Masters in online journalism visit ITN

Images from the visit of Masters students to ITN. 

Thanks to ITN for welcoming us and also hearing the Masters students pitch and providing a critique.  ITN's Jason and Emma were also very generous with their time and they spent a full two hours with us. 

Full write up to follow. 

How Channel 4 News won the RTS innovative news section, 2012

David arrives early at the judging meeting at the RTS

The winning entry for this year's innovative news read as follows on the RTS's website

Innovative News

No Go Britain, ITN for Channel 4 News

“The winning entry stood out for the novel way in which it helped to give a new look at one of the year's big stories. It built upon the strength of crowd sourcing and social media and then added the clout of a broadcaster to build up the channel's continued commitment to people with disabilities in the year of the Paralympics.”

The Nominees were: 

• 50 States: 50 Voices, Sky News
• The Olympic Torch Relay, BBC News for BBC

Within the glitz, as well as, sombre mood from remembering fallen journalists, the industry gathered at the Hilton to crown the victors. A couple of months earlier, however, the business of finding a winner and why fell to ten of us gathered at the RTS headquarters in central London.

Jurors are pulled from across the industry, as well as academia, from where I come. It's an interesting area to diagnose. What does constitute 'innovative'? We have guidelines and the mood is relaxed, yet business like to soul search, if the need arises.

So why me, how did I get involved? I can't be sure. There's a panoramic look across industry for people with the skill, and presumably, the fact I have worked for BBC, Channel 4 News, WTN, ABC News and a host of others might suggest I possess some understanding of the broadcaster's production process.

In 2005 I won first place in the US' Knight Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism, a decade earlier was one of the UK's first videojournalists, and am completing my PhD which examines innovative news. So I guess I have a penchant for the innovative, which I try to reflect on my site, viewmagazine.tv.

Now, it would be grossly unprofessional to write about our conversations when judging, in that common courtesy alone dictates I should at the very least contact my fellow jurors. I also feel a bit of Chatham House rules  applies to be frank about our conversations, so I will only reflect on my thoughts on 'No Go Britain' and what caught my interest. I'll do the same for '50 States' and 'The Olympic Torch Relay'.

Also, a myth buster to friends who have asked. The voting is such that I genuinely have no idea who has won, until it's announced on the night.

No Go Britain

Awards Night at the Hilton

'No Go Britain' did something that broadcasters rarely have time for, because of the news agenda. They took an off diary event, that is people with difficulties getting across London because of disabilities and contextualised it  via a bit of advocacy journalism. Or as Katie Razzall, C4 reporter put it: 'This was about empowering disabled people to lobby for change'.

The plight of anyone disabled trying to get by on London transport may seem anecdotal or at best isolated, but the programme followed a couple of subjects around as they negotiated their way across the capital, evoking Robert Drew's mantra of 'being there'.  But how did they get their subjects or begin to understand how deep the issue went? Old media and the not so new in twitter collided.

The twitter discourse allowed the programme to pull the issue together. and once it turned from tweets to taped interviews, the subjects within the film were invited to speak on the programme. The shift had been made now to good robust studio debate. It could have been left here, but the producers now made the issue an open platform for the disaffected to meet and discuss on air with execs. 

If there's one thing new media by itself still has yet to do well,  its the clout and platform to call on high profile interviewees, in this case transport bosses and let them face their accusers. When John Major, from the Confederation of Passenger Transport spoke about changes that would take place in 2017, presenter Jon Snow tells us of an audible gasp from panelists, before Anthony Wilson quips: we live in 2012, not 2017.   Good television.

Channel 4 News then announced it would be taking on further campaigns and execute a similar strategy. So what made it innovative?  Tying all those elements together rather swiftly, mixing old and barely new media. Twitter was not incidental, but strategic.

A couple of years earlier CNN used twitter for the world cup in an innovative means. Nope, this doesn't mean you need twitter to impress. But C4News made it look integrated. Other factors included:  letting the stakeholders tell the story, finding strong interviewees who could articulate their concerns and were not fazed by the studio or even the execs they were meeting. 

Finally looking at the workflow, it appeared seamless and the thought did cross my mind of the strategic use of resources and personnel. 

As an acad-ournalist or hack academic ( both horrible words) a critique, such as this will hopefully provide ideas for up and coming practitioners, online media and Masters students looking to understand programme making. C4 News provided a text book case on how to leverage a story. I might have gone slightly further with the videoing, using the Go Pro 3 so the subjects could bring back vérité videos of the troubles they face, but that's a moot point.

Tomorrow I'll talk about 50 States and The Olympic Torch.

