Prometheus of videojournalism and social

By David Dunkley Gyimah. Connect with him on Google 

"Focusing attention only after people start relying on a medium misses the critical era in its development. By the time an audience has gathered around a source, many of the negotiations over purpose and mission are complete. 

Routines have already been developed. Limits have already been set. A “hard pattern” of processes and purposes might already be guiding the product. 

These negotiations not only provide an important view into how and why a medium developed in a certain direction, they can also give us a glimpse of the roads taken".

The above passage comes from Mike Conway's The Origins of Television News in America. It is an incisive text, described as the lost chapter in the development of television news in America by CBS.

Put another way it is the Prometheus of US TV News. In Greek mythology Prometheus is credited with creating man from clay. In Ridley Scott's Sci fi it begs the related question "where did we come from?" the missing link in the Alien's franchise.

Delivering a Keynote in Norway

A fortnight from today I'm in Denmark presenting at a conference of journalists interested in videojournalism and Prometheus is an important subtext for my 2 hour session.

Let's recap: "Focusing attention only after people start relying on a medium misses the critical era in its development".

I have long held that Videojournalism UK misses a critical era in its development and I hope in an 80,000 word thesis via a rhetorical argument to prove this.

The difference stems from the development of videojournalism from a period in the mid 90s in which videojournalism was built from the ground upwards to furnish the ambitions of a newspaper company with $82 million dollars, about £50 million pounds to spend.

There was no existing process and videojournalism was the panacea.

The converse which the BBC came to develop was, having observed videojournalism from a distance to cherry pick what it needed incorporated that into existing structures so there are degrees of compromise people had to negotiate.

The result is a different manifestation of videojournalism from one group that I have researched and for which I was fortunate to be a part of in the mid 1990. I do not say that one form of videojournalism is better than the other in structure or organisation, but that it was different and delimiting.

Broadly too what it thus presents is a videojournalism that mimics the duopoly that existed in the 1950s between a filmic form called Cinema Verite, Free Cinema  and Direct Cinema.

It's been fascinating to see this played out and I have verified some outstanding questions by speaking to the founder of Direct Cinema Robert Drew.

None of this somehow should come as a surprise. We've seen time and time again how institutions assimilate and codify technologies and processes to become their norm which become the normalcy for various constituents.

We can't know it all, but it's a shame if we can't have the desire to want to know proclaimed Socrates.

Here for ff up piece on presentation to Danish Journos.



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What comes next in Social Network of News?

Scene from Sex Lies and Videotape

By David Dunkley Gyimah. Connect with him on Google 

The appearance/ reality divide is arguably the most fundamental distinction in philosophy, said David Rodriguez-Ruiz in his critique of Steven Soderbergh Sex Lie and Videotape (SLV).

Soderbergh, 26, and a relative unknown in 1989 stunned Hollywood with his film about tangled relationships and sexual repression. So this is what goes on behind the curtain's of middle class suburbia.

The conceit was further complicated by the central role of a relatively new device, the consumer camera. One of the main characters gets off filming women talking about sex.

It didn't matter that this was a fictional story, its low budget style convincingly posited this as a quasi-documentary. Reality TV,  a decade later, owes a debt to SLV. This was non-fictional material captured for our fictional titillation.

The appearance/reality divide is central to all forms of media including news whose prudishness likes to think it's above reproach.

Truth or to use the more apt term "verisimilitude" is the thing that news and non-fiction attempts to capture, but it's not fixed. In Simon Blackburn's erudite read  Truth - a Guide to the perplexed, we learn how the vocation of getting to the truth has evolved over the centuries.

Blackburn, a professor of philosophy at Cambridge University states:

For a time in the seventeenth century, ordinary, everyday empirical belief may have seemed fairly easy, The ideas in our minds come from impressions, and impressions come from the impact of the world around us. 

This system of truth could equally have applied to news making. "Tell me what was said", as opposed to what was saw was instrumental for early journalists from Andrew Marr's My Trade - A Short history of British Journalism.  Some journalists (circa 18th C) didn't even bother to verify.

But  around the turn of the 20th century, journalism borrowed from the sciences with positivism. If a scientific experiment could be replicated anywhere around the world in what they were they doing, how could that help journalism?

Journalism's so called rules

The rules of objectivity, impartiality, fairness and balance developed over time hereon. They've had their flaws, but, by and large, they've held the practise of storytelling together, bridging the gap between appearance and reality.

But, Social Networks have now thrown an almighty spanner at this.  It's not the technology per se, though that's important, but the philosophy underpinning the appearance/ reality divide.

Michael Schudson an eminent academic at the Columbia School of Journalism reminds us, and this is significantly relevant now, that news is a cultural product.  Culture, the human need for membership or shared feelings of a social group is at the heart of the fundamental changes to the news landscape.

Understand culture and societies and what's happening in news becomes obvious.

