Future of Video : What makes 12 years a Slave an exemplary film to learn from

Newsmaker, Artist, lecturer, PhD Researcher, Digirati and filmmaker David Dunkley Gyimah

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If you like Future of Video, click for From wars to music videos, a 21st Century style of newsmaking in videojournalism-as-cinema.
David discusses digital and journalism, with CNN's Christine Amanpour at the Frontline Club, London.
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It is as hauntingly immersive in its compositional scenes, as it is perversely in the more difficult acts e.g. Patsy's beating. 

In its viewing, you'll likely lose yourself in its thickened oil work, unfolding a simple-to-follow plot, which is equalled by a visual poetry. 

Even in the darkest moments; the near hanging to death of Solomon, the director finds art to play out the scene.

What is evident about 12 Years a Slave, is it is an artist's film. It inhabits a world of theatrical framings; how movies were once made, enveloping hues, colours that manifest as a moving image painting.

If video could truly hail itself as the successor - a direct comparison to canvas oil painting, and what the likes of Caravaggio, or Rembrandt would have conceived - this is it. 

Recently released on DVD, I had the opportunity to watch 12 Years a Slave away from the frenzy which rightly carried the film during its Oscar run. This time around I could analyse the film's nuances.

This is reportage; the closest how I would define videojournalism-as-cinema  (my PhD thesis) as a proxy to what Steve McQueen, a moving image painter achieves.

No, I am not and would not dare compare myself to McQueen. What I am saying is 12 Years a Slave features a plenitude of styles that ironically, cyclically, define modern factual filmmaking e.g. news. In my work I identify this as a form of videojournalism cinema predicated on art.

Journalism critiquing can often be discursive, with the writer offering opinions, albeit professional, to evaluate a film. Academic critique, as undertaken by the film scholar David Bordwell (a theme he himself addresses) tends to be more explicatory and evidence-laden.

It's Bordwell's approach, which I'll try and use to delineate the film, coupled with my own sensibilities as an artist; an artist-in-residence at the Southbank Centre, with my primary focus situated in news and factual programme making.

1. Camera
Framing 
McQueen's style is to shoot square on as if directing for the theatre. It is reminiscent of Swedish director Ingmar Bergman e.g. The Seventh Seal. 

scene from the seventh seal

Like Bergman the camera is still, and there are few privileged positional cuts. McQueen's trope is his compositional weighting, so that a character dominant in the foreground is balanced by an event in the background usually in the 3rd  of the frame (see below). 

The deep focus (as opposed to the penchant for shallow-depth-of field) invites the viewer to decode the screen - just like a painting. It's the closest to 'objective filmmaking' (read Cesare Zavattini). 

There are a number of reasons why the film could be labelled unconventional in its visual framing. In fact it's an Art movie, or to classify it correctly based on its cues, this is an artist's film.

Take this framing. Very few directors would have the courage to frame this and leave it in the edit. The image is truncated leaving nominal film frame data off screen.

Perhaps, this is one of the most extraordinary shots in the film. This whole sequence where Solomon faces near death by hanging lasts two minutes, but this one scene lasts almost one minute with no cut, no camera movement. The movement occurs in the scene. The camera's stillness is countered by McQueen's play in the empty third sector of the frame.

If you're familiar with Bela Tarr's Werkmeister Harmonies, then you'll see similarities in durational cuts and how they induce reflective thinking.




These are not new concepts; French film scholar Andre Bazin stressed the importance of long takes towards film realism in the 1950s. What's remarkable is because the average film cut today is 3 seconds that McQueen can work against the grain, could be conceived as bold.

Further evidence of Arts influence is strewn across the film. The lighting and composition e.g. Chiaroscuro which Wiki states is

in art is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modelling three-dimensional objects and figures.^[1] Similar effects in cinema and photography also are called chiaroscuro.

This scene from Bergman's Winter light captures the art of Chiaroscuro.

Winter light

12 Years a Slave

This shot here from Kubrik Barry Lyndon is influenced by Caravaggio.

This is Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus (1601)

And below is 12 Years a Slave

One last reference to art, which was evident was this... 

and it points to this Georges Seurat's pre-pointilism Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884).

2. Plot
If you're familiar with Bergman's films, The Silence (1963), Winter light (1962) then some of the themes collide with McQueen's.  