Click here for previous posts

David in Tahrir Square, February 19th 2013

In this post I talk about the debilitating effects Egyptian journalists say social media is having on finding the truth in Egyptian politics

David in Chongqing working with universities

In this post I present some pictures towards the shoot we did between new and old China.

On another related matter  I am convinced that Chinese narrative, with its multiple foci in painting, holds an important understanding for elliptical narratives and new media story form.

Speaking at NewsXchange in Barcelona

Here I spoke about journalism and its fragmentation, which is a natural cause, given that journalism, as Schudson says, is a social construct.

The best in TV journalism celebrate the best

To the queen!

Most venerable institutions would do nothing less, particularly when Ma'am or her siblings are patrons. In Soho, the quintissential location for men's tailoring, similar choruses can be heard at their events.

'Can you remain standing for grace?'

Truthfully, I shouldn't be here. My friend and sometimes training partner Rob Montgomery will be amazed to realise I dragged myself to the awards.

12 hours earlier he was shepherding me on to a plane as my frame began to crumble under the weight of a chest infection and cold. Put simply, I looked like a monkey's arse.

But awards only come once a year and my motives are more enterprising than merely social.

For there is no better way of inviting a tv personality to the university, where I teach without seeing them face to face.

There's also a masked syndrome. It goes like this, if you're here, you must be doing something in journalism. In reality, I'm no longer a network producer or reporter, though my site viewmagazine affords me this lifestyle.

Yesterday I was in Tahrir Square, a few months before in Denmark and before that in Barcelona taking workshops or presenting amongst international journalists. Soon, I'm in Lebanon. As a hackademic or journaemic, I balance practical journalism with theoretical findings and what they mean.

No, the reason, I wanted to be here, spluttering unforgivably as the three course meal was served: beef and potatoes etc, was to catch the attention of the likes of the BBC's Ian Pannel.

Arguably, one of the UK's stalwart and fearless reporters, cited by his colleagues for his seat-of-the-pants incisive reportage, Pannel and I crossed paths in 1988 as reporters starting out at BBC Radio Leicester. He remembered me and the invitation to get him along to the Uni to talk to students about international reportage looks very possible.

Similarly, Rageh Omar, whom I know from my days at the BBC African service in 1996.  We exchanged hearty 'hellos' and I mentioned the Uni, to which nodded. Jon Snow, Alex Thomson, Tony Morris ( Newscaster, Manchester) all too said they were up for it.

Result!

Now though I'm paying for one excursion too many. So my trip to Dublin to consort with colleagues where we are in my PhD submission, will have to be done remotely.

At one point over the last three days,  I averaged 3 hours sleep and my diary went: PhD bibliography, Students web site, knowledge Transfer programme, and Arab League presentation.

Now, lots of Vit C. etc and probably the odd antibiotic are highest on my agenda.

Next post. how did they win those awards. I give you a wee insight into the judging at the RTS

How videojournalism came unstuck in Cairo

David speaking at Arab league Conference in Cairo

Hello Mr David!   Folks from Arab states tend to call you by your first name and the prefix,'Mr'.

'I'm a video journalist, how can I learn more?' This is often followed by a swift move to retrieve your email, for presumably later discussions. 

Questions like this are not uncommon, but they're loaded. What my good delegate friend means, is how can I make stories like you.

On the panel opposite me, another delegate rolled her eyes as to say 'Insha Allah'. She continued: Mr David, when you were here five years ago, you were talking about video journalism, and I was thinking how can we learn this, now you're talking cinema journalism, and I'm thinking the same thing.

There was a chuckle from everyone else. The implications being, yep, if you want to stay ahead of the maddening crowd you need to step up.

I love a creative fight club!

Attendants at News Rewired 2010 will remember too me saying  lets have a creative fisty cuffs, because only then can we begin to sort out, by the powers of rhetoric, what this thing means.

If you'd read Moses-knows how many books from my research, a fraction of which I turned into this banal art work below, you'd want to be challenged.

Sample of books I studied. I'll supply a lis in due course

In Cairo, at the Arab league of Nations conference, the more pressing problem mirrors the state of the country's politics. Everything is in transition.

If the BBC had Cairo as its place of abode, it would have a field day. The stories and issues fall about you. You're only literally a stones throw away from tripping up on some other issue.

Yesterday, the Egypt Gazette reported President Mossi appointing a friend, a dentist, as his new IT specialist. Dentists are very clever, yes, but you wouldn't bet on router issues and the intricacies of transmission frequencies figuring in their muffled debates with patients.

Hello Mrs Rabia. Drill at the ready, I'll be over to fix your download speeds afterwards.  