That broad analysis aside, within the viewing patterns of traditional media, the codification of television viewing cultures is performed according to a class rating system, developed in the UK, and wait for it, 50 years ago. 

The grades ABCDE equate as, A being affluent and E being impoverished. Back then Britain was a fairly homogenous place with distinct markings. Now, not so. And the system devised by default for the web of new technology adopters versus the stay-putters, may not even suffice.

Regarding the broader context of cultures Roger Scruton, a well known sociologist, advances the logic for my point. He views cultures as the creation and creator of elites.

And since the 20th century the news and media industry, at least in Western cultures has been the promulgation of news cultures by elites towards elites. Paradoxically, this thing called news made in the West has been one of the most successful exports across the world.

To make the news follow our example they say. "Our" being CNN, BBC, Sky, ABC, CBS, France 2 and the rest.

Since social practises and literary conventions change over time within cultures, so the effect of the Net, disrupting fixed cultures and debunking elite cultures reforms the way we view, but also want our news.

The "we" is no longer a stolid system, which is why on your twitter account, as many people connect with you, will disconnect with you over time.

And what a group of "we" want, which was partially always there, but has now been heightened by connections, ambient relationships, centredness, in a fragmented, to put it lightly, crap existence. I'm pulling a point from Professor Manuel Castells broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Analysis.

And there's an added layer. What cultures want ( young urbanites vs empty nesters) is at odds with a profession that believes its craft skill gives it the edge to tell cultural groups what they need.

Sky News uses Social Media matrixes to create stories

When I visited Sky News, I was amused, if not a little surprised to see their social ticker operating in the newsroom. The ticker shows the broadcaster which news is going social, so they follow up. This is not for all news by the way, but we're back at the conundrum, which is partially solvable.
Do we tell people what they need to hear, or what we believe they should know?

Jean Baudrilllard called it hyperreality. We want so much of what we believe we should have, but are denied by media institutions that we're in a continual process of inventing artifacts that bridge appearance/ reality divide.

We want intensity ( Instagram); to be loved ( Facebook);  to learn about others without any commitments, the theme of SLV, which works into Tweeter. We want info quick (Twitter again) and we live in the age of visuals (SLV) and PInterest.

Any app, any software that attempts these stands a chance of success and the reason broadcast media struggles with this is again is the differing cultural systems they occupy, either because of their homogeneity within and lack of pluralistic connections with cultural groups outside.

Have you ever wondered why media people employ by likeness. You could tell who works for the New York Times and The Washington Post, Schudson tells us. But if it helped them back then, it's not now.

The BBC is an interesting case.

Social Networks at the BBC

Yesterday I read a fine blog by Nadja Hahn on ten ( at least ways) to make social media work for organisations. The BBC was the exemplar.

It made me reflect on my days working at the BBC in the 1980s and 90s.  The BBC as Hahn notes is doing some fine things with Social.  In effect, it's tackling the issue of cultures and elites in a way that's far different even from the makeup of staff when I worked there.

I presented to senior BBC executives about storytelling and video making here looking at different cultural group's video making. Of course back in the 80s the web wasn't available then, so the hegemony of the BBC's culture was stable and intact.

The BBC has proven itself to be quite astute, particularly 2008 onwards, and as my own visit showed before the completion of their new premises the set up looked impressive. 

But I can also show you emails between  commissioners and me in 2001-2003 where they did not get social or the web, and you only have to get Peter Barron, its former editor of Newsnight over a beer to learn the herculean task of the BBC to review itself in and out to become highly relevant again.

There's still work to be done though, but the BBC has a huge advantage in capacity and resources, which commercial organisations with more fixed cultures on the one hand and limited resources on the other, will always find difficult to match.

Social, as much strategic involves a large portion of throwing a lot of material out there, which is why Mashables tweets almost every minute on new findings.

The issue therefore is what comes next in News?  To objectivity, impartiality, fairness and balance comes "mutual affinity" - what can I know about you that becomes relevant.

And fundamentally as my own PhD research has revealed, some of those central tenants above that sculptured 20th century journalism are not as centrally relevant, integral perhaps, as they once were.

As cultures change, perceptibly over lengthy periods, we can count on more pressure on journalism. Professor Manuel Castells says it will get more disruptive. From my own research I  wholeheartedly agree with him.

About David

presenting in Tunisia on cinema journalism

David Dunkley Gyimah begun his career in news in 1987 going on to work for Newsnight, Channel 4 News and ABC News South Africa. He is completing his PhD in the future of news that looks at philosophies and cultures. He is participating at NewsXChange a NHK produced session on Social media and broadcasters; Denmark's national union of journalists on videojournalism, and UNESCO. He publishes viewmagazine.tv and is a recipient of the Knight Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism and International Videojournalism Awards.




