How does it hold your attention and how does it continue to hold your attention. There was a moment presenting at Apple Store in London, when there was a shift from the audience. A comedian friend told me about this phenomena during his set when that moment comes when the audience mirror the artist, referred to as mirror neuron.
All storytelling involves an intentionality, but sometimes motives can be masked or suppressed because of conventions. Conventions are human generated rules bound within a time and space. But dependent on societal and cultural progress they atrophy, or are questioned (disruptive necessity) for something else to take its place.
Consider then this. News journalism quite often doesn’t cover an event that’s happening in real time. What you see on screen is an attempt to construct a story based on a thinking of events by the storyteller. Where, how and when people are filmed is made invisible in journalism for the convention. It may not have been an issue in the 1950s when TV journalism was coming on stream because there was good faith in the actors — those being filmed were respectful of TV.
How about today? Imagine someone telling you a blatant lie. Have you ever recorded your gaze/ eye movement towards them? Imagine you wanted to question them about it. “John can you come here a second, please?” You’re on the veranda between the coats asking what on earth is going on. The scene becomes quite animated.
Imagine now a scene from a politician named John. He chooses where he’s filmed, actually journalists through convention choose the scene, outside parliament. John’s interviewed some time after the event, so if he’s not in reflective mode has had time to consider his response.
And the framing, by convention, in journalism of John is via the rule of third. The rule of third is in fact NOT a rule in the sense of a fixed command, its a visual choice. The rule of third maintains you place John on the third part of the screen, leaving two thirds of space for where he’s fixed his gaze. It implies John is speaking to someone off camera.
Yet it’s also a shot that invisibly unconsciously yields harmony. Way before TV News was born, in his film Citizen Kane (1941) the director Orson Welles shows a compositional arrangement of the “rule of third” in an interview scene. Western artists discovered that post renaissance. Chinese art found different compositions for balance.
So now consider this. John your politician is lying, yet he’s decided with you on the power of the scene, he’s working a narrative and you’re making him look harmonious by your filming techniques, and the audience will interpret the scene their way aided by the invisible codes used.
There are solutions, and they require a broader discussion, just as the hand cutaway (convention) has been largely laid to rest. There’s no such thing as an innocuous cut away. That much became clear where in a scene many years ago, a corporate was feeding back on a question and then it cuts to the corporate rigorously tugging at his wedding band. Someone in the edit asked innocently does he have marital problems?
So what next? I’ll post news of a form that’s addressing issues like this and is gaining in currency.
Are we so gullible to think that every new phenomenon that has emerged in our digital existence has never seen the light of day before?
History, so eschewed by those who live in the now, provides many answers.
We need those answers if we are to not to repeat mistakes, or truly endeavour to push into new frontiers.
The premise for my talk back in 2005 — and before that — was that cinema offered a fresh model for journalism.
I thought that was radical. I look back on that noticing my own foolhardy swagger. But I was soon humbled when I discovered that there have been several attempts to make cinema journalism stick — but these failed for several reasons.
The many reasons however are receding. The implications are so wide that like the past, we could and would want to dismiss them. Not this time though.
In a series of videos — whose themes constituted the table of contents for my doctoral thesis, I show how the rise of cinema journalism is gaining momentum.
Here’s the second of six short videos — which I’m planning on releasing through a publisher or broadcaster.
Robert Drew, the father of Cinema Verite provides a platform to discuss cinema journalism in the 1960s.
By 3 O'clock in the afternoon, it dawned on me the magnitude of the story. We're holed up in a hotel near the Turkish-Syrian border. That's me standing on the bed.
Young Syrian journalists in the room, fifteen in all, have taken huge risks to cross over. Their stories are powerful, yet untold, and international businesses regularly lift or take parts of their report with no remuneration.
We're trying something called cinema journalism - an artistic form of news making. The story really starts here, almost thirty years ago... Five minutes of the film can be viewed below...
Nineteen eight-seven
Looking across the auditorium at some of the US’ most respected educators, Donald Schön presenteda simple yet powerful talehe had recounted several times.
Its impact was no less emphatic for professionals who were not educators, such as designers, health workers, and for that matter journalists.
You’re riding a bike and you begin to fall to the left. How do you quickly regain your composure?