No, what's really eating at Cairo is the amount of people who are publishing, and in so doing wanting to be credible, but engaged in internecine journalism.  In part it's about the dash for dollars, who publishes first and fast wins, never mind whether they're wrong, its out there. 

Secondly, it's an ideological battle, with no sense that the poor lot caught in the middle are citizens who gulp down facts, rumours and figures, without the wherewithal from the professionals to help them distinguish fact from fiction. 

Meanwhile tourism has tanked and the nation is slipping into abject ruin. Oh dear!

If the West, through its sheer willfulness could beat its chest about the benefits of citizen journalism, in Cairo, they're beating their heads. Too much can be a bad thing.

There's no sense of credibility. This isn't about the tools, it's about the attitude. As I said yesterday, what's needed is a social change.

If you don't know your objectivity from your subjectivity, why being partial is perhaps far worse than balance, how being balanced can level the scales, but it doesn't have to be "he said, she said', and that at the heart of all this is a fairness, truthfulness, integrity that you wear in your heart, it's time you found a credible journalism school.

Me, I have done that, but I also believe the experience of the many years working in mainstream, BBC and Channel 4 News, has conditioned me, so that even when I do cinema journalism, I can defend a subjectivity to eke out the story.

The pic at the top was taken when I was working in BBC Radio way back in 1987. Provenance I told another speaker, provenance. 

Subjectivity, actually correspondents to this all the while, as I said to Cairo's new Sweden correspondent. Trust, is something that is earned. There's work to be done, and truthfully, what makes it exciting and both alarming, is 

• Those statues which were laid down to combat yellow journalism apply.
• But, there are local nuances that redefine the philosophy of any journalism.

Take the concept of the vox pop. Both a brilliant filler, but a barometer during the blitz for how individuals felt. Their experience mattered. It's now a feature of many a reports. At best it provides a credibility for the network being in touch with audiences, at worst it amplifies or deadens an issue, because of 

• The notion of balance
• The reporter picking anything

If you follow Schudson's notion that journalism is a cultural construct, and it is by the way, the vox pop to individuals might be better fashioned as the the 'vox pop familia'. It's when you interview families, the patriarchal, and matriarchal and siblings that you come away with not only good sots, but the tensions or harmonies in households - a reflection of Egypt.

In the West the family bears a huge brunt of being dysfunctional or safe. Not in Egypt, though western values are reeking change on this nucleus.

Someone who looked at the family  well in his featured piece was Inigo Gilmore for Channel 4 News. Gigi is battling her sister, whilst their auntie (I think)  exasperated asks why can't everyone just stop this nonsense.  In my own film Tahrir Memento Sara talks about the revolution in her household and how her dad now asks her opinion. 

As the youngest that's uncommon, but Sara fought a good campaigning fight during the 18 days revolution and was recognised for doing so.

The old trusted hegemonic ways of journalism create interesting tensions in these regions. Cinema Journalism may just compound that, but they're willing to give it a go. I have been invited back to Lebanon and Egypt later in the year.

Time to get really ambitious. There's amazing stories to be told. 

For more go to Viewmagazine.tv
I'll post some new films shortly.

Post videojournalism to cinema journalism -struggling to tell a story in Cairo

Guys stay close.

Our host, himself an Egyptian and a seasoned journalism, was matter of fact in his tone, as we filed out of a conference into the cool breeze.

That coolness morphed into a chill. Tahrir is not the square I knew before the revolution in 2007, when I first came here.

Neither was it the strangely homely place residents had built to oust a president.  The current occupants  we were told are cynical, factional, partisan and more hard edged.

True to this picture, minutes later we are accosted by three young men.

'Who are you filming for ?', they ask.

We ignore them and pick up our heels.

In Egypt there's a bipolar attitude to this story. Some are tired of its dominant symbolism slowly atrophying the country's international tourism. The other, says, a delegate is that it's badly reported and the stalemate here looks like continuing for a long while yet.

There's no police in sight and its being run as an autonomous enclave.

I'm here at the invitation of the Arab league, speaking at a two day conference, and using the opportunity to to wrap up my findings into videojournalism.

Now everyone has a camera; citizen journalism is as ubiquitous as the acrid air from Cairo's congested cars and their fumes.  And the effect of the democratisation of shooting isn't helping, we're told.

Fifteen years ago, Itemulang, a bright 20-something in South Africa, spoke to me of the political change in South Africa for a videojournalism film for Channel 4 News, but, he added, we haven't had a social one.

In Cairo, the do-it-yourself approach appears to have detonated a wealth of social networking, without the social responsibility.