In Winter light, a film that drew on Bergman's upbringing, the priest is torn between infidelity and God. Just as Bergman pushes the envelope on sexuality, McQueen raises the bar in onscreen violence, but not for the sake of it. 

If you substitute sex in this description of Bergman's The Silence, for slavery, you could be referring to McQueen.

from trailer The Silence

Plot in film refers to the structure of the edit, as opposed to story which is the unalloyed narrative of the film. Here, McQueen plays with some modern tropes of Neo-Noir filmmaking. What is often called elliptical filming. It allows the filmmaker to play with different scenes out of order, and by so doing present a plot that acts to refresh the screen and make the audience work.

The scene where Solomon is drugged and ends up in chains, leads to mini flashbacks. McQueen could have let the whole scene play through from drinking wine, to throwing up, then Soloman finding himself in chains. 


3. Sound 
Sound presents the ability to elicit emotions from the viewer. Far from being subjective, the music is often used to compliment the scene, unless like Eisenstein who uses counterpoint. Music is subliminal when it works well. Interestingly Hans Zimmer is the hand here and he revives those famous chords heard in Inception, at the time this character starts to speak about her loss.

If you listen attentively you'll also hear references from There will be blood (2007).


4. Gaze
The character gaze is another trope from art movies that you find in 12 Years a Slave. Often described as breaking the forth wall, Solomon's long gaze into the camera draws attention to the artefact of filmmaking. It's no longer this subconscious act of realism.  Here's the a shot of the 'gaze' from a film called Summer with Monika, which shocked the film world when it was shown. It's Bergman again!




5. The artist's work
Artists tend to have an ambivalent relationship with their audience. I love this analogy by Bergman, but I believe he misses out an important component.


The artist can only create the work, they want, but unless they live a hermit's life they are undoubtedly affected  by the critique of others - the audience. 

They need the audience to thrive - to earn a living, but the more comfortable they become with their personal style (which by the way, has partly been shaped by the audience) the more they become individualists in starting to shun what their old audiences wants, because the artists wants to move on. 

Similarly what new audiences yearn for can also be shunned because the audience don't understand the artist's heritage. 

This is most evident in music concerts, where sometimes the artists refuses to play the one classic that has defined her work with the audience, because it no longer defines her, as she has moved on.

Conclusion
All filmmaking is a negotiation between several parameters. As I mentioned before it's a dynamic relationship between different techniques and styles. 

The easiest step is to learn how to shoot. More difficult is understanding different styles, some of which are 100 years old that may be deemed redundant.

Factual story e.g. news making's achilles is it invented a limited form for the screen, which a televisual literate generation are finding less than challenging today. 

McQueen up ends Hollywood's form by reviving art filmmaking with his own developed style, pointing to an understanding of the future. That the rules that defined filmmaking are less stable and that film is no longer framed by defined rules.


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David Dunkley Gyimah's PhD research involved exploring the interstices of cinema, documentary and news and what makes compelling video. It is a historical and analytical framework covering the field from its inception to the present. David, an award winning videojournalist states that to understand the future of film and video is to quote award winning doc maker Dimitri Doganis, one of David's ex colleagues, to disregard the boundaries of docs, news and cinema. Play video below.

Just what does it take to make compelling stories - myth busting.

It wasn't that long ago when lean forward meant watching television. 

Television tried to ape cinema to keep viewers locked to the screen. Techniques included that old cinema trick; the popcorn stay-in on sports nights,  today its pringles. 

Its programming schedules were also devised to keep viewers on one channel with techniques such as 'tent poling'.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaThe term tent-pole or tentpole refers to a broadcast programming or motion picture expected to hold up (as is the function of a tent pole) and balance out the financial performance of a movie studio or television network. It also refers to movies that are expected to support the sale of ancillary tie-in merchandise.

Individual storytelling in docs and factuals also followed a pattern. A style developed called the television documentary. It was an elongated news features, with all the earnestness to boot.

The reporter's voice carried the narrative and the visuals adequately knitted the story together. In the more visually aesthetic school of the 60s, Cinema Verite schooled a generation to up the ante.

The hypocrisy of the Cinema Verite approach, albeit unintended, still meant off camera asking your subject what they were doing today and whether it was filmable. So much for not interfering.

And herein ladies and gentlemen lies the first problem for creating compelling video.

