Scary story! You’ve been working for an outfit for some 15 years — even as a regular freelancer, you had some inkling of the next pay cheque.
I did stints at the BBC, WTN, Channel One and the rest and then one day at Channel 4 News the dreaded knife struck. A dozen of us were let go.
If it has happened to you yet it’ll come in some guise. For new grads coming onto the market, it’s equally scary as they send off cv after cv — been there too.
For mid-careerists, at some point you’re either elect to go alone having built up a cadre of contacts or take that leap into the unknown.
Army personnel speak about their life inside the forces, compared to outside, civvy street where a simple trip of going to the grocery is alien. Even Presidents talk about the loss of trappings and attention. I’ve been neither, but I can’t think the feeling is any different.
So what do you do?
I read endless self-help books — course you do. Anything that works and audited my own experiences and then fundamentally made the web and new associates my friend; networks became my partners, and my transferable skills an unlikely hidden gem.
Today, as a university lecturer, who still practices his craft, my passion has been to pass it on. Invariably this pathway can be traditional, but there exists a poetic logic — an unwritten manner at creativity beyond the rational in pursuing a goal, which can make your work stand out.
The term derives from the work of the great Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky. Poetic logic from a poetic conscious attempts to create a unique and aesthetic course to complement your identity. You are the artist — and the job can be anything.
I have learned over the years there is no one size-fits all, because cultures, societies, different races create different meanings. My job, I have come to learn is to inspire; to open up new learning practices; to pass on cognitive skills e.g.reading human behaviour consuming media; to acknowledge fears and concerns as necessary, and understand why and what’s happening.
My deepest desires is to channel what I have learned, to utilise my experience as a professional, an artist in residence at the South Bank Centre, a researcher imbuing my complex identity like most of us ( I’m a Black Briton, with a German grandmother) to forge a path that rewards emotionally (emotional intelligence) and financially.
If that sounds reasonable, I’d love to be involved in what you’re doing, to cross paths, to as, Jude Kelly the Artistic Director of the South Bank says: “to collide”.
What’s the point, after all of acquiring all of this if you don’t intend to engage.
Please contact me here David@viewmagazine.tv and here@viewmagazine
Perhaps, an illustration of PR from the early 1900s illustrate its strategic approach and difference to journalism.
Up until 1929, smoking for women was considered immoral. Psychoanalysts equated the cigarette to the penis and male dominance. Cigarette barons though were desperate to have women as a new market. They hired press agent turned father of PR Edward Bernays who recognised if he could find an irrational/subconscious emotion that played to women’s desires, he could reach them en masse.
Bernays hired debutantes to conceal cigarettes on the Easter Sunday Parade in New York (1929) and on his cue, they would light up. He informed the press and ensued the photos which had that studium (taken well to provide his impact) gained maximum coverage. His message to the press was women were smoking torches of freedom. Freedom and liberty were a general, as well as women’s movement post-war.Cigarette sales soared.
Press-Pr-Marketing often operate as a single entity in commercial enterprises.They’re in the business of selling the explicit and subconscious e.g fears, desires.A headline and photo that works unconsciously (at first) on our irrational fears/desires is what’s needed to drive this human construct we call ‘news’. In the instagram age, paradoxically and often to us innocuously, our images and words are continuously being scrubbed for how they might provide secondary-to-primary meaning. Commerce eh!
To the couple of media people around me in London, when I heard the news, I might as well have spoken Klingon.
That’s #SXSW people — the super bowl of pressies and social gatherings. I’m still getting flashbacks today watching live on TV Marcus Allen’s 74-yard touch down at Super Bowl XVIII.
Seriously! SXSW’s gravitas is so A-game, they can call on a @Potus to drop in.
My talk, having passed the public vote would coincide with the start of an academic itch. A big itch. A PhD. I’d been a self-camera shooting journalist for some 15 years, a journo for 20 and it was now so patently obvious as a practitioner that news as a construct and journalism as practised by TV Networks was the equivalent of Nipper the dog earwigging an antique gramophone.
You know, His Masters Voice, abbreviated as HMV, in which the Masters were TV suits inured and sated by spin and corporate agendas.
It wasn’t always the case. At the time of SXSW, I was reading Michael Thomas Conway’s, Ph.D. which by coincidence Conway is a prof at The University of Texas at Austin — yep home of SXSW.
His account of the history of CBS is truly fascinating. Those pioneers, in there 20s and 30s, such as 33-year-old Henry Cassirer really tried to do something revolutionary. Conway cites a Cassier report in Journalism Quarterly in 1949 “A Challenge to Imaginative Journalists.” That section reads.
