... And news is the most dramatic drama, because it's real. It doesn't quite resonate on the page, but in a venue filled with the cream of British television journalism, 400 of them there's a a certain bite. A statement of intent about why TV's heroine keeps its practitioners going like Duracell batteries, and its audiences, the firm wish is, wanting more. They applauded. Then again, preaching to the converted hardly shakes the china. But the speaker might be onto something. Fade to black and pull out Dziga Vertov, Russia's uber bad boy circa 1930 and yes journalism was drama par excellence. In fact, journalism was the height of Cinema. Somehow we've lost that search for drama on the way. Today things need shaking up -- a bit. I made this some years ago, which kind of works towards creating new ideas within news
Tales from the Awards But shaking up things a bit on a grander scale is something the US stalwart network, NBC, dared to do, yet was so damn refreshing. Months back now, it hired a British female dynamo in the shape of Deborah Turness. Turness, the architect of the news is drama speech, IS cutting edge. Yesterday, she was given The Judges' Award, by her peers for outstanding achievement in journalism. Not bad at all she could say for the once 21 year old, rejected by the BBC, who then wrangled herself into ITN via its Paris Bureau many years ago. If you haven't heard it said yet, but oh yes the Brits have come. There in America, Turness is making her mark. Among her evaluations about news, Turness let on what pressure meant, that is to be hit by a hose - supposedly from managing the US network. She said she presses, among other things for the correspondents to find the "Queen on the loo" stories. *^%?? ... the unreachable.
Awards, and it is the season for them, have a habit of being like Christmas staff parties; everyone who is there is in the know; they're aware of each other, and nothing really emerges that might be a tad controversial. Michael Crick, a reporter whom it's said strikes fear into politicians when the secretary announces: "Michael Crick is in reception", defied the general patter that award ceremonies were for glad handing each other, or increasing a reporter's brand worth. "Thank you Channel 4" he said, for hiring me from the BBC and proving "there is life after death", Ouch! Crick 1, the BBC 0. And there's more, but way informative. So imagine for the minute you were an outsider and had the opportunity to attend the BAFTAs, OSCARS or in this case the RTS. The Royal Television Society Awards whose patrons is HRH the Prince of Wales. Imagine that! The dusted black tie, the rethinking how do I get this infernal thing into a knot? And then the journey, where the night could go either way. Particularly, if the smattering of people you think you might know are't there.
I did, you see, I used to work in television, but I have been out of front line reporting on television, though still doing net stuff. So I'm an outsider of sorts looking in. And the distance gives me a different perspective. Firstly, a bit of mischief, so as you see I took the time to create a compendium of selfies.
Selfy 1. Jon Snow. Getting down with the programme. Is he being ironic? I used to produce him.
Sian Williams was my cheekiest catch, but I'd bumped into her convening an event at the BBC five months ago, so I sort of mouthed "Westminster". Oh go on then! Selfy 2.
Selfie 3. I caught the BBC's wunder man Ian Pannel whose reports from Syria are seat-of-the-pants stuff.
Pannel and I share a sliding door moment. We both started our careers at Leicester twenty five years ago. I went though the door too early. He stayed. A different future unfolded. We spoke about Syria and how the presence of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria militia is preventing foreign reporters from going into Syria to report. Marwan, I thought would have something to say on this.
The event was a chance to to find out who had won the category that I chaired, Innovation in Journalism. Followers of this blog and my work might know I am bit bonkers about tech and news. The three course meal p.s taking photos of meals is now an infringement of a chef's IP in some restaurants in the UK.
Wild Mushroom and Leek Tart
Main course: Square Cut Seabass with Parsley and Lemon. Baby New Potatoes and Baby Leeks
Cherry and Almond Tart with Vanilla Ice Cream
After Dinner thoughts So, I have found out if I look closely enough at the winners in this category over the years, it's possible to read trends. After all, it's the best of the best who gather and then get judged, so it's more thank likely, the popular choice might have some bearing on the sociology of journalism. One of the notable winners some years back was Al Jazeera's The Stream. A show made by young people with all the tools that put mainstream media to shame, but are now are commonplace. The year after, with more money, they changed the programme beyond recognition. This year's finalists were Channel 4's data baby. The Channel invented a fictional character, gave her a phone and then let her mine data to show how easy it was to gain access to your phone. YouTube's Truth Loader is a way for the video engine to offer validation for its stories. And then the third nominee. Well, look at this below
Hans Rosling, a charismatic statistician, seems to have raised the bar with his interactive graphics presentations. Watch out for a presentation by your beloved broadcaster near you soon. But something else also struck me. When Bowen was giving his acceptance speech for Specialist Journalist of the Year, for a piece of reportage in particular. Bowen had been injured by gun pellets, but kept on reporting. That was professional enough. But Bowen did some thing that only Bowen knows. That in the heat of the story unfolding, Bowen could offer first hand eye witness reportage, with contextual assessment and an analysis. Think about it! According to Bowen, when he first landed this gig some twenty years ago he says he had to plead with his bosses to allow him to do this.
Why this is significant is the feature of my PhD thesis, which questions how we can change roles in journalism and be discursive, but still operate in the parameters of news. And I seem to have hit journalism gold. Deborah Turness, who I interviewed for an hour before she left for NBC hints at many innovative ideas worth sharing soon.
David Dunkley Gyimah was a chair of the jury panel for the RTS Awards for Innovative News. He is a senior lecturer and videojournalist/ filmmaker. He is completing his PhD which examines a future of news. It involved speaking to more than a hundred pros from around the world, including Deborah Turness. David will be speaking at the IJF in Perugia
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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:
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.
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
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.
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