Turn Right Turn Left I don’t know It’s an irrelevant question
The answer, the MIT social scientist said was to turn into the left. It has to do with the bike, which acts like a gyroscope, re-finding its centre of gravity. Racing car drivers braking around a bend at 200kph know this. But what about those who might say turn the other way? In practice, Schön continued you don’t fall off so what’s going on.
Often, we might know what to do, without necessarily being able to put this into words. This phenomenon Schön called reflection-in-action.
Doctors will sometimes detect an illness, not based on a clinical diagnosis but a hunch. Designers make use of reflection-in-action to ponder a new design, like the Stata Center in MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when the concept appears impossible, and journalism?
Well, swathes of journalists have creatively thought through the process of compiling a report against a deadline when the odds have been stacked against them — but there’s a catch.
Schön’s address poked at education on the one hand and the professions on the other. There is an enslavement to the packaging of knowledge in academia he said, and the rigid modular form students are taught does not give rise to what he called reflection-in-action, or reflection-on-action. One is an ongoing process, the other occurs over time.
Here, students should have the artistic freedom to experiment, to develop new forms, to ‘make it up’ within a framework and assess their work thereafter. The idea caught on withmany US educators doubling as action researchers who incorporatedSchön’s teaching into their classes.
But arguably and generally television journalism has been in stasis.
A case in point, students undertaking television journalism or documentary will often work through how to create news and documentaries based on a rationale of the way things ARE done.
Not by what could be done, which is in stark contrast to visual or graphic designers who employ wide discursive methods to reach their goal.
News, we’re told, requires the use of one camera. You can’t use music, and the narrative has to be ‘he said, she said’ assuming total knowledge from the journalist. Often, it’s worth asking the lecturer or practitioner why?
Schön called this condition technical rationality. In one of several books,The Reflective Practitioner, published four years earlier from his 1987 AGM talk to the American Educational Research Association, Schön elaborated.
Technical rationality confines many professions to be rooted in a scientific norm of practice, what’s called positivism where data is derived from logical and mathematical reasoning.
It leaves little room for much needed artistry in experiments that would expand knowledge in ways that are unpredictable. A popular way to look at the two systems, postivism and reflection-in-action based on artistic methods, is the Apollo 13 near disaster.
If it was logic that got the crew nearly to the moon, it was lengthy periods of reflection-in-action, tearing up the rule book, shown in the film by Gary Sinese’s character that got them safely back to earth.
The Reflective Practitionerhas since become one of the most cited and talked about books for researchers talking about their practice.
Whilst journalism is not included in Schön’s book, the similarities are clear. The way television journalism is, and delivered by experts, has been fixed for the last fifty years. It’s based on a positivism, so issues such as objectivity, balance, trust are thrust before student journalists by professionals as absolutes.
New Journalism
In 2001 when BillKovach and Tom RosenstielpublishedElements of Journalism, a book synthesised from several industry meetings from conversations started at the Harvard Faculty club in 1997, issues such as objectivity were finally being jettisoned.
Some readers may think items are missing here. Where is fairness? Where is balance? As we researched journalism’s past and looked to its future, it became clear that a number of famililar abd even useful ideas associated with news were to vague to rise to the level of essential principles of journalism. Fairness, for instance, is subjective a concept that it offered little guidance in how to operate.
While Schön is not, and neither am I, criticising the many hard-working educators and journalists who ply their craft, Schön’s reflection-in-action advocates change, not as a cosmetic procedure, but to advance our knowledge and profession. He states:
Our systems need to maintain their identity, and their ability to support the self-identity of those who belong to them, but they must at the same time be capable of transforming themselves.
Television news is a Porche, often presented in a Skoda body. It embraces a language system that is so vast, so rich in expression, but has confined itself to a scientific norm of practices.
The camera needs to be placed here — inevitably leading to the rule of thirds. The reporter’s job is to voice-over bits of the film where an interviewee isn’t speaking, and a report needs to be 1.20’.
All of these have specific reasons for how and why they were brilliant at the time and why they would work when NBC news pioneer Frank Reuven popularised the news package.
If reportage is the skill and knowledge of articulating complex issues to an audience, then even in these video-utopian times there is still a vast terrain that videojournalism is reluctant to enter.
The artistry derived from experimenting and peeling back from technical rationality lies within a journalism that embraces Schön’s reflection-in-action. Sadly, such artistry is not taught.
Young British Artists
In the UK an attempt at a new journalism happened twenty years ago to this day with the UK’s first officially recognised videojournalists.