How do we ensure we get the truth, a senior figure connected to the United Nations asked. My reply, rather long-winded, was you can't.  A former student of mine, Rabia, urged public programmes of sorts to educate the public.

The whole tenure put into context any ambitions I might have to share my research into cinema journalism. If videojournalism was the new new thing, 20 years ago, which has only just been discovered, then the innovators are moving into cinema journalism.

Don't be fooled, it's not new either. We can look to Robert Drew, the father of cinema verite, whom I had the pleasure of speaking to a little while back. And before then, don't underestimate the Russians.

Cinema journalism though separates the unique videos from the  garden variety videojournalism. But it comes with huge risks. That's what I aim to talk about.

And whilst the surge may be to create cinema, which by the way is not predicated on the camera look.

So a 5D gives you creed, but doesn't guarantee you the story.

No! Cinema journalism is a particular brand of story telling which requires craft skill. That's the message for tomorrow, as I deconstruct the form in my session.

See you tomorrow for an update.

Cracking the knowledge bank in video and net content

David speaking at Innovation conference in Cairo

You put it in, read the markets, and then rebuild.

Welcome to the dynamic, transient knowledge economy, where you might sometimes think you're chasing ghosts.

If you're lucky the deal is symmetrical. By the time you've finished, exhaustion is tempered by the understanding you've given your all, and you've learned something about the journey and yourself.

My week ends where it started. Three death marches, which in the Net world of Soho means 20 hour working days from dawn to dawn.  You smack your lips at 5 in the morning.

A bibliography of ten pages, needs rechecking to the standards of Harvard referencing and thanks to Dreamweaver CS6 responsive design in CSS just got a whole lot easier. Two disparate worlds collide.

But now, even the BBC, 'the market' is looking for journalists that can code.

The weekend sees a flying visit to Cairo to speak at an international Forum for Media Innovations. 

The 'put in' is a presentation: the end of news' hegemony. The 'read', the markets concerns over what is the new 'must have content'. The 'rebuild': it's strangely about news and info that is transcendent. There are better ways of devising news content, but it depends what you want.

By wednesday, following the BAFTAs, it's the turn of the RTS to celebrate and honour its talent. This year I judged the innovation entries. They were exemplary . The victor was a hard choice.

Thursday sees me off to Dublin for last preps for the submission of my six years-in-the-making thesis. I'm starting to call it the missing chapter in the development in digital media.

The 'put in', I certainly couldn't have done this by myself, and I'm very grateful to some of the world's respected film makers and thinkers lending a hand to my new theories.

The 'reading of the market': now this was serendipitous. Last week Britain's communication regulatory body OFCOM handed the contract for a local London television to The Evening Standard.

Deja vu. 20 years ago, one of the groups in my study launched Channel One TV. The 'rebuild': there are enough lessons to be learnt from this study to deliver a local station that could be head and shoulders above anything ever produced.

By Saturday revisions to my site coding in jquery, nailing down the script for my first fictional shoot, the Masters students readying themselves for their launch, should carry me over to the next. After that anythings possible!

IM VIDEOJOURNALISM - Knight Batten winner retrieves lost chapter in the story of video journalism

Homage to Mentor Mark Cousins's story of film

Described as the zeitgeist of media forms, videojournalism was the first in a line of contemporary A-list disruptors to impact the protected fortress of traditional media. 

It involved a way of rethinking media, not in the camera per se, but in its practitioners' approach to that philosophical matrix word, "realism".

Vertov's eponymous film, made a decade short of a century ago, Man with a Movie Camera, tells us that much. It really isn't the camera, it's what we express as alert conscious beings that mostly matters. Then, only then, can the camera come alive.

The snag with journalism, its tyranny, has been its corporatisation and a dulling of interpretation that abrogated its original art form. Instead, we became and invariably are entombed to the tick box of five journalistic paradigms: Who,what,where,how, and why. 

Let me rephrase this, all communications, journalism included, involves a filter: you reinterpreting what the journalists herself has interpreted: a filter within a filter. 

This post for instance which is a piece of journalism will mean different things to different people.

Morphing Journalism

Morphing Videojournalism and its  breakthrough in Africa in 1997

Journalism, as it emerged three centuries back would have struck scholars, witnessing its evolution, as an Art form. 

The very idea that writers could deliver a script with, confusingly for our generation, no perspective, and no predilection to interviewing people, would have meant Daniel Dafoe's new writings was a particular art.

Defoe, who wrote Robinson Crusoe, is often credited as a pioneering journalist.

Ever since then, our reactions to a constipated status quo understanding issues: literary journalism of the late 1800s; Gonzo of the 1960s, have involved renewed efforts and new expressions.