It will not be true television unless it uses most of the facilities available at the television station, adapting each one to the best way of reporting the individual story. (Film, for instance, is best to report a parade, graphic work is more adequate to visualize a tax debate in Congress, and remote cameras are most 420 effective to convey the colorful scene of a convention. Maps can tell battle movements better than words, but late reports from an overseas conference are most suitably and speedily summarized by the commentator himself, speaking to his audience “on camera.) — Henry Cassirer Journalism Quarterly 392
They got McLuhan’s the medium and the message, so much so, that today whilst digiratis beat their chest about discovering data journalism, visual journalism and the likes, the CBS young turks had it covered way back.
Conway then says something that grabs me. One day at an editorial meeting, an executive showed up and the journos sensed something was up. The suit was dictating editorial coverage. American broadcasting business folk had twigged that News was a money maker, a big one. The ethos of a journalism holding the powerful to account within the political economy and framework of journalism was about to be laid to rest in favour of, you guessed, business interests. Raise a glass to Edward Bernays, the father of PR.
Cut to almost seventy years later and the the lack of diverse stories on television, or the networks’ refusal to show a plus size commercial on the spurious grounds of nudity, when executives believe they’ll lose contracts from clients who promote size zero beauty above an alternative, shows the power of the greenback in story telling. Alternatively, what about this, the head of CBS Les Moonves defending Donald Trump’s excessive news coverage.
It may not be good for America, but it is damn good for CBS … The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. It’s a terrible thing to say. But, bring it on, Donald. Keep going.
10 O’clock on a Saturday morning, I know where I’d like to be I tell attendant’s — in bed, so I’m grateful for those who’ve showed up. Over 45 minutes I map out a different form of newsgathering construct, which incorporates multimedia and an integrated form of videojournalism.
The talk revolves around the use of embed video and sharing, using SEO to reframe millennial journalism; alternative outlets e.g. micro sites to publicise work (four years earlier I’d won one of the US most coveted prizes for innovation in journalism,the Knight Batten); the Outernet which is not too dissimilar to the Internet of Things; and how videojournalism spawns new forms of reportage. These strategies and more were developed with the videojournalist, lone worker, in mind and those wanting their voice heard above the chemtrails.
By some accounts, the talk goes reasonably well. Here’s a sample of that:
Freelance writerAmanda Hirsch, former editorial director of PBS Interactive wrote she was concerned the style I was promoting left little room for finding the story and that…
when I posed this question to him, he got a tad defensive, assuring me that he always listened first, and that he emphasized to his students how listening is key.
Excellent presentation A+. Great presenter. David shared tips and was humorous. This is what SXSW is about. Great job David!
And I even managed to interview a few people after the talk.
The rest of SXSW was as an exhilarating experience of social banter, an exploration of ideas and ambition. I made new contacts. The comedy/ agent of wit trouble-makingBaratunde Thurston (left)whom I met up with in London on his tour of his New York Times bestsellerHow To Be Black.He’s now at the Daily Show. Have to say thanks too to CC Chapman who supplied me with the majority of these photos.
So, yes that was seven years ago. SEVEN YEARS… a life time… but SXSW represents a kind of ground zero for sharing and since then, a number of things have happened that give rise to reflection.
Yes I could now put Dr at the front of my name, but I live in trepidation of that moment on board a plane when the pilot asks if there’s a doctor on board. Yes you in seat 21.
Video has experienced a boon.
Television, in spite of the social media onslaught is still the most popular medium through continual reinvention and still retains what UK TV expert Simon Albury calls ‘Groupthink’ — ideas being made by insiders.
We’re largely chasing the same tools and skills, with more or less the same narrative structures, making us less diverse and distinct. This calls for a revolution at a more fundamental point in our quest for media literacy — a philosophical one.
Such seeds for creativity lay in the stories of the CBS and what I found in my research, a similar more contemporary story on Innovation calledThe Thirty.
Also consider this statement from Marshall McLuhan
If men were able to be convinced that art is precise advanced knowledge of how to cope with the psychic and social consequences of the next technology, would they become artists? Or would they begin a careful translation of new art forms into social navigational charts? I am curious to know what would happen if art were suddenly seen for what it is, namely, exact information of how to arrange one’s psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties. Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media)
What do you think?
We rarely talk about artists in media, referring instead to the age of the Tech, blogger, social media etc. but Artists and exemplary ones at that are the weather vanes of a vision of the future.
They defy listicles and simplistic framing. They find ways to connect the inner self with the external world and rarely are taken seriously within the present.
The level of experimenting, of looking for individualism, of innovating within innovation is set to repeat a cycle in history — the 1900s. What I spoke about at SXSW in Integrated Multimedia Videojournalism represented the iceberg of a more potent form, which can simply be understood as Cinema, journalism — a myriad of cinema and it’s one I look forward to multiple sharing
Different cultures interpret stories differently: know your audience.