Compelling video comes from generally well define variables, each of which can be delineated into a thesis, but broadly you can shape compelling video by its:

• the content ( if you take pictures of cats, you get cats)
• the style of genre - meaning TV docs differs from Cinema Verite
• the style of the filmmaker.
• the period of the style and the audiences reception. That means docs in the 1980s are different to docs and audience of 2000.

Of all of these, personal style and picking the right content is something you can develop. I'll come back to these, The really tricky one for the professionals is how different periods require differing approaches.

'It's the audience, stoopid' to paraphrase Clinton. And the logic goes like this. The audience you once knew in the 1990s is not the same as the audience today. Meaning the personal style you used to win awards, is markedly different to the style appreciated by audiences today. 

Just listen to this rare critique of a BBC executive speaking about how his colleagues are challenged by twitter and criticism. 





 YouTube and its bespoke audience - the new lean forwards make demands on programme styles that are fundamentally different ten years ago.

The tropes, cues and styles that made traditional news and doc making compelling has changed because the audience needs have changed.

The Cinema Verite or award winning classic doc may bag you an audience, but as mass viewing goes, the audience have cottoned on to something else.

It's a world of YouTube and Netflix, where once sacrosanct rules of movie making existed, and still do for television, for online with its massively growing audience, the rules are are absurd, defunct, old hat.

That doesn't mean you can't still watch Nanook of the North and think it's a cracking film, but that the mass audience yearn for something that indulges in contemporary practices.

The question is what are those? As a filmmaker who specialises in forms as well as a researcher I'm continuously testing audiences to find out what these parameters are.

Audience define the culture and sociology of viewing habits. It's the reason, Hollywood continues to remake classics, because of what audiences are looking for.  What worked ten years ago may not necessarily work now.

In my six years PhD research, this is where it gets interesting and in the next few posts I'll illustrate more details about the audienece and making compelling videos.

From wars to music videos, a 21st century style of news making - videojournalism-as-cinema. linear and spatial new media mobile films

Last month I was invited to meet a band: Thabo and the Real Deal, who via their work and manager Kienda Hoji, have been talked about as one of the most exciting bands in 2014.


The background to meeting the 4-piece Huddersfield group was they'd been asked to come to London to play a set to industry insiders. Only 100 tickets were issued inside a venue that could take 800. 

Their manager, Kienda Hoji, wanted to know if I would like to hang out with them. I'd previously seen their track World War Free and was utterly mesmerised. So I said yes, but had no idea what I would film or where, so everything in the video above emerges from incidences that need to be pulled together quickly to form a narrative.

Thabo and the Real Deal's supporters include Naughty boy behind the hit La La La ft Sam Smith, Professor Green, who their lead singer Thabo has recently collaborated with, and actor Idris Elba  (Luther) - another collaboration. 



Telling a story about a band or artist often involves the ubiquitous music video. Its inbuilt logic acts to reinforce the bands intended branding: how they see themselves, or want to be viewed.

Miley Cyrus Wrecking ball, bookending twerking, is everything James Dean did to stick two fingers up at suburbia in the 50s - a brand legend was born. Madonna has successfully done this too. The music video serves an important function between artistry, commerce, the fanbase and identity and is often a fictionalised story.


MTV and various music outlets will regularly feature news on a band; nothing new here. News offers the audience facts and representations of the musicians,  however, it fails as a pieces of visual artistry to offer some of the tangible effects you might get from a documentary. 

That is because while a doc maker follows the band, they get themselves into privileged areas and see/ hear things news maker miss, unless its caught by the world's citizens journos.

The music industry has a rich history of documentary making on musicians. Some of my favourites e.g. Maysles Gimme Shelter (1970) featuring the Rolling Stones and Madonna's Truth or Dare (1991). 

Hanging out with Albert Maysles behind the epic doc Gimme Shelter (1970)

However, though we've come to accept the elasticity and mutability of the documentary form in the 21st century, in that the form called documentary is now so listless that anything can be called a doc, there are still identifiable tropes.

• It's recognisable by its Cinéma vérité feel.
• The films authorship is muted to often reflect the subject.
• The making and posting occurs over a period of time e.g. 1 month - a year.

Somewhere on the peripheries of these two established forms: documentary and news making is one of several new factual art forms. One of them is called: videojournalism-as-cinema.



From Wars to Music Video

Discussing conflict and digital with Christiana Amanpour at the Front Line Club

It is a form that is as malleable for covering wars as it is music videos and is as much about the subject matter being produced as the artist behind the lens.