Thirty British youngsters, many of whom were picked because they had never worked in television, were trained by the father of videojournalism Michael Rosenblum in an intensive three month regime.
The group made a serious stab at reworking television journalism though as yet there’s little evidence of their reflection-in-action being adopted by UK journalism.
I was one of them and over the years have become more familiar with reflective practice. But here’s the catch mentioned earlier. You can reflect, but you can’t affect change unless
a) You’re willing to step out of the conventions that so powerfully hold you
b) You are in possession or are seeking to find this non conventional solution.
In my case I have looked to cinema and art for these, which would lead to incredible journey’s, such as becoming an artist-in-resident at the UK’s illustrious Southbank Centre, or travelling to near the Syrian border to make a film.
Channel One folded after four years but its legacy amongst the founding staff lives on. The history of Channel One and its practitioners is due for publication next year from my PhD.
The company folded after four years but its legacy amongst the founding staff lives on. The history of Channel One and its practitioners is due for publication next year from my PhD.
Today, social networks and the impact of the Net have finally forced institutional journalism to rethink its practices. They’ve been dragged here screaming.
But the field, at least in video, is still wide open. WhenAdam Westbrook, part of a new generation of videojournalistsand writers enquires about new artistic forms on the Net, he invokes a spirit of journalism, a reflection-in-action, that I believe became conscious amongst audiences 20 years ago and is now, finally heading to critical exposure.
www.viewmagazine.tv David is a Knight Batten Winner in Innovation in Journalism and an international award-winning videojournalist. His journalism career spans 27 years working for outfits such as Channel 4 News, ABC News and Newsnight. His PhD looks at the future of videojournalism.
Students being entertained by one of the UK's most respected journalists, Jon Snow
When someone asks you how you're doing?
The common response could be: I'm doing fine, otherwise, 'I'm fine, how are you?'
This reciprocal effect to the common usage of language is best illustrated in teaching manuals for the travellers to foreign countries.
You know it well, when learning Spanish, French or when a non-English speaker is learning English for the first time.
Invariably the recipient of your phrase can judge you to be a novice. Where local parlance would do, such as when Brits say: Alright! with the inflexion indicating a question, this can be lost in translation.
Every language moves from a first-base approach of communications to more informal. less rigid, exchanges.
In 'Good Morning Vietnam' Robin William's character breaks the rules with his Vietnamese class he's gate crashed.
'Give me some skin!' he intones to one student as a response to 'how are you?'
Poets are some of the leading proponents of up ending words and meaning as this video I created about the British poet Lemn Sissay shows.
In effect, poets and those who purposefully veer away from 'Im fine, how are you'? exhibit what I call an indexical variability in confidence.
It allows them to do things, in which they confidently assume others may understand. Television, a domain, I have been associated with intimately for more than 25 years as both a news reporter, producer or anchor, and then a lecturer is one of the most interesting areas for observing this variability in confidence.
In my PhD thesis looking at communications and reportage in the 21st century, I took on the task of trying to understand how TV News was shaped from proponents of documentary, factual and even cinema. There are many strands that I will delineate through this blog. Here's one of them.
The understanding that video is not a language in the same way as the spoken word is a fixed now, but it is agreed by scholars that it is language-like. The way we use a camera, which is naturalised, depends on a filmic language.
Many educationists, teaching programmes, training centres and tertiary study programmes teach this language, and heuristics shows this to mainly be the: 'how are you?', I'm fine approach'.
It makes sense too. It is the most accessible and though may sound banal and simple guarantees a lot of novices and 'foreigner's will understand.
Fo that reason, the language of Television News in the way video constructs meaning has not changed much, compared to how poets would orate.
But my studies came across a group of individuals, significant by how they are respected by their peers, exhibiting a variability in confidence in their language of video. They are neither tethered by social communities, and come from different territories, which makes it even more interesting.
They perform functions with video that would normally be eschewed. A German scholar Wolfgang Kissel brought to this my attention almost a decade ago, when he was evaluating my work.
The video of Lemn Sissay is perhaps an example of video interpreting an event, breaking the 'how are you?'.
But now I prefer to turn the tables on others to find out what makes them tick.
Confidence Evangelists
What then enables them to do what they do? On observation is this confidence comes from, among others, being radicalised by practitioners outside of their domain.
An examples of this is, if you work in television journalism and I say: when you think of news amongst people like Cronkite, Murrow, Snow or Amanpour, what would you say?