Storytelling is an art and science — study it
Respect the giants whose shoulders you’re standing on, and let others one day stand on yours.
Sod everything else.
[roll on reality]
For the best part of 50 years in broadcast and hundreds of years in newsprint, the establishment pretty much had the field to itself. Businesses supplying hardware locked their clients into long term deals, so they could future proof their profits and the chief executive could afford that St Tropez yacht, without risking the mortgage payments.
When the sails came down, new astute, more nimble entrepreneurs surfaced. Who can blame them? Drone journalism, mobile journalism, citizen journalism, long journalism, solution journalism, data journalism, video journalism, laptop journalism, indifferent journalism, and the rest…
Some of these new niche genres were genuine byproducts of traditional journalism’s inertia. Others would give love-handles to characters fromMad Menproud, a sleight of PR hand reworking new business opportunities.
Take mobile (phone) journalism. Yes, it’s been transformative to social media, but in video production please don’t be fooled, it’s just another camera competing amongst a panoply of others. Some talent would sell off previous gear to go mobile purchasing an array of lenses and accessories. That makes little sense creatively, unless budget is the key reason.
Ultimately, it’s about using the most appropriate gear for the job. By the way, mobile journalism was the term to label 1960s Direct Cinema when cameras and synch sound gear could for the first time go mobile.
There’s more than enough material on digital’s impact on storytelling. InKeanu Reeve’s documentarySide by Sideand equally exemplaryMark Cousin’sThe Story of Filmthese visionaries provide a teleogical impact of digital: Reeve’s on the format over film and Cousins a lengthier expansive look at cinema’s development over a hundred years that ends with ones and zeros.
Digital in the 90s aligned with one of the more significant contemporary movements (Danish) in film called Dogme 95.Celebrationdirected by Thomas Vinteberg and DoP’d by Anthony Dod Mantle spearheaded Dogme’s intent. The film’s visual language, aided by smaller cameras, is more immediate; whip pans, super close-ups, and distinctive angular framings fill the screen.
But just as Dogme was baring its teeth in fictional film, alongside a revivalist indie market in the US, another revolutionary change was occurring in the world of journalism in the UK — a profound creative movement setting off teutonic ripples, but which little is known about.
Digital provided an impetus to a form of journalism known as videojournalism: journalists who authored their own stories; saw no need for editors in newsroom; became jack of all trades in video styles and master of all, from presenting, creating reality shows to making programmes online and could when pushed knock off four, 2 minute interview-reportage in a day.
But there was one feature that has been continually overlooked, which 20 years on is only now slowly being appreciated. Like the Dogme 95 movement making fictional cinema, this group of videojournalists, referred to asThe Thirtywere creating factual cinema — cinema journalism.
The wider perception is that cinema journalism is linked to DSLR cameras circa 2008, but that’s another myth. DSLRs provided a sharper (cinematic) image, but the perceptual qualities of cinema that derive from structure, plot, composition, art, narrative qualities and philosophy was cracked by The Thirty movement in the 1990s. It so riled the establishment it was pilloried, derided and dismissed by industry, and only now are experts reflecting on its impact.
History provides a number of salutary lessons to learn from and in the next post I’ll explain how this movement and their working methods are a model for creativity. How cinema journalism envelopes an amazing breadth of styles illustrating the Soderbergh, Von Triers and Lees of new journalism, and why it will undoubtedly become a defining feature for non-fiction storytelling embracing all other forms.
In the
run up to the UK General Election in 2015, with the Labour party gaining head
steam, the chips looked like falling for its leader Ed Milliband — a
doppler-type figure aiming to be somewhere between Bernie Sanders and Roger
Ramjet — edging into Downing Street.
Labour’s advisors,
following a series of political Harry Houdinis — 100 business leaders were
rubbishing Milliband in the conservative-partisan Telegraph — were to play an
ace card.
Anyone living
abroad, the wealthy and tax evaders, were about to be carpeted. Milliband
announced he was scrapping a loophole in the law that enabled “non-domiciled”
UK residents to avoid paying any tax on foreign income.
Canny political
calculations, his advisors noted, would give Labour at least three days of
headlines, effectively controlling the news agenda and picking up more steam
amongst the electorate.
The Conservative
party knew it too and played one of their most dastardly campaign strategies.
One of the conservative’s more respected politicians, Defence Secretary Michael
Fallon, presented in the media as a mild mannered person, did a Trump. Sorry
mate the Brits got their first.
