone lead to get sound effects of the divers decoing at 10 metres.

Video journalism Timeline and World Newspaper Association

On viewmagazine.tv, with the help of Sav, a friend, I've placed a number of key videos from 1994 to present marking a personal take on video journalism.

I'll be adding some .swf files, effects and short descriptions which link to longer articles over the coming days, plus the doc on Channel One TV I mentioned in earlier posts.

Lots of photoshop comping...

The more I play with LiveStation.com, the more its appeal as one facet of future TV seems so abundantly clear.

It opens the prospect for uni-casting. ie everyone becoming a live broadcast outfit.

Also this week I'll be at the World Association of Newspaper gathering in Goteborg, from where I hope to be posting a series of reports on the newspaper industry and presenting at one of the forums on the video journalism digital newsrooms.

In a year where there's been an onslaught on the industry from many sides, what's the state of health of the industry?

Is the decline in sales, you've probably read about elsewhere symptomatic of a real trend?

Is it the overall downturn in the economy which is exacerbating the squeeze felt by the industry.

These are big questions, nay impossible to find answers to, but Goteborg should provide plenty of scope to examine the causes.

In the meantime, settling down to watch a stunning documentary: In the shadow of the moon - quite simply an outstanding film on the space race.

future tv camp vj

A friend from one of the US' big networks ( Nope can't mention them) dropped me a line. Things are pretty dire he says with no clear strategy for this digital future.

Having content is great, but if your constituents don't find it "cool". I'm playing on Mcluhan's Hot-Cool notion, then you're a gonner.

Here's some observations which I'll process into a empirical data about brand awareness, programming and the likes.

Here's the odd bullet point

It's nay impossible to control the digital mushroom cloud. There are just too many players with different programming variants. In the 70s and 80s with a finite number of media and primacy of emerging programme/ news statisticians you could give baby boomers what they wanted. The market, whatever that is, is a series of tails.

American idol, Gladiators, Oliver - the big reality progs are the money and audience deliverers, but they're few and far between. The dilemma also is do we flood the channel and risk a backlash or play it safe? Alternatively should we buy one of the shelf, but how do we know it's going to be a hit? The net provides some answers here in Second Shift aeshetics.

Every department needs a futures lab. What's happening now is good, what's happening tomorrow is worthwhile investing in, and what's happening in the future is the stuff of model simulation and the Delphi proceedure amongst others.

Programmes can no longer rest on their laurels as unitary packages. Those triple plays you once discarded combine to keep an audience in your loop.

At Camp VJ we showed how we could push into the realms of high end creative programme and news making. That coupled with creative data minning gives us the ability to respond fast to Hot programmes.

What Al Jazeera teaches us about modern day media

It was bound to happen, could be the refrain.

Discontentment within the ranks of Al Jazeera forcing mass resignations.

This week the UK's Guardian newspaper added to the raft of reportage, many have done so thus far via so blogs, quiet conversations, and a site that hangs out AJs dirty linen.

In essence you could argue that the set up and architecture of AJ was ripe to go pear shape at some point, though that would be an easy hit - a cop out: all companies go through the antithesis of a purple patch.

But has AJ's come too soon?

Personally, I can't think of any other business ingredient to sour a company than to have two outfits of the same ilk occupy different hierarchies. AJ international Versus AJ domestic - sibling rivals, one born at home, the other, African dialect would refer as a "been to" ie Been to US/UK etc.

In my first ever radio job working at the BBC, the station came close tot this: Asians and Blacks located to the rear, their programmes literally in one corner- sharing metaphorically paper cups, while the other side of the newsroom had Earl Grey.

But this post isn't so much about a them and us, rather firstly my own experience with AJ and secondly, whether AJ's punt for a new of type of news journalism was a PR stroke too far?


You've got Friends
I have got some good friends at AJ, including the man said to be responsible for helping set it up, Riz Khan. One day on a visit to another friend, I found myself being interviewed for a post in Africa.

How would I do this and how would I do that was the closed line of questioning?

Frankly, I was a little put out by what I was led to be an informal chat, with some big name types, about their new venture, but I thought of playing along nonetheless.

They the team of Brits looked mostly resigned, when I mentioned videojournalism. Their heads cocked to one side, you could read their bubble thought: "here we go another chancer".