The chances are you're likely to reciprocate a dialogue along the lines of one of the above, or even journalists closer to them.
If you ask for any other influences. If you're depleted, you'll say nothing else.
Interestingly, a couple of things are happening. psychologists such as Robyn LeBoeuf and Eldar Shafir identify what I have done as 'Anchoring' you to supply an answer based on the question supplied.
However, those journalists that I have researched from my six-year PhD thesis exhibit a) a confidence so they break out of the anchoring and b) deliver answers that are surprising.
That the aforementioned filmmakers are recognised in some guise as being poets of their craft. The 'give me some skin' parade.
That for videojournalists, what matters, surfacing for the first time is an interest in the process of fllmmaking, rather than solely journalism, as the writer/reporter, which appears to be a given.
And that just as over the years poets of the spoken/written word have been recognised, that an assumption is these videojournalists, whom though disparate in numbers are being recognised by industry, will likely inspire others.
In a couple of weeks time, I'm travelling to Columbia to engage in a debate about the future of television. Though I will not discuss this, it anchors into an overall schema for a new type of television-like I call the Outernet - a hybrid system.
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On the morning after a presentation at the International Journalism Festival, I went for a run. I was so taken with the architecture of Perugia, that I came back to the hotel at 5.30, On the morning after a presentation at the International Journalism Festival, I went for a run. I was so taken with the architecture of Perugia, that I came back to the hotel at 5.30, grabbed my equipment and made this
A strategist would have suggested the term 'best' would have been more appropriate. In the eyes of mortals, Lionel Messi, Jordan, Ali, they were the best, but they all believed the could do better.
Best implies an ultimatum. It stops there. Whereas we never stop learning. We'd like to be better. There are individual philosophies in all these, which Linkedin members/ and others can guide us to. So here's a general guide to getting better.
1. Learn from the exemplars.
In any field there are a few, relative to the field's participants who have shaped the discipline. In mine which is media, it's Robert Drew, pioneer of Cinema Verite; Gilles Deleuze and Dziga Vertov. Learn all you can about them. Often embedded in their histories you'll discover their motives and the 'secret' that made them.
Robert Drew, who worked in photography at Life Magazine was tired of seeing television pictures that could not get close or track its subjects, so he took the principles of photography to create a new mobile camera and as such a new language, Cinema Verite. Below is a short interview from an hour interview I had with him.
2. Even giants, have masters.
Your exemplars have their own idols, so its worth tracking back again. Deleuze's ideas for understanding cinema emerged from Henri Bergson. This process of 'ping backs' could go on and on.
There are few times when an original idea emerges from thin air. Everyone is influenced by something. You can decide if you want to stop at your 'ping back' or go back further. I usually go back one more step and then focus on my exemplar in detail.
3. The conditions, what are the conditions?
Ideas are rarely universal. They are constructs from the society and culture you inhabit. For that reason, those ten point guides may be apt for the territory you live in (West), but not the East.
Look at the conditions. In China, our pitch really did revolve around socials e.g. Saki, Karaoke and foot massages. In the West this could be construed as play. The translation of fresh ideas into new territories tends to work when the hosts are receptive to receiving new ideas.
In television, a sizeable number of countries adopted the Western model of television news making, because it was deigned the best. In modern times, that's not necessarily so. Television, like so many things e.g. cooking food is a human construct.
The BBC is guided by regulations of impartiality, interpreted by editors. Fox TV, is not legally bound by impartiality rules, as the FCC ditched the fairness doctrine in 1987. Fox TV says it's impartial, but there's no external body to oversee this.
4. Be respectful, but not too deferential.
Your exemplar set a standard during a time, a period and place. History writes her or him up as a pioneer, but as times change, so do the conditions and society. Was Drew a pioneer? Yes! Was he correct for his time? Most likely! Is he right now? No! Is he still relevant? Yes.
Drew's premise was don't interrupt the filming process. His French counterpart, Rouch, believed you should, that is you should be allowed to ask a question.
In Drew's filming, if your subject says they've just committed a crime, you're not allowed to intervene and ask what it is. Who's right then? Neither and both. It all depends on the conditions, the environment and the audience. In my thesis on videojournalism-as-cinema, I explain what this means. [The link is not the actual dense Phd thesis language, but accessible articles on perception].