Unlike docs, it has a quicker turnover and is what I call a 'visual plenitude'.  It has many styles and hybridises the music video genre between news-docs and music videos, yet paradoxically it has a unique line of identity and origin. It is corporeal, sonic (sound is crucial as an assault on the senses) and it is haptic.

The videojournalism-as-cinema form is a style that I have had the pleasure of demonstrating at SXSW, the International Journalism Festival and speaking at Apple.

Showing a video made on Moby playing in France, at Apple store, London

Among many news socially engineered terms describing 21st Century media, a feat that took 6 years travelling across the world, videojournalism-as-cinema is featured in my PhD thesis. Inside and  over 100,000 pages I provide evidence of how it works, where it came from and what it does and how it wraps around discursive new media forms e.g. websites, mobile etc.



I won't bore your here. However, what I would say is the videojournalism-as-cinema is as much a philosophy as a form that provides a cinema experience imbricating news and docs. It is highly decorative and shares authorship; it is much my film as it is about the subjects. It can be subjective but adheres to the principles of 'truth telling'.

Here below is one of the UK's most innovative film scholars, Mark Cousins,  talking briefly about what he thinks it is.





Given the appetite for fan bases to know more about their idols, the form offers more than news and docs in meeting audiences demands. 

It's also tied to a social media ideology of creating bespoke sites to reflect the videojournalism-as-cinema form and thus populates the indentity of subjects. Below is one of my films and sites for 8 Days.

I'll be speaking more about this at the British Film Industry event, examining the future of news. One thing to bare in mind, videojournalism-as-cinema is implicitly driven by the audience and unlike videojournalism which connotes a certain news form, it is paradigmatic of the way we consume media in the 21st century.

David Dunkley Gyimah is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster and videojournalist. He is an industry presenter on new media forms and has consulted for several brands e.g. BBC, Press Association etc. He is next talking at the BFI event on next generation TV.

Rules of change: how the next big thing out did Facebook, Twitter and video

In 1974, Ghana, a progressive country in Africa with a population of 10 million, overnight switched from driving on the left hand drive to the right. 

2012 saw Facebook change a rule on users' photographs after it acquired Instagram. Instagram could use user's photographs as they wished. Onliners apoplectic with rage voted with their feet causing Facebook to renege. 

In his John Ford's epic 1939 Western Stagecoach, one of the fundamental 'rules' of filmmaking was shredded. Ford's chase scene continually and wilfully crosses the line. One moment, the chase is left to right, then its right to left.

What these all have in common is that a rule has been overturned and by default demonstrates 'rules', are not fixed. 

Rules exist as an agreement between users, often created by powerful bodies to create commercial enterprise.

I mean would you buy a book that didn't teach you how to tweet, how to film with the rule of thirds, how to sample sound. These rules derive from agreements, whose origins can often be questionable. 

One of the biggest contentious so called rules, is the way television news is made. Have you ever asked how it came to be made that way, and then realised, a couple of people, with no TV experience came up with an idea and that was that?

Today, television is produced in a uniform, world-wide govern rule. funny! Rules, however are transient and none more so that in the creative fields. 

In the arts, fashion, music - fields that thrive on innovation and creativity, the very idea of a rule is bunkum.  A rule is nothing more than a guideline to aid the novice.   

And if a rule, or to be precise a convention did exist, the innovative creative lot would just as well break it.

Twitter experts state you need a hashtag, link to something and a couple of @s to make your tweet fly. But this 'rule' only works when users of a certain place, time, culture agree. 

In five months time, it could be something else. In five months time, the seeds of a new 'Twitter-like' app may be in the throes to go big, because our habits have changed.

And that's the key. So called 'rules' which are really guidelines exist because of the patterns of behaviour, a certain set of people exhibit.

We like volume, so 33m followers is better than 3000. But at some point 33m users becomes meaningless when in the 3000 followers the user gets quality feedback.

In the digital age, the concept of the 'rule' that defines what we should do is  contestable and malleable.  The very idea of a 'rule' is nonsense because of the 'mutability' of digital. Concepts and materials in digital can change and be transported elsewhere.

What exists in a photoshop image can be manipulated to become a data visual set in data journalism and also inserted into a film. 

The practical outcome at realising the rule, is that in order to be on top of your game, you need to be aware what your target audience agrees.