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

Winning a Youtube Channel worth up to $850,000

It's all about the tube - David's baby mac - model of the first mac he worked with in 1993

If you're an existing channel owner, you should be quaking considerably in your boots. 

If you've always wanted to own your own channel and couldn't afford the Sky platform insurance indemnity of supposedly $1,000,000, Youtube just answered your prayers.

The platforms says it was part of its original plan as this week it rolled out 60 new channels in Cannes, made up predominately of European producers.

The idea is channel proposals with strong brand potential and detailed feedback on their audience profiles can grab $200, 000 or up to $850,000 according UK industry magazine Broadcast. A watermark of 100,000 subscribers appears to be the bench mark.

So far the victors include: Endemol, who make Big Brother; Hat Trick Productions behind "Have I got News for You", and Jamie Oliver's Food Channel.

The outlay of funds from Youtube's parent Google will be recouped from the ad sales. This year Google stands to make more than $10,000,000.

The move signals a bold foray into television's already diminished audiences and also leverages Youtube as the platform of the future to watch television.

Yet it could also spell the end of meritocracy for the millions of users whose use built up the brand. That is by playing to stronger brands, Youtube may be forced to set up tiered premium relations with its commission winners.

In its bid to become the destination of viewer choice, Youtube is also signaling intentions by dint of the producers its allied with to produce lengthier quality pieces. The days of the idiosynchratic 2 minute  piece could be number.

david working on Nato's War Games 

The strategy that must be adopted by existing networks, aware of the social power of Youtube, is to jump into bed with them.

This could be a boon in some sense as firstly Channel owners avoid some of the superfluous regulatory frameworks of channels.

Over the last five years for instance, we've been working on Nato's War Games series .

For us this would be a prime platform not only for War Games but streaming web-based docs to audiences about conflict, an idea that Danfung Dennis indepedently arrived at for his iPad platform Condition One.





David Dunkley Gyimah will be  in Denmark UNESCO (cairo), New Xchange in Barcelona speaking about future media. You can find more about him as a senior lecturer, PhD researcher and programme maker from his site www.viewmagazine.tv

News Xchange Media and Videojournalism ideas that make the modern world

Delivering a Keynote in Norway

Every broadcaster wants to know about the future. Everybody wants to know about the future.  Yet often the future is something they won't countenance, until it becomes untenable.

"Breaking News: Can TV Journalism Survive the Social Media Revolution?" presented by the BBC's Lyse Doucet for the annual Huw Wheldon Lecture is yet another example of confirmation.

Doucet spoke about her resistance to Social Media until the Iran 2010 demonstrations. Then the collective of the people illustrated a wisdom of crowds. This is what it would have been like in the 1930s had not the intelligentsia ruled the teleporting of vision should be controlled. 

And even then BBC considered it such a low art compared to the spoken word.

From the moment I wanted to become a journalist in 1987 balancing my Chemistry degree with shifts at BBC radio, the ambivalence or skepticism to anything new has been a feature hard to ignore.

And "new" back in the 80s meant personnel as much as technology. When three years later I travelled to report from Apartheid South Africa, having had stints on Newsnight and BBC reportage, my uher became my recorder and edit bay. 

Using the BBC's studios in Johannesburg was out of the question. Adapting was something I learned quickly in order to make a living.

Embracing technology for me was a given. In the last twenty years I have yet to meet a broadcast executive who in 1996 didn't sniff at this thing called the web, or in 2000 think editing on your mac was a prepubescent activity, or in the ensuing years pour cold water on somehing called MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.

The general thinking is that technology has been the driver for the new dawn in hyper-communications, but that misses a huge point: the needs of the broadcaster comes first before techno-fetishism.

A broadcaster or publisher will simply not lay out millions of pounds on a piece of technology and its development when that means a depletion in its bottom line. They are a business first and foremost.

There's no such thing as an altruistic broadcaster or publisher.


In 1995  when some of the UK's most powerful publishers merged their interest into the British Media Industry Group, they did so aware that projections for the newspapers business did not look healthy and like all businesses the imperative, where possible, was to diversify.


Few, if any of them if they were candid, would claim to know 1995's future up to 2000 as this video I present as an anchor at Channel One shows.



But they were aware through the availability of cable, because that's what primarily defined multimedia in the 1990s, that there was leverage to be gained in the lucrative field of television advertising.

The 2000 Media Jump

By 2000 scores of management and executive meetings, with overheads and PowerPoint's needed to be run, often back to back.

Those who weren't prepared to shift a bit to the new quadrant, even though by netizens' standards these were small moves, left their employ.

Then publishers and broadcasters did something remarkable. Instead of nurturing talent within, many opted to buy in talent from tech companies and the silicon valleys. 

Actually that's not the remarkable bit. 

What was, is that to do this they acknowledged a degree of dead space in their companies and the hit they could take financially and in resources before getting up to speed. Any company trying something new has to build in a contingency that absorbs inactivity by default.
  