Never mind, I'm comfortable with what I believe I know I heard myself thinking

However I was mesmerized by the loose chat that followed in which they talked about their eye of the prize - the new approach to reportage et al.

I don't doubt probably the bosses are extremely pleased with what they've achieved thus far, but I felt the lack of Videojournalism as added reportage skills and the lack of innovation on the web meant something would give.

For all the technological gizmos in broadcasting and now digital reportage, the one aspect of reportage that is consistently overlooked is the style and approach.

If you're an exec, look away now, because the chances of you revolutionising news reportage after being handed shed loads of money go like this:

1. Invest in high tech graphic suite and equipment

2. Look around for the best personnel in the market

3. Get that swirly logo punchy theme tune going

We're wedded to an idea of news that is beyond rigid. It's a igneous in structure.

News' Frankenstein
The original arbiters of news reportage have a lot to answer for as nothing else beyond a woman/ man and a desk appears to brook any currency. Form and structure in news are untouchable.

We've tinkered with solo presenters, double headers, red lights:hushed backgrounds, to zoo tv where there's a whole army of people working in the news ecosystem, but the DNA of news and its gathering remains the same.

And any sign, reported in the press of a new dawn in TV invariably involves a rehash of a new theme, and, AND a roll out of the same old usual suspects.

Nothing wrong with that, experience is the bedrock of what we do.

But when the well's dry, it's time to inject new blood, outside blood: new disciplines, personalities et al.

Last night the BBC did what it's supremely confident at: a feature on the sub prime lending market presented and written by its Economic Editor Robert Preston.

It was marvelous, fabulous. Granted it took an army the size of the Persians at Thermopylae in 480BC, but it was sublime.

You can't beat quality programmes: the film mixed genres of Hollywood film making, with pathos. It was erudite, creative and supremely impressive.

The new discourse for news and features should be more of this. It stands the test of time, deserves to be revisited, and reworked - the web allows that. Hear this again. You don't have to abandon a programme idea because you did it once in a year. The web allows you do so much more with rigid TV schedules.

If Britain's race politics reportage seems so distant to be non existent it's because the commissioners sacrosanct believe only one programme on race will suffice in a year. BROAD B*****Y BAND - WAKE UP!

Al Jazeera's back lash ultimately isn't just about discontentment it's about a missed opportunity, none more so evident than in its web site, which is brochure ware par excellence.

So while we wallow in a partial sea of mediocrity, news masquerading as infotainment and the rest, we do a generation a massive disservice.

In 20 years time, if the then news and programme makers look back on this era, they may well scoff in disdain. What were they doing back then? They had a broadcast outlet - the last of its kind before we went super broadband and IPTV, and they wasted an opportunity.

Wasted!

But you know what?

The exec sitting in his office has litte to worry about. They're a couple of years shy of their retirement. Keep the ship steady till then, then hand over the problem to some young turk. "What do I care - I still get my bonus and healthy pension".

What will AJ look like then? If present trends are anything to go by, very badly.

AJ is a lesson in not how to launch a media company, even if you have lots of money.

Television's big RIP ~ ie its amazing Reprieve - a future Newsweek personality

Since writing this blog, Duncan and I have since met up. More recently a lot more interest has been generated in his app. In a meeting I would attend with Duncan, a former head of TV at Saatchi and Saatchi Jon Staton swore on being taken through Duncan's baby, saying "this is the holy grail of communications".



This post is available here as an MP3 podcast for you to download - should you wish of course :)

Google the name "Duncan Whiteman" and the chances are you'll get nothing, which is surprising, utterly surprising.

For Duncan Whiteman, with no hint of irony or hyperbole stands at the gates of a malestrom with the ability to irrevocably change the face of television as you or I know it.

His absence from the web is all the more remarkable since he's had his hand in other apps, though not as a front figure.

But now, now, is on the verge of his opus.

And when it hits us depending on who you are, it'll either be the biggest disruptive force to you profession or a liberation into a territory unknown thus far.

Who is Duncan Whiteman?

He's a genius, a code writer, who can manipulate anything but life itself through line and line of code, a key holder to the matrix of emerging TV


Why you should know the name Duncan Whiteman.
Duncan currently lives in Spain with his family, an Englishman who hails from Leicester, who attended university at below the age we normmaly associate with tertiary education.