Society sets itself up in a Darwinian fashion. Twitter would not have worked in the 1950s post-war because we were a society that hid things, suspicious of the enemy in our midst.

Decades on we've forgotten and become blase to security. This coupled with the rise and rise of the 1960s fame culture means we're all too ready to a) become stars, b) share what we're doing.

In years time, that behaviour will change. Will, because the trends have shown that societies and cultures do change and when they do, the agreement of users breaks down to evolve into something else.

Facebook connects us virtually, but what about an app that does it metaphysically? I have seen this on display in China. Or what about a time when we generally don't want to be connected in the way Facebook manages our affairs.

What if we didn't need to tweet, because an app existed that allowed us to store voice data,  which was accessible via speech. Think Star Trek's Holodeck. Again I have seen this work.

The reason why they haven't taken shape is that society as a movement has not made those demands on the technology. But it will, in the same way, one moment we had no use for 3D and now 3D Ocular glasses could be all the rage soon in sharing virtual communities.

Birth of a station

Birth of a Station by Mike Pearce documents the making of Channel One and the birth of videojournalism in the UK in 1994. Uploaded by one of the videojournalists David Dunkley Gyimah

Perugia's inimitable journalism festival - Why you need to be there

Perugia - tucked in the clouds

Just what is it that has made a journalism festival tucked away between Rome and Florence, situated on a hilltop, a must-go-to festival?

Perugia's cultural resonance - art, paintings, and architecture - is explicit on arrival. The town appears as an interconnected canvas bridging a kaleidoscope of frescos.  Unsurprising when you read its history.

To the odd news hound, this rustic town is where a contemporary mystery has brought into sharp focus the legal systems of the US and Italy. That is the unsolved murder of British student Meredith Kercher.

On my way to Perugia, after a 2-hour plane journey from Stanstead, I share a taxi with two behemoth speakers, Fusion's Felix Salmon and Joanna Geary, head of news Twitter UK.

Felix suggests if you're going to stage a festival, the more the location is as far removed from a city, the better. Attendants become absorbed in the area, with little 'city-like' external distractions. 

David presenting at SXSW

Utah, where Sundance stages its film festival, conjures up images of canyons and dust devils; SXSW where I have spoken transforms Austin, Texas, into one giant tech jamboree, and Perugia?

Perugia, if you love retreats, is an idyllic busman's holiday. It's compact, facilitating active mingling between delegates, and the speakers and the audience.   

In a relatively short space of time, the festival's indomitable driving force Christopher and Francesca ( and their staff)  have created a phenomenon. 

It's intriguing to know how the idea came about and then sold to the town, because it is now a cultural event with shops, restaurants and the tourism center playing their part. 

Notwithstanding the influx of international journalists, students and free-to-attend sessions for the public, in the short space I was there, it was obvious Perugia is also a cultural tourism hot spot.

Coaches arrive and offload swathes of tourists; yesterday was labour day and the evening was capped with a pop concert.

Videojournalism talk
Scores of sessions addressing a wide range of journalism topics makes Perugia's event a physical wikipedia.  My talk was one of the earliest presentations and because of that I had little idea how many people would attend. It was billed as New Narratives in Videojournalism - a title designed to provoke curiosity.

Fortunately, we had a good turn out. I'm thankful to @journalismfestival for all their hard work and all those who spent their time listening and contributing to the debate. 

I made this a day later to add further context cinema journalism.




Though the listing shows Marwan and I as presenters, Marwan graciously allowed me the bulk of the time to present my thesis. He would be at the heart of a presentation the following day giving inside expertise on Syria. 

The heart of my talk, which is an element of my PhD thesis is that the 60-year old TV/Video news model is not quite up to the job for reporting various events in the 21st century. 

Newspapers have reformed, and adjusted to the times. In the 60s faced with the arrival of television, print journalism adopted a range of tropes. It couldn't compete with the immediacy of television news, so contextual and commentary reportage became a dominant part of its journalism.

Language evolves, as societies and cultures grow.

Amazingly, television news' lingua franca has not changed very much. These aren't my words, but that of  industry leaders I interviewed during my research, such as Deborah Turness, one of the world's most powerful news executives

.  

Play the promo to hear what industry leaders say about news' story form.



My presentation spoke about the methodology of my research. I have worked in the TV News and Radio  since 1990 and on the net since 1998.