Furthermore, those five "W" pillars, suited for its time, can often be found wanting. It's as if the 2 dimensions of linear journalism required a z-axis, a new consensus, to fulfil our penchant for narrative. 

Videojournalism fell into the aforementioned. Its newness, its genetic makeup was unlike any other before it. Unfortunately, that has been lost on us, almost.

Now, following a six year study, which has been rasping, exhaustive at times, across four continents and some of the world's leading minds and emerging talent, I'm almost ready to share what I see as a remarkable story.

The claim of an unwritten text may seem nonsensical. What more can be said of this thing that has not been said? Everyone's doing it. The camera in the tech advance world is like the air we breath. Ubiquitous!

"And what makes you think you have got something worth listening to?", you might ask.

8 Days - a video journalism film from Mrdot.co.uk

Videojournalism

Firstly, google "Videojournalism" and the chances are you'll come up with this site on the front google page: 

• http://www.mrdot.co.uk/videojournalism_today.html

It's from the site: Mrdot.co.uk, which features the first UK regional newspapers learning videojournalism from the UK's biggest and most respected news agency: The Press Association.

It says this of videojournalism:

Videojournalism is an advance on television news production - a shift away from the predictable approach television has stuck to doggedly since its inception.

It is next generation television: story telling in which you are not be bound by the many constraints of traditional news production....More on video journalism

That seems obvious now, yet there lies in this text a deeper story, more nuanced, providing greater clarity and purpose, which I have pursued in "The Story of Videojournalism", if you're interested.  

The text and site on Mrdot.co.uk is connected to me in various ways: 

1. Mrdot.co.uk is one of my earliest net accounts from the late 1990s 
2. I trained the journalists in the film, 8 Days, which I also made.
3. I helped the Press Association create and launch their programme.

I'm grateful to everyone who has engaged with its meaning and sometimes contacted me to understand more. 

So where has this new knowledge come from and what might it mean?  New knowledge is like the embers of a log fire. The more smouldering logs you bring together, full of potential, the brighter the fire burns. 

Knowledge invariably, is not the product of one person and depends on a critical understanding of first finding knowledge nodes. These can be artefacts in books and films, or the experiences of expert people. 

And then secondly, interpreting what is gathered so, as Gestalt theory proposes, patterns and cues appear, is not a given.

But all knowledge is transient. It's only as good as the time; its temporality, and this can be for a number of reasons. One of the most pernicious causes is what Foucalt, a celebrated philosopher, called discursive formation.

Lets pretend Twitter went out of business today. What are the chances that we might begin to think that far from tweets being a way to connect with friends with ambient messages: "my bikes been stole!", its most vital role is to inform people of the more formal things you're doing. 

And if the latter were the case, then people/institutions with content, would gather the most followers. This has often been the charge of traditional media, that twitter is their echo chamber.

The most brilliant ideas don't necessarily start with the institutions, but history has shown us that they will appropriate and use them for their own ends. Twitter for the media is a way to push for contacts and promote their own programmes, not to say, we messed up on the Jimmy Saville story.

And then in paying homage to a great teacher, I give credit to the Mark Cousins, an incredible filmmaker and historian, who spent time evaluating my work and study and with great generosity deconstructed it.

The Telegraph called Cousin's 15-part documentary on film, the cinematic event of the year...extraordinary.

The implications for this study I hope affect our cognition of story form within videojournalism, the way its taught, and how audiences are changing.

Visionaries often pave the way to the future. This studies' trajectory threads content from various visionaries  and a logic I hope will open up dialogue to how, we do what we do in these different times.

End
++To contact David Dunkley Gyimah, who is an artist-in-residence at the Southbank email David.dunkleygyimah@southbankcentre.co.uk

The changes to news and videojournalism

Something very interesting is happening in news narrative, very interesting, and it came to me when my head of department made a comment.

Coming from him a dye-in-the-wool BBC type, it got me thinking. It's something I addressed in my talks together with other techniques.

Before I talk about this go and look at this and below the page fold I'll speak about what's happening.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vJG698U2Mvo

Did you take the test?  If you did it's akin to the following. The BBC and a lot of organisations are using different quality glass for news making, some are embracing the DSLR.

The effect invariably is that the viewer spends so much time looking at the pictures as to ignore what the reporter is saying.

This hyper-reality reportage, a term used by Jean Baudrillard who infamously minimised the gulf war, now requires a fresh approach to story form and its one that has not been sorted out, yet! What d'you think needs doing.

Historians will tell you documentary faced the same problem in particular the venerable Murrow.