TV and publishers have always circulated their own talent. This time they went fishing outside and when they succeeded, their confidence was such you would have thought they invented new media.

It wouldn't be the first time. Some people think Ed Murrow invented television news. New research by Mike Conway in The Origins of Television News in America begs big time to differ.

For that reason then I'm grateful to some of the big hitters in broadcasting for setting the record straight when it comes to videojournalism in the UK. As the figure who brought videojournalism to the BBC Pat Loughry states: "Channel One TV was ten years before its time". 

Channel One TV was the videojournalism station I joined in 1994 having previously worked for BBC Newsnight and reported from South Africa.

The videojournalism I knew was equally not palatable as the future for broadcasters and publishers. In a couple of weeks however I'm on the road mapping out the future of the media and the future which I glimpse will again make for some bum shuffling.

Media Futures Research

That's not to say that I know specifics in which app will do what, but if we mine from the themes of Jean- Froncois Lyotard, Jacques Rancieres, Leonard Shlain Nicholas Mirzoeff and others, a picture emerges, though its not necessarily explicitly. 

The general theme is, we are becoming more image conscious rather than worshiping the alter of the text. Shlain provides a convincing argument to this that spans centuries. It's the reason why less writing ( twitter) and greater images ( Pinterest) currently work.

Appearing in Time Square

It's the reason why Tokyo, Times Square and Picadilly Square London, look like perpetual landscaped Christmas trees. Postmodernism, not to be sneered at, tells us we lead fragmented, disjunctive  lives. You like your job, then don't like it; you have many friends, but not real friends.  

All this was known before Facebook, which is why Facebook would work. Anything that connects us that gives us a sense and belonging requires attachment. Social didn't just happen, it was a brew stewing for a while.

Right then if you're so smart asks the absolutist, how come you're not making a mint. LOL I'm working on it, but yes it is the technologists, the builders, who are in vogue. Journalism provides other intrinsic values.

If you want to become rich become a banker.

But remember how in 2006 I spoke about all that acres of broadband space, what will broadcasters do? Well they're doing that, only just now.

But what about the next generation of broadband? This is what the Chinese created when I had the opportunity of visiting their expo. The Internet would support holograms, such as this child and mother speaking to grand ma and dad - projected as figures.




or what about this Outernet site profiled on Apple's site in 2006, which every town will have one day, which will let you dump compressed files onto your phone to be watch on your HD at home. 




Or that a bluetooth device which will one day make telephones redundant. In fact by allowing access to its echo feature you can hear anyone who is mentioning your name. Geopositioning will tell you where. 

Remember the shiny emblem Kirk and his team tap and then speak into?



The reason being that along the horizon exists the next big web volcano - the shake up of learning, knowledge and education.

The signs are there, the logic is simple - all the institutions are diversifying, as they should. Pearson publishers, who I present to in a couple of weeks, have their own degree course and there's more.

The structures that so suited the traditional learning environment are being turned around. In a couple of weeks, I'm addressing journalists in Denmark, Unesco in Cairo and I might, might just be speaking about the future at News Xchange.

And its the learning environment that will present the next, did-not-see-it-coming for broadcasters. Question is will they see it?

Because from the "now", history tells us at some point there's also an anti - a shift that cuts against the grain - which is another reason why it's difficult to nail trending and for the benefit of the broadcasters countenance what lay ahead in the future.

David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster. In his broadcast career he worked for Channel 4 News and Newsnight. He is a Knight Batten Winner for Innovation in Journalism.

Pushing the visual and video journalism envelope

Mark Cousins, behind the Epic Story of Film, the book and Channel 4 Series,  described by the Telegraph as the Cinematic Event of the year has a new film out - What is this film called Love.

His previous multi-faceted work includes the must-have book on documentary written with his friend the Oscar winning documentary/film maker  Kevin Macdonald Marley (2012), Touching the Void (2003) and One Day in September (1999) .

Mark's influence on my work, and I many other cinephiles, has been deeply rewarding.

I first came across on screen him when he presented a series on the BBC in the 1990s interviewing some of the greatest directors and actors in the world. e.g. Scorsese, Tom Hank's etc.

Three years ago I had one of those rarest opportunities to share a space with him for a week. Such is his vast encyclopedic knowledge that he deconstructed my work and offered his own critique, which I intend to eventually use for a book.

Interviewing Mark Cousins

What Mark offers is a philosophical probe and language of film. But and it's a big BUT, not philosophy in a manner to complicate or muddy affairs, but to experiment and bring clarity. Film is soup, which does not have fixed meaning.

We create meaning through a negotiation between what the filmmaker offers and how we ourselves perceive the text. One aspect of this is a Wittgensteinian model. The strength of images and text is not fixed and that film based on fixed language of meaning is not fixed.