Hence, I used my own journey as a research thread called autoethnography / reflective practitioner. I have been with a slew of organisations that challenged journalism styles e.g. Channel 4 News, BBC Newsight and BBC Reportage. Below, I'm reporting from South Africa's landmark elections in 1994.

Reporting from South Africa between 1992-1994

But I also used ethnography, that is studying in-depth two communities: Britain's first videojournalists and some of the world's best videojournalists.  This was then critiqued using expert opinion; some of those figures seen in the trailer, as well as using a wide array of literature.

Cinema journalism, but not as you know it - perhaps

Cinema, the new language of news

The essence of my talk was that cinema, not cinematic, but cinema was enriching journalism when used by key news makers. It doesn't replace current narrative journalism forms, but evidence shows the audience are drawn to it.

Cinema, I explained was first coined to mean factual constructions of events. It was Hollywood that hijacked the term to denote fiction. But even in its modern parlance, fictional film tropes and cues used ethically can enrich a film, while still retaining its journalism.

I showed one of several examples I researched, which Journalism.co.uk included in their report of the event. Often experts state the difference between newspaper videojournalism and Television is how newspapers have co-opted the cinema verite approach.

I disagree. This may appear so because a large number of newspaper videojournalists use cinema verite, but in principle this division is an artificial one. 

I helped set up and run the UK's Press Association's videojournalism programme and often the reason why newspapers did not voice their reports was that they were self-conscious of their own voice. 

Former Washington Post videojournalist Travis Fox's piece, you'll find in the Journalism.co.uk report, is a voiced piece. Something more interesting is going on which explores the complexities of cinema.

Complexities because unlike television news' language, cinema, as the scores of books, 8000 plus in English, show cinema is difficult to define, but you know it when you see it.

Or should that be, my research with audiences demonstrates they can tell the difference between cinema fact and cinema fiction. 

Cinema does not also exclusively imply linear narrative. It can also reference spatial story forms, which is why the web and html is a suitable medium to revive cinema's early incarnation.

This image below shows on the left a zoetrope from the 19th century, while on the right, the cube, my spatial cinema narrative on graduates being recruited the CIA

Similarly, the Outernet, which was displayed on Apple's site for several years is also an indication of where we're going.

The recording of our presentation will be online soon, so you can see what you make of the rhetorical arguments I pose.

But there are wider significant points. Cinema is agnostic to platforms and linear forms, so whether you're a data journalist or social media boffin truly understanding what cinema can do, is worth exploring. 

However, if, as my research shows cinema is a tour de force and the use of 'cinema' here alludes to 21st century styles, then the way we teach journalism generally and videojournalism in particular requires attention.

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David Dunkley Gyimah is a senior lecturer at the University of Westminster, artist-in-residence at London's Southbank Centre and videojournalist and coder. He is next speaking at the British Film Institutes Media Conference 

New Narratives in videojournalism

On Wednesday I present New Narratives in Videojournalism at the International Journalism Festival. This morning I completed the promo which I made to accompany the talk.



It's taken me 6 years to research it and I believe it offers a comprehensive degree to what's happening to the way we tell stories around the world.

The arrows signify the areas I travelled to; the larger the arrow, the greater the region. So in Europe there were several countries I researched.

The actual 360 page thesis is my PhD submission and so there are a number of findings that build upon what you might know or are new.

After the talk I'll post some more details

Videojournalism, past, present and the future, and now the real news... (My 2000th post). The president of the....

This is my 2000th post since I started blogging properly since 2005 - a milestone of sorts, and so I wanted to share a wrap.

In television jargon a wrap is a story that extracts a point from the beginning to emphasis an overall point. It can also signal the end of a show.

Last week, in bringing the Masters in Journalism online module to a close, I took my students  to Channel 4 News, one of the most seminal newsrooms you'll find anywhere.

I worked for almost five years as a freelance producer and videojournalists at Channel 4, at times producing the indefatigable Jon Snow.

Jon to a US audience would be the equivalent of a Peter Jennings. Smooth, unruffled, old skool and new mixed together, and much admired (and disliked by some, ah well). 

Jennings is someone I have met too when he toured the ABC Newsroom in South Africa. He was much taller than I imagined.

I was a producer for ABC News during South Africa's epoch first all-race elections.  

All this paints a picture of sorts of the journey I have had in news. In spite of the number of natural and artificial barriers, journalism morphs from being an occupation into a