5. The audience, the audience.
Conditions are shaped by the audience. Audience are society, a focused group from society and culture. Yes, technology too shapes the audience. Ask the audience.
In 2006 I presented in Sweden on Television of the Future. The host had booked me on the strength of my online reputation. I had two presentations. One at 4.0'clock to about 200 people and another at 6.00 to more than a 1000.
During my 3. 0'clock presentation, a few people started walking out. By the end, the producer was a bit concerned. 'David it's not that they didn't like you, but that they did not understand some of the things you were saying', she said. Some months earlier I had presented at ONA New York, where it went really well. [see video]
'Right!' I said to my host, Amy, 'in the time between 5 0'clock and 6 0'clock we're going to rewrite this. If you don't understand it, then I'll take that as a guideline that the audiences won't'.
We changed it. At the end of the 6.0'clock session, I got the biggest bear-hug from Amy and a welcoming audience. It worked. Two key take-aways from this. No matter how good we think we are, we'd do well to put ourselves into the hands of the producer. She/he should know their audience better than you should. Nowadays, I always go earlier to the conference room and 'mark' it out, by asking questions from audience members, who perhaps may not know I am about to present. They don't have to be polite then.
6. Prep, prep, prep.
Yes, I could and do send my slides over to producers - all part of the presentation. Interestingly enough. In the West, we often stick to short, snappy power words on slides to provoke thought and catalyse our presentations.
In Middle Eastern, African and countries like China, powerpoint slides are equivalent to notes, so the clients more often than not request comprehensive data on power point slides to present to delegates.
But being better at what you do involves successions of preparation. The first attempt; the changes; the reflective look; more changes; more reflective; and then tweeking; leave alone; come back and do it again.
The process I describe above is allegorical and not the absolute direct steps for the process. It essentially means ideas are palimpsestic. They often require refinement.
Once in a while I'll come across a Masters student who has fixed ideas and doesn't want to go through this process, believing their version is perfect.
It is their prerogative. But it does make me think 'Why?'. Learning to prepare is a self-critical skill. How do you know what you know? What will be required of you? It is a painful, enjoyable, but a necessary process knowing that you could do better.
7. Humility.
Knowledge is not exclusively age-related, though wisdom general, but not necessarily comes with age. These boundaries are not fixed.
Humility means you're willing to take on board new experiences. The better practitioner is prepared to listen. She or he also tends to critique, rather than criticise. They are different processes. The one who critiques finds logical reasons to explain. It is also a rhetorical process built on evidence. They also understand the need to praise good work and again offer cogent reasons for this.
The one who critiques provide routes for understanding, without believing there's is the best. They learn to collapse joint ideas, and re-synthesis, crediting where due. What I am writing here comes out of me, but is a combination of experience and many others' advice.
8. It's not personal.
In my career I have worked for some of the BBC and Channel 4's top shows e.g. Newsnight. I never once got a job through human resources, but I was always 'found' and invited to join a team.
That 'found' came from persevering and sometimes being in the right place. Being rejected, I have learned should not be taken personally. That's not to say you won't or can't. Some use this to better themselves. But don't get wound up. Move on and find the next challenge.
9. Surround yourself with friends.
Friends come in various guises. School friends who are loyal and aren't afraid to critique you. Friends at work, some of whom might tell you you're the best. School friends might do the same too.
In any case, you want those who will weigh you up, to help you by being candid. Perfection is a utopian ideal we strive towards. Accept the critique and if you have humility, you'll grow.
I had a driving instructor who was critical. A previous instructor treated my sessions as a joy ride. I know who I preferred.
10. Challenge yourself and recognise your limits.
Disperse those ideas, so you're forced to think of new ones. Share them too. Each time though, push against limits. I have just come back from a 6K run.
It was 3k a couple of weeks ago. It hurts, but I recognise that the run, the payoff with endorphins and the lasting effects spill over into all sorts of other disciplines.
David Dunkley Gyimah is a multiples international award-winning inovator in videojournalism and the web e.g. Knight Batten Awards. His recently completed PhD examines videojournalism debunking several myths as well as charting a course for the future. It includes an interview with the father of Cinema Verite Robert Drew. David isa senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, artist in residence at the Southbank Centre and chair of jurors at the RTS Broadcast Innovations Awards. You can see his work on www.viewmagazine.tv and www.videojournalism.co.uk
Last month I was invited to meet a band:Thabo and the Real Deal, who via their work and manager Kienda Hoji, have been talked about as one of the most exciting bands in 2014.