We met through a friends friend.

He was in the midst of a multimillion pound pitch - deal, a demonstration, when the group gasped at what they were seeing.

Surely this can't be done.

But Ken Walker, an artist and close friend asked the attending group to stop and take stock.

"Do you know what you're looking at"?

D-O Y-O-U K-N-O-W W-H-A-T Y-O-U A-R-E L-O-O-K-I-N-G A-T? he said again more measured.

I know that because when my phone rang one evening, that's all Ken would repeat.

"I have got this mate called David", Ken told the group, "He's into all this. Why not let him take a look?"

"Er I'm flattered Ken. OK, but I can't promise anything" was my response.

The meeting
A skype conference chat was set.

Duncan is an habitual background checker; if you're going to be sitting at his table, he wants to know who you are.

But this time Duncan, at least before our meeting did not google me. He felt at ease with my introduction he would later say.

For anyone who knows me, I am, If I'm allowed to say so myself, very easy going. Mannana mannana. What will be will be.

Cyber handshakes by the party over, Duncan went into his shed- metaphorically- and showed me around.

It must be a pisser, because that's what it boiled down to, to know that someone you've never met is evaluating, guaging you, trying to fill in the void which for a man of Duncan's status should be 1,000,000 google pages minimum.

And that the right outcome puts you on course to your ultimate goal.

Let's praise even the smallest achievements we make, rather than criticise the mistakes that we are bound to make. We're human after all: Glass half full, rather than half empty is my mantra


Whos is Kaizer, no Duncan Whiteman
Duncan, frankly sits in that rarefied air of the Jobs and Bill Gates.

What was destined to take a few minutes, ended up taking 30....1 hour.... 1hr.30.....2 hours....2hrs.30.... 3 hours.

And even then we could have continued.

We spoke, and spoke, and even now speak some more.

Perhaps also because he's from Leicester and went to uni there, as did I.

And also that he effortlessly moves from media to maths and code, which chimes with my degree in Applied Maths and Chemistry, though I'd be the FIRST to say I'm not even a smidgen in Duncan's league.

What I saw, what Duncan plans needs to be seen, released for all to enjoy or killed - stopped dead in his tracts.

The latter we joke about, because Duncan recognises the disruptive nature of his invention and so do many many others who've had a sniff.

What is it? All I can say is imagine the best and worst of what the media could be in a future of Isaac Asimov.

Many CEOs that control what you do in the media, and have by proxy come by Duncan know that much and have made themselves known to him.

And many don't know the half of it - as Project X, Duncan's not one for showing his hand.

What is emerging as public knowledge has been Duncan's breakthrough at algorithmically transmitting High Definition film down the web, without it going at all.

Sorry if I have lost you.

Among the select few popping by to say hello, include one of the world's most powerful media magnates'. Yes Mr X. He's on Xs Christmas card list.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

No, I'm thinking something else that Television's big RIP, that is it's amazing reprieve - will no doubt feature in Wired Magazine and either be something we're all going to enjoy or never ever see.

End ++++

If you'd like to talk to, hear more from Duncan, let me know and I'll look to set up a conf skype

Broadband's end game for broadcasting

The end of broadcasting via terrestrial satellite?

Further relentless pressure on brodcasters - as broadband TV become a reality

Broadcasters leaving the BBC et al en masse ( due to financial cut backs) set up rival alternative BBC esque networks

Most broadcasters have broken up in into pocker networks to balance the books. Publish only that which makes a profit - policy makers are not pleased.

Advertisers abandon barb ( a rough estimate of viewing audiences) for more sophisticated web analytics.

Gaming culture and broadcasters collaborate further aong the lines o photo realistic shows. Who wants to be a millionaire
can be played with you in the chair

Broadcasters cry foul and urge policy makers (Brussels) to introduce laws allowing for video on line to be vigorously monitored.

You compile your own news based on defaults on your viewing habits.

View by appointment stays because of a core minority viewing audience before it abandons it altogether.

Universities are under pressure as real life lectures either through holodecks or advanced second life do the same job

Every major ciy is wi-maxed up with multiple translations for news streams.

In 5 years time most of the above has a good chance of becoming a reality