Because then the limitation of language pens in ideas. If you're five years you'll use language in a certain way. If you're twenty with a greater language vocabulary, you'll have a greater use. But even at  twenty you might end up limiting yourself because you believe, say for instance, meaning in the English language is all encompassing.

Were that the case, then French, Iranian, Cuban and Chinese films to name a few would be prescriptive to our English language of film  mode. But all the aforementioned have all redefined film.

Film in effect is a universal language, with multiple syntaxes and grammars, and Mark whether its in his documentaries or in his latest film seeks to discover how standing on the shoulders of giants he can himself enhance his understanding.

Forever learning ")

Video journalism's margins towards the centre of tomorrow's creative form

I have long argued the scope in video journalism. 

I'm on Chapter Seven of my 70,000 word thesis, and with this corpus almost intact have the opportunity to embark on a number of tours, to explain a past, present and future of videojournalism.

Predicting the future is as I have said a mug's game ( See Apple's site for what I spoke about some time back).

How do you know has to be the first question anyone should ask.  I have conducted various ethnographic studies in China, Tunisia, and the UK.

So whilst, yes, it would be a bold person to claim they've a hang on the next trend, using methodologies such as the Delphi procedure, Trend extrapolation and Media history, some interesting results emerge.

One question you could ask yourself is with broadband beyond your wildest dreams, what could you do, that you haven't done so far?

Gamer the film provides some examples in spatial film making, whilst my trip to China and hologram (previous posts) videos is worth considering.




However in breaking of from writing, I wanted to reinvigorate a conversation on Montage.

Creative Videojournalism

Last week in one of my first psychovideojournalism tours, we ending up at Trafalgar Square where I shared ideas with the team on creating montage.

Viewing a montage sequence at Trafalgar Square from Psychovideojournalism

Montage is the apotheosis of film form and extremely difficult to pull off. You can trace its background to the Russians in Pudovkin, Eisenstein and Vertov.

But one of the daddy's of montage to create it as a genre was Donald Siegel, who played a huge role in enabling the form to possess its own identity.

Remember montage, as seen in the modernist guise of CSI Miami etc is often used to show the transition of time within the body of a film.

As a stand alone, it conveys ideas in what semioticians view as unorthodox shots often prefiguring some symbolic meaning.

 A symbol is something that bears no relationship to what you see. You make up the meaning or in some cases societies convene on some understanding e,g, a red sign as a triangle.

In Se7en, you're no wiser about the image, but as a whole the meaning its frankensteined. That is together the sequences signify strange dangerous even criminal behaviour.

The film montage sets the tone. Montage is used elsewhere in "accelerated digital" to convey information in motion graphics. Motion graphics, which stems from graphic artists moving into the moving image is itself old as film with intertitles, BUT, you'll have a jolly time going through films in the 1960s and the great Maurice Biner who made several titles include this one below for Charade.

Anyway, below are some more opening titles, from the likes of Snatch  and the last one from Tarantino because it represents a different form of Montage, as a music break within a film.

BUT more importantly it creates the famous contrapuntal feeling again developed by Eisenstein. The scene works against the images to recreate something that shouldn't work, but does.

See you in Denmark next this month and then Cairo with UNESCO talking about the future of the media in December.

Meanwhile I'll post some new films on Viewmagazine.tv

Customer concerns buying Edelkrone's POCKET RIG

Pocket Rig. Image taken from Edelkrone promotional video 

By David Dunkley Gyimah. Connect with him on Google 

As you might know, I undertake several training regimes for videojournalists and photojournalists around the world, and recommend buys for a number of clients. 

In the past these have ranged from the World Association of Newspapers, the FT, and videojournalists within the BBC.

A couple of months ago, I blogged about the POCKET RIG, a device to aid all Canon 5D shooters Juan Antonio Rodríguez, Tous Seville (Spain) posted this extremely helpful response below.

Please read and be cautious. Hopefully Edelkrone will correct this, if a) customer service means anything to them or b) sales of the devices have any effect on their business.

Feedback from Juan Antonio Rodríguez
I just got the Edelkrone's POCKET RIG, directly from Turkey. The product is excellent, a masterpiece of engineering. The e-marketing of Edelkrone, however, is most regrettable, ranging from abuse.

First, from the date of payment via Paypal (26/08/2012) until receipt of the goods have passed 24 days!

That is, bad management of stocks. The worst thing, however, has been the sending itself.

Edelkrone indicates that operates with DHL International. Insured shipping charge 13.49 euros. They do not indicate, however, that customer will be charged upon receipt of the merchandise, almost 40% percent of expenses (office, "steps", VAT).

Exemplified in my case:

1. Paid to Edelkrone via Paypal: 558 euros (pocket rig + follow focus) 
2. Paid to DHL receipt of the goods: 200 euros. This amount is the result of application of 21% VAT, the "rights fee" of 3.4% and 63 euros (¿!) of "border management" to DHL. 