Drive, Be Driven or Drown Part 2

Yesterday I talked about provenance and the back story, which made me think about applying it to my own narrative. The mantra was drive, be driven or drown.

Everyone drown's as some point. It comes from pushing beyond your boundaries. Though this is an inherent fear for some. The more you drive, the more you invite the circumstances that put pressure on yourself.

Drown

In doing something that scares you, for the last six years I  have been scared witless researching a thesis into  new types of storytelling that synthesises various approaches and I can't wait for it to be finally finished to share.

We communicate via stories, so story and narrative is at the heart of what we do. The thesis

pulls together:

• Working as a reporter for commercial television, ITV's London Tonight and producing on the BBC

• Working as a videojournalist starting from 1994, and as a producer and videojournalist for Channel 4 News and filming in France Moby

•  And online creations such as The Cube, in an attempt to explore the web's unique spatial narrative, as opposed to film's linear sequencing. This, an interview/film on intelligence was with an interview with the former head of the CIA, James Woolsey from Nato's War Games base in Denmark.

Be Driven

• Share ideas as collaborative goals. In fashioning this concept for new narratives I could not have done this without the help of others such as:

1. Richard Sambrook
2. The makers behind Pimary
3. Dimitri, head of Raw behind Nat Geos popualar series 'Banged up Abroad'
4. Tom Kennedy and Brian Storm from Media Storm
5. Nick Pollard, recently behind the Pollad Inquiry
6. Deborah Turness, the Editor of ITN News.
7. In all some 200 people were interviewed which I pared down for a narrative

Drive

• learn what you can from others then carve your own niche. For this elaborate story, I have travelled across 20 continents and territories which include:

1. China
2. Cairo - 4 year programme starting in 2007 for your filmmakers and producers
3. Chicago
4. Spain
5. United Kingdom - co-creating the UK's regional newspaper videojournalism programme with the Press Association 
6. Tunisia

This sums up one program and as I wind up its work. I can now cast my sights on new ones, which are more visual and film making.

My own provenance is I was an Applied Chemistry grad who wanted to work in the media, but could never get a job at least via an application scheme because on paper I looked very thin with the right sort of experience. 

But I always firmly believed in the mantra - drive, be driven or drown

Click here for insight into major new findings on

What is videojournalism on the web, in multimedia and offline - a major study and film - and why it matters

Drive, be Driven or drown in creative media, film & videojournalism

Videojournalist David Dunkley Gyimah filming in Egypt behind the scene filming Tahrir Memento

The stories we hear, the one's that stick with us are narratives about individuals, who possess definable qualities. 

One of these is what the art world calls provenance -  a back story that provides a deep level of interest.

A painting found on a rubbish dump is picked up by a fisherman, who gives it to his daughter. 20 years later she comes across it in her loft and has it looked at. Turns out its worth a fortune and Sotherby's expect a bonanza sale which will make the struggling daughter, now a mother, a millionaire many times over.

It's an interesting story in itself, before provenance kicks in. 20 minutes before the sale, Sotherby's receive a call to halt the sale, a gentrifed family, providing a whole new different back story is claiming the picture was stolen from them 20 years ago

They have no evidence of the theft, but they can prove it's theirs.  And they will only give the daughter 25% of the sale. The painting is now worth considerably more.

In all of us lies a back story, but it's knowing how to tap into it, how it can be harnessed and how it serves as a source of intrigue or inspiration, and to whom.

Where you're from, how you got here and where you're going matter.  Curtis Jackson's story aka 50 Cent I recently watched on MTV, like many rappers, is steeped in provenance, as is one of the world's most famous men's designers, Ozwald Boateng, proving its not exclusive to art.

The Backstory is...

David with Ozwald Boateng at the Mayfair Club

No one starts of famous or well known, unless they're born into privilege. Ozwald Boateng answered the call: Drive, be driven or drown, and has the most fascinating back story.

From outside tailoring stock, he penetrated the hallowed lines of Saville Row. A Brit, with Ghanaian parents dared to think the impossible taking to designing in his teens. In the 1990s he staged a fashion shoot in Russia, then several fashion shows in Paris before making his way into the Brit psyche. 

I might know because I have known him for more than 20 years and directed one of his first features back in the days when we would hang out in his Ladbroke Grove home,where he would struggle to fit the stars. 

Today, Will Smith, Samuel L Jackson, Royalty... there are few stars he has not dressed.

Creatives driven to the top have provenance and its the back story that provides currency for as many times they might drowns, but come back again.

Licked by life's fires these individuals scour new peaks on a regular basis.  The higher they go the more rarified the air becomes. Fires can't burn without oxygen. New challenges await them.