In PR terms it’s
called a ‘Dead Cat’, a strategy coined by Australian strategist Lynton Crosby,
who was hired to be the Conservative’s campaign director. Simply put, imagine
you’re at a dinner with your family. You’re winning the argument about why
Bobby, your brother should not be going out with friends in Mum’s car when he’s
five times over the drinking limit. Then Bobby puts his hand under the table
and the next thing places a dead cat on the table. What happens next?
Everybody stops
talking about Bobby’s traits and screams, ‘There’s a dead cat on the table’.
For the forseaable future it’s all about the dead moggy.
For Labour, Fallon
crowed to the media that Milliband was unfit to be Prime Minister because he
had stabbed his brother in the back in winning the party leadership. He
couldn’t be trusted.
It was an
outrageous comment axiomatic with Trumpisms. Labour knew it. Some advisors, it’s
said, even quietly admired the chutzpah. The Conservative’s knew it. And the
media knew it too. But the collegiate village-environment of mainstream media
couldn’t resist the bait.
Milliband’s
initiative had been pole-axed and the media led for a series of days with the
Labour leader’s lack of integrity and Fallon’s bromide comments. For as long as
Trump’s campaign has been running, the reality TV star who knows how the media
function has been placing one dead cat on the table after another. And the media
has proved inept to see through them.
Being out of the
limelight has its draw backs, so Trump’s dead cats serve to re-orientate the
media’s gaze on him, providing him with the oxygen to be nicey-nicey with his
audience, play the media victim, shape-shift to his audience’s preferences,
before teeing up the next cat.
‘Why the modern world is bad for your brain’published in the Guardian by neuroscientist Dr. Daniel J Levitan summarises how the world of tweeting/ emailing and watching tv at the same time is bad for your health. It causes stress and releases hormones that 'overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking'.
Perhaps not so much strict multi-tasking (could do with a definition), but the experiments conducted by the widely respected BjorkHuman Learning and Forgetting Labat UCLA explain how the process of learning that involves variation and difference aids long term memory retention.
In Veronica Yan’s presentation from the lab’sexperimentfrom 1.52 mins in from thisvideothe following comes as a surprise. Two sets of participants were tasked with recognising the styles of 12 different artists. One set studied one artist’s work, before they moved onto another. The other group studied the same artists but in a random fashion. Contrary to presumed belief, the second group ‘learned the styles a lot better’, says Yan.
Professor Bjork refers to the process of learning which involves deep engagement, like the random sampling of artists, as ‘desirable difficulties’. So while switching from a supposedly different task to task may have its problems according to NeuroscientistDr Daniel J Levitan, switching foci on elements in a learning process helps your memory, saysProfessor Bjork’s lab.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Why as a tech-creative you need to get a grip with the 1920s
Wars loomed; politics was a mess and tech e.g. phones were blazing a trail such that entrepreneurs thought they’d never had it so good — almost anything was possible.
Audiences were being bombarded with new platforms. New styles of music with frenetic drum beats were wowing audiences. Literature too was metamorphising. Its fresh facade was non-linear personalised texts about its subjects represented from amultiple of angles( the biog rather than the blog). Meanwhile, poetry e.g. Imagism was quite literally cutting-edge.
Film too was at it. New styles were emerging; some the audience understood, others seemed a little quirky that that they soon tired. An example of this is a man contemplating looks out of the frame. The director then cuts to an image representing what the man sees.
Does all this sound familiar? If obviously yes. Small wonder that in his bookFilm and TheoryAcademic Robert Stam says, in a paragraph towards the end that the new millennium is like the 1900s to the 1920s.
It’s the 1920s all over again — the jazz times when Rhapsody in Blues makes us feel we’re in the black, and the red.
Today, a long line of scholars and perhaps you associate ‘cinema’ only with Hollywood’s 1910 ‘smash-and-grab’ definition. I was musing over all of this in a brief moment during a meeting at the Arts Council, when asked how I showed my voice.
You see, I think journalism in this new era has lost its way, or I should say a strand of journalism called videojournalism and we’d do well to look for ideas amongst cinema and Art. I have just submitted two draft chapters to a publisher about this. Mmmm I wonder what they’ll think?
And that’s the problem isn’t it? We’re tied down by rules, often good and necessary for their time that become conventions. But a convention’s shelf-life is tenuous. It can be propped up to continue to make money, but at some point the audience tires. It happened during the 1920s and continually repeats itself.
It’s happening now, and many of the symptoms for change today can be found in that creative behemoth of a period, when the telephone was coming on stream and the airwaves were beginning to be transformed.
It’s worth looking at the 1920s, and if you do, you’ll come across something else. Technology is assistive. It has fad qualities. It comes and goes. The message, of what you have to say and how you say it in different cultures is the primer.The mechanics as I’ve said before can be secondary.
And now can I have our factual cinema back please?