Clearly Edelkrone know what happens. If you operate with DHL is easy to calculate the real price of the received goods. Suffice request this information from the carrier. With this datum on the Edlekrone's Web, of course, nobody in the EU would buy their products. This is a clear abuse by omission.

Sorry strongly recommend NOT BUY PRODUCTS OF EDELKRONE FROM SPAIN VIA INTERNET. It's a shame, because they are magnificent. But selling online requires some ethical principles that Edelkrone completely ignores.

Juan Antonio Rodríguez Tous
Seville (Spain)

Social Video. Marketers imagination or the next trend?

No word quite enraptures businesses and post modernism media type, whilst befuddling traditionalists than the word "Social Media".

Harder to define, its description falls somewhere between the spread of information based on networks of consent and intra correspondence between ambient friendships.

Social media is the emperor's clothes, apparently. You really can see and marketers unable to contain their glee now preface every conversation with "social" as a panacea to deliver. How antisocial we must have been a priori 2005.

Take Twitter, Tumblr, Four squares, Youtube, Facebook, Pinterest, blogging and knit them all together and you're there.

Except social media experts will proclaim it's more than connecting the dots when singing for your supper. Each possesses a unique set of codes. Twitter is as much about finding great links to share, as it is revealing how unorthodox your life is.

Being resourceful, means understanding the power of presence and volume. That is being there on the conscious of your followers perennially, as well as generating that presence by your voluminous data, unless you're a celeb.

Unsurprising then, as tweeted by @MonicaSarkar, that Nokia states that social video is next in line for the magic stardust treatment.

Social video! It sounds like an oxymoron. Video by its very nature is meant to be shared, generally.

We go to the cinema to watch a film - social.  Crowd sourcing video is by its very nature social. Who can forget Eric Whitacre's Social Choir in 2010 which I spoke about participatory social media.

 Two years on what's changed?



Pedagogically do we know any more? Philosophically or thematically are we any wiser? Where does social end or even render video or film a uniquely different entity?

Social Video 

For my money I would posit, it lies in the connotative "call to arms" quality of the film.

Take these five  films: Super Size Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, and Kony2012, and Triumph of the Will byLeni Riefenstahl. The latter mobilised a country and its footage has been used just as prominently by producers anti its messsage.



What they all have in common is a social message, as opposed to the classic Hollywood traditionalist film or concert cinema of Transformers. With the exception of Kony on my list, the others, in spite of their social good require you to fork out a princely sum of money to watch.

Kony 2012, as many other videos I have not mentioned ooze social because we're able to share their social message in their entirety.

But this is where we need to take stock. Video can become social by dint of it being shared and so for that reason alone almost every video on Youtube is social, which is a poor argument. Or as alluded to there is something inherent in the content that mobilises us.

If the latter is the case then social video has a more prominent Achilles. It cost. Good video relies on resources i.e. money and time to make.

That's because, though we may all get there one day, at present the art of making video, good video along the lines of the aforementioned is not the same as firing off a tweet, but is an artistic endeavour.

So whilst Nokia may have hit on the next best iteration of social, it's not as easy as it appears.

However, and that's a small however, whilst on this blog and viewmagazine.tv I speak about the art of breaking rules to make videos, there are patterns and rhetorical strategies that go into making good social video.

For that though I'd urge you take a look at this popular post on a semiotic breakdown of Kony2012.

The Art of Psychovideojournalism in London

It is the subjective-analysis of the art of videojournalism in relation to its geographical location.

Psychovideojournalism as a discipline pays homage to psychogeography. The latter is a field of study based around the idea of flaneurism (wandering) and owes its presence to the avant-garde movement of the 1950s.

In psychogeography in London, tours are arranged on foot around specific historical points designed to illustrate the richness of the landscape and surrounding architecture.

They include:

• The knight Templar's headquarters captured in Dan Brown's Da Vinci code 
• The Southbank Centre, acclaimed as the largest single arts centre which sprawls along the river Thames
• Brixton, one of London's diverse boroughs where you can sample every African dish under the sun.

Whilst I have undertaken videojournalism training programmes around specific locales, such as Castle Howard in York (above picture) where the English film classic Brideshead Revisted (2008) was shot, today was different.

Academic and commercial text books featuring David's work

Videojournalism London

Around 11 a.m we met in a cafe off Oxford Street for the launch of the psychovideojournalism, a mental and physical exploration of videojournalism with London as our canvas.

We explored the different genres and forms of videojournalism and narrative logic on the basis the narrative of the VJ film's content film drives a particular production expression.

This generally works, but as I showed today we can disrupt that relationship. That was another difference to today's programme. 

Today's street lecture employed knowledge from my PhD thesis around future film forms, thus it addressed multiple, sometimes recalcitrant concerns, both theoretically and practically.

Below are samples of images from today as I use myself to illustrate a point in being filmed, to filming in Trafalgar Square and then the Southbank Centre.

I'm looking to run the next programme in November.  Details of this, it usually involves a small group,   can be found on Viewmagazine.tv in October

The Story Police aka journalist is dead. Long live

Journalism is in decline and young people are not interested in it.

You've heard it a million times.


When I googled: "young people not interested in journalism", I got 38,000,000 returns.

Admittedly, because of the way google works, that number does not represent the actual number of articles, but in comparison to young people not interested in gardening, there's a clear winner.

But don't be swayed. The fact that there are so many young people supposedly not engaged in news, doesn't mean they're not interested in news.

It becomes a question of relevance for young people and framing the right question. Are you as a young person interested in finding our how you deal with being shy, or that you believe you're being bullied, is news, and is relevant, but for a social genre.

Jim Romsensko.com's post on a study: Young people consider news to be garbage and lies, gets close to my point.

The book by University of Texas journalism prof Paula Poindexter is one of those books managers should read, but won't, largely because in this disparate world of us there are so much academic knots to get through.

Which one do I undo that will help me, is the question.

Young people have always been ambivalent to news. I know that much from experience working at the BBC and its major youth current affairs Reportage, which attracted some 900,000 viewers on BBC 2 at 7.30 pm.   Newsnight pegged some 1.2 million, but we''re comparing cheese and wine.

Young people left news in their droves by official standards at around the 1990s. Certainly, the biggest change was cable and satellite. For once too a small station run by young people could vent its concern, otherwise the news media would listen curl their lip and proceed as normal.

So in the UK its parliament stories and in the US capitol hill and lobbys.

Any wonder young people couldn't give a chimpanzee.  The web has amplified this discursively through social media - that's the new new thing which gives young people that added matrix voice.

I'm about to introduce to journalism to a number of groups. I understand my dilemma. News' importance, as Lord Levenson puts it is because:

The press provides and essential check on all aspects of public life. That is why any failure within the media affects us all.

Trouble is when a young person is looking for the next wage package, or next best hit of recreational pursuit, or where to hang out when we're board, the press have no presence within aspects of this public life.

The press here being the traditional bricks and mortars with pensions and the rest. So the press by and large have to report, at least for the audience where they can either gain advertising or public interest, non-young people.

The model of news or the press was always creaky. A one size fits all was adequate until those with a voice found a way to be heard, which is precisely why the founding fathers of these institution believed themselves to be patriarchal and doing a public service.

TV could have been the Internet, free for all in the 1930's, but it was skewed, and Lord Reith, the Director General of the BBC believed you and I needed protecting, so the BBC would tell you what you should think.

Stuart Purvis whom I interview for my PhD film Storied, owns up. For years we perpetuated a myth that you couldn't make television, but you can and did. In this case he's referring to Channel One TV, a group of 25 year olds who revolutionised TV news in the UK in the 1990s. But the message is the same nonetheless.

What young people think, generational they will always think, unless the press become Lord of the Flies, ran by young people and the even then.

So I'm no more shocked by events that young people are apoplectic today than I was in the 1990s. What I want to be shocked by is the revolutionary young people who decide they will report on matters relevant to themselves in a way that captures the zeitgeist.

Many have tried such as Current TV, but the lesson if any, that we often fail to understand, is that priorities being young and for some carefree; you're not thinking about pensions just yet, is that unless you're planning Britney Spears, r Jack Ass news, whatever that looks like, you'll never get the numbers.

Film on the future and past of videojournalism - Must Watch

Did the BBC pioneer videojournalism? 

No, says the senior executive who brought videojournalism into the BBC.

Pat Loughry credits a little known company called Channel One TV.

So how did this obscure company no one has ever heard of become so integral to a movement that would have huge ramifcations around the world?

And this isn't hyperbole as its former press officer, now an executive at Turner/ CNN, states how executives flocked to the station to see how it worked.

Channel One was not responsible for making you pick up a camera and shoot, but when it launched way back in 1994 every broadcast manager worth their salt came to have a look.

The former chief executive of ITN, the UK's biggest commercial news provider pays tribute to Channel One, calling them pioneers.

Here's the rub!

Channel One Videojournalism

STORIED Videojournalism, Past, Present and the Future from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Channel One was a newspaper company broadcasting on cable. The irony is so rich, and if you'd like to sample yourself, an extended trailer is on Viewmagazine.tv.

Videojournalists likened one facet of their work to speed chess. You arrived on the scene and would swiftly have to assess the story. You had one hour to wrap the whole story up, because you had another two, sometimes three stories, to fill in.

If you're a photojournalist it is the equivalent of what one of the photography's greatest theorists refers to as the punctum.

The punctum in the picture is the punch, the thing that stands out. In videojournalism storyform, you were scanning for multiple punctums, so it was fundamentally crucial you

• Understood this ethereal concept of news
• Knew when and where you wanted to break it.