Drive, be driven or drown, should be your mantra for 2013 - if it isn't already and you want your provenance to work.

Rewind to the beginning of this tale. There is no institutional, common place way of doing things that you frankly want. You, me et al are searching for ourselves somewhere within the text, beats, zoom, and digital movements of someone else that we can make our own.

But how?

The answer as a blueprint, though personal stories differ, is: 

1. Scare yourself to do that thought-thing. The one that's been weighing on your mind.
2. Share ideas as collaborative goals. BTW collaboration is not a recent Net phenomenon. If you've read Stephen Covey's 1989  international best seller: The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I recommend it where he talks about interdependence. 
3. Learn what you can from wherever you can and then carve your own niche. 

Provenance and purpose

A friend starts a new job today. I'm wishing her the very best. Quietly driven, she has provenance and a story to tell which partly inspired this post. It brings me back to:  Drive, be driven or drown.

This alliteration is life's journey and in finding it in others, it made me self reflect on its application.  A note of caution though, provenance depends on you the recipient deciding its level of interest, not me the teller believing in its sense of importance.

Part 2 continues here

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There is no better feeling than to play a part in the success of others.

It is not a feeling of personal triumphalism, but one you share by association. Often you quietly smile and go on your way. Sometimes the source of this inspiration has the capacity to bring joy to others.

When Mo Farah won his double and Jessica Ennis clinched her event, millions of us joyously wept and even though we may not know them personally, our sentiment would have been "it could not happen to a nicer person'. 

That feeling of satisfaction spurns the next child to take to the tracks. They become the next Farah and Ennis.

Person of the year- You!

It's the same feeling in education. We exist to help others become better than what we have achieved. 

We have made a silent oath to ensure all students emerge from our mentoring to do things they thought they couldn't do - to find that job, to re-engineer media codes, to pass it on.

Some students resist this. Curiously, they quietly contend they know better. A critique of their work is seen by them as an attack. Your willing them on to search and discover is viewed as negligence. 

Your years of experience of what works, the awards you might have won, the cracks you ask them to explore are regarded as nonsense.

I can get you to the water, but you have to decide you want to drink. They will, the determined ones find success on their terms. We must wish them well without reservation.


But within the student makeup are those who would make Steve Jobs smile (read this), let alone us lesser mortals.

They reach planes of success because they are driven and understand personal sacrifices. No successful person got to where they did because it was easy, otherwise we would all be David Beckhams. We effectively become nudgers. A gentle nudge here, a smaller one there.

They inspire us further to want to do better.

They negotiate life's hurdles and where we are permitted invite us to the transient role of advisor, but more importantly as a friend, such as Yixiang, now based in Hong Kong.

Alternative Pathways

Former student Yixiang who is an inspiration talking to MA Students in 2011

Here's a related story. You're going for an interview. You're aware you'll be asked a number of questions, but depending on the interview and the position, I might tell you how to circumvent the process and drive the interview process.

A panel of interviewers, having sat through 20 applicants would like nothing more than someone who has initiative and who stands out from the others. How do I know this? I once went for an editor's job at a BBC regional station.

The interview should have lasted half an hour; it went on for 50 mins. I did not get the job. I was told I didn't know enough about the region's politics, but they found me engaging and were torn. They considered me for the position but a better candidate came along.

Our former students reach their goals and we cheer on their behalf. One went from learner to tutor in one day. He went for an interview and got a top international correspondent's 
post."From now on I will be learning from you", I told him.

Five years on in August, whilst working in Tunisia, a client wanted a senior journalist to drive a project for them. Only one name came to mind. The client rang me a month later to say, "wow" about the journalist. I said "wow" about him back. 

These are individuals who engage in that mystical Hogwartsian university, which one day I'd like to physically bring to life. It is a University of Collapsible Media.

This story I am about to tell please do not confuse with the need to caress my ego. 

Apple Inc Innovation profile did that pretty well enough :)  Some years earlier I was plastered on the Evening Standard magazine alongside Zadie Smith and others as happening blacks in London.

David 4th from right in ES Magazine

My role as an artist in residence at the Southbank Centre is to challenge how we think and what we do. When I present to BBC World Service executives ( see here)  

• To Danish senior journalists
• consult for the World Association of Newspapers here 
• judge the UK's best TV news programmes using innovation for the RTS 
• Or help set up the UK's first official videojournalism programme for the Press Association's newspaper journalists

I take all these experiences and fold them into my lecturing. This doesn't make me right or in what I do, but I take from what Dorothy Byrne the head of Channel 4 said to me, when I asked her about newspaper videojournalism.