The background to meeting the 4-piece Huddersfield group was they'd been asked to come to London to play a set to industry insiders. Only 100 tickets were issued inside a venue that could take 800. Their manager, Kienda Hoji, wanted to know if I would like to hang out with them. I'd previously seen their track World War Free and was utterly mesmerised. So I said yes, but had no idea what I would film or where, so everything in the video above emerges from incidences that need to be pulled together quickly to form a narrative.
Thabo and the Real Deal's supporters include Naughty boy behind the hit La La La ft Sam Smith, Professor Green, who their lead singer Thabo has recently collaborated with, and actor Idris Elba (Luther) - another collaboration.
Telling a story about a band or artist often involves the ubiquitous music video. Its inbuilt logic acts to reinforce the bands intended branding: how they see themselves, or want to be viewed. Miley Cyrus Wrecking ball, bookending twerking, is everything James Dean did to stick two fingers up at suburbia in the 50s - a brand legend was born. Madonna has successfully done this too. The music video serves an important function between artistry, commerce, the fanbase and identity and is often a fictionalised story.
MTV and various music outlets will regularly feature news on a band; nothing new here. News offers the audience facts and representations of the musicians, however, it fails as a pieces of visual artistry to offer some of the tangible effects you might get from a documentary. That is because while a doc maker follows the band, they get themselves into privileged areas and see/ hear things news maker miss, unless its caught by the world's citizens journos.
The music industry has a rich history of documentary making on musicians. Some of my favourites e.g. Maysles Gimme Shelter (1970) featuring the Rolling Stones and Madonna's Truth or Dare (1991).
Hanging out with Albert Maysles behind the epic doc Gimme Shelter (1970)
However, though we've come to accept the elasticity and mutability of the documentary form in the 21st century, in that the form called documentary is now so listless that anything can be called a doc, there are still identifiable tropes.
It's recognisable by itsCinéma véritéfeel.
The films authorship is muted to often reflect the subject.
The making and posting occurs over a period of time e.g. 1 month - a year.
Somewhere on the peripheries of these two established forms: documentary and news making is one of several new factual art forms. One of them is called: videojournalism-as-cinema.
From Wars to Music Video
Discussing conflict and digital with Christiana Amanpour at the Front Line Club
It is a form that is as malleable for covering wars as it is music videos and is as much about the subject matter being produced as the artist behind the lens. Unlike docs, it has a quicker turnover and is what I call a 'visual plenitude'. It has many styles and hybridises the music video genre between news-docs and music videos, yet paradoxically it has a unique line of identity and origin. It is corporeal, sonic (sound is crucial as an assault on the senses) and it is haptic. The videojournalism-as-cinema form is a style that I have had the pleasure of demonstrating at SXSW, the International Journalism Festival and speaking at Apple.
Showing a video made on Moby playing in France, at Apple store, London
Among many news socially engineered terms describing 21st Century media, a feat that took 6 years travelling across the world, videojournalism-as-cinema is featured in my PhD thesis. Inside and over 100,000 pages I provide evidence of how it works, where it came from and what it does and how it wraps around discursive new media forms e.g. websites, mobile etc.
I won't bore your here. However, what I would say is the videojournalism-as-cinema is as much a philosophy as a form that provides a cinema experience imbricating news and docs. It is highly decorative and shares authorship; it is much my film as it is about the subjects. It can be subjective but adheres to the principles of 'truth telling'.
Here below is one of the UK's most innovative film scholars, Mark Cousins, talking briefly about what he thinks it is.
Given the appetite for fan bases to know more about their idols, the form offers more than news and docs in meeting audiences demands. It's also tied to a social media ideology of creating bespoke sites to reflect the videojournalism-as-cinema form and thus populates the indentity of subjects. Below is one of my films and sites for 8 Days.
I'll be speaking more about this at the British Film Industry event, examining the future of news. One thing to bare in mind, videojournalism-as-cinema is implicitly driven by the audience and unlike videojournalism which connotes a certain news form, it is paradigmatic of the way we consume media in the 21st century. David Dunkley Gyimah is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster and videojournalist. He is an industry presenter on new media forms and has consulted for several brands e.g. BBC, Press Association etc. He is next talking at the BFI event on next generation TV.
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 orrespected industryfigures 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.
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, whereanyone’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.
"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.