Storied will eventually be a series of shorts. The trailer features Michael Rosenblum, Brian Storm et al.

The second trailer version will feature prominent managers from Channel One TV. But see for yourself how videojournalism started in the UK, and how when it closed it took with it a number of key features, I have since unearthed.

My overaching PhD thesis that looks at storyform includes Channel One TV,  a ground breaking videojournalism project in African in 1997, work in Egypt and qualitative evidence of where its going.

This is only a trailer, and a substantial section is also about establishing credibility, because there's some pretty jaw dropping things to come.

This film will have some value, I hope, if you're a student, professional or expert interested in corrections in media history, and want to have some idea of videojournalism's future.

The glimpse I give includes China where the net is a hologram in your living room. And there are many others.

See you on the other side.

Advice for getting the job that does not exist. Bowl them over. Do something epic

Lemn Sissay poet and Mark Cousins, film maker behind The Story of Film

Get that job by doing something epic

I love this story,  This link shows you an amazing feat. Do something epic!

It might be common place now and its perhaps not the same person as I can't find the original link. But the story is he emailed a surfing competition to enter as an exhibitor and was turned down.

Then he sent them one of his pics.

The organisers wrote back immediately.. when can you come? They couldn't get him fast enough.

We are conditioned to tell people "er maybe". "No, there is no job", "let's have a chat and see", when you go for a internship, speculative visit, or answer an invitation from a contact.

Where possible I try and recommend ex students to employers and I know from my long experience. If YOU BOWL THEM OVER, they have no choice but to want to employ you.

So I coach people on what to say; not tell untruths, because if they had nothing to offer I wouldn't be able to recommend them in the first place.

I know from my own experience it works, and also to my cost as I came closer to a BBC reporters job, after meeting for lunch the BBC head of foreign news in 2002. He acknowledged I had a diverse and interesting CV, and I learnt you can't afford to be anything than persistent.

The question you must ask yourself then is what can you do to bowl them over.

As Eminen says, you only have one shot at this, so rehearsals, preparation, visualisation are crucial. You should know what's going to be asked. The usuals. Hello, how can I help you, what have you done, what would you like to do?

Epic Mania @SXSW coverage Austin 2009 by IM Videojournalism from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

DO SOMETHING EPIC ( loved this too during my sxsw presentation)

Firstly then you drive the interview. Patiently but with determination, stack up the approach. I had one friend who got a job at sky. She got the job, not me. But I was able to steer her so she drove the 30 minute slot. She had one film we worked on that she made for my magazine viewmagazine.tv. It was a premiere of a film with Beyonce et al - the sort of thing the client would love. 

So I said to her as soon as the pleasantries were over she needed to show the hirer the video and let it do the talking. because on that video, she fantastically demonstrated a plurality of skills.

1. Chasing the interviewee. Have you seen how on the red carpet reporters have to hail and scream, There's a way of doing this. A colleague of mine made it an art form to the extent rival cameramen and women would reserve a spot for her because they knew if she got them close by, they'd get the shot as well.

2. She had done her research so the interview came across as a warm engaging chat.

3. She demonstrated she could go toe to toe with the professionals, because to her left was the BBC and to her right was Sky.

So firstly you need to leave an impression with them which is so profound they talk about you in the next meeting. Secondly ask yourself what you've done that is profound?  A film, a website, and your attitude!

Film impression

Your film should not be garden variety ie normal, but something truly exceptional and short enough to hold their attention with the possibility that its long enough to want them to see more.

Website impression

It should have functionality and content pertinent to the person you;re talking to. By the time you finish with them, they'll say can you make a site like this for us. This happened to a working colleague of mine who picked up an award from Channel 4, only to be stopped by another exec requesting if she could build one for them.

Attitude impression

What makes you exceptional?  Don't suck up to them. Your independence, but likability, and warmth must suggest you'll be a great asset. Do you know how to get interviews? You need to demonstrate this with a story... What's the most exceptional thing you've done? A friend of mine could blag a helicopter to fly his guest. I once did the same in South Africa covering Miss World I had a helicopter pick me up for free and they brought me back 

I'm about to post some interesting things on viewmagazine.tv, I'm picking from what won't be going into my PhD submission early next year. It's been five deep years and its been illuminating.

David Dunkley Gyimah was voted outstanding lecturer by the National Union of Students at the University of Westminster. He is an award winning videojournalist, Knight Batten winner in Innovation in Journalism and a trainer consultant specialising in:

• Creativity
• Media cognitivism and semiotics
• Videojournalism and online branding and web building

As a broadcast journalist he's worked for the BBC, ABC News, Channel 4, WTN  etc.


Artist in Residence, Southbank Centre
Academic & Videojournalist
www.viewmagazine.tv
Twitter: viewmagazine