She said, they could do worse than consult us. After all, we've been doing this longer than they have.

So, here is a story. I could tell you quite a few more of these going back to 1994, but I won't because they are private and I'm a firm believer in Chatham House rules (being a member n' all). But when I got sent an email two days ago. 

I asked her if she wouldn't mind sharing her experience for all those undertaking Masters in Journalism courses - the next generation - and in particular those at the University of Westminster.

It is how a student studying as a print journalist dipped her toe into online/multimedia and got involved in video. 

For her final project she got into the gates of No.10 Downing street to do her stand-up for a story. She speaks five languages. She got her break with CNN and by the time she'd finished a three month attachment, coupled with her final project, she'd built up the most exquisite portfolio and was then hired to work for a dynamic station in her native country.

This is her story.

Her Story

I want to share something with you. I have just come back from Africa, where I was the first Romanian journalist in the history of the Marine to go to a conflict zone with the Romanian frigate.  It was...amazing.

I had the best time in my life. I filmed part of the reportage, we spent 18 days with them in the Indian Ocean and it was kind of the beginning of my childhood's dream, to be a war reporter and work with the army. 

I guess somehow things arrange themselves as life wants them too. 

Life, I believe, it’s always about a mixture of making the right decisions, working too hard and having that bit of necessary luck. Decisions like attending the Masters at the University of Westminster. And luck, for instance, of meeting people that change your life. Like David Dunkley Gyimah.

I am a kid from Romania who always wanted to be a journalist, before she understood what that meant. So I read a lot, I learned many languages and never listened to the many people who said: you will never make it. 

Or it’s not worth it being a journalist in a country where the meaning of this notion is decades behind what Western countries understand it is, and where people do not trust you or what you represent - the media -  after half a century of communism and fake journalism.

Denisa in action

So I went on learning some more, trying to make the most of the chances to study abroad. I went to Belgium and Prague to do that. And then I was accepted at the Masters in International Journalism, at the Westminster University. 

And I learned to think big and believe nothing is impossible, if you want it and work hard for it. I learned to report, to film, to edit, to have an interest in what happens around the whole world. It was the meeting with David that made me change my perspective. 

I guess his incapability of stopping for a minute, his never-ending energy, his curiousity and eagerness to learn more and discover more have “intoxicated” me, too. 

To give you an example? I am now on holiday, after six months of no free day at all, not weekends, not anything, making plans for the stories I will cover next year. And I got that from him. To never waste time, that’s the first lesson learned.

Second is not to be afraid - for international students, especially - to go back to their home countries, instead of trying forever to make it in the big world. I decided to come back to Romania to work for a TV show which broadcasts reportages. And in two years I travelled across Europe, USA and Africa to film them. 

I have been nominated for national and international awards and I have become the first journalist in the history to cover a conflict with the Romanian Navy on a frigate sent in the middle of the Indian Ocean to fight the pirates. 

Sometimes, going back to your small country means you being one head above the others - for your international education and way of thinking - and also receiving opportunities at a very early age that people would never give you in the big world. This doesn’t make you smaller.

Third lesson: think big, make plans, break rules and never let people convince you that you can’t. Of course you can. And try to implement the rules of international journalism you learned, in your own country/newsroom, as difficult as it would seem at first.

Fourth lesson: continuously learn, read, watch documentaries, improve your work as much as you can and be one step before the others. I’ve started learning my eighth language. The ninth and tenth are coming soon. There’s too much out there to find out and learn, that it would be such a pity not to and waste time instead.

Fifth lesson: work hard, be willing to give up on your life or friends for some time, in order to work and learn and be good at what you do. It doesn’t matter I spend more than 100 hours a week at work. It is worth it now, for sure. Everything you learn and do will help you. And soon.

But all this, if you just love this job. Cause if you do, you’ll make it. And it’s too lovable, I believe. So really enjoy it.

Here's my reportage (it takes a bit of patience, it starts at minute 4 of the timeline: http://inregistrari.antena3.ro/view-23_Dec-2012-In_Premiera_cu_Carmen_Avram-41.html). 

Senior lecturer and digital specialists David Dunkley Gyimah sharing a panel on alternative broadcasting styles with:

• Pavlina Kvapilova, Director, New Media Division, Czech Television
• Caco Barcellos, presenter and director of "Profession Reporter" Globo TV
• Kenji Kohno, Deputy Director, International News Division, NHK.

David a judge, for the UK's highest Television News Awards, the RTS, publishes viewmagazine.tv and is close to completing his PhD which partly examines alternative broadcasting styles. He has 25 years experience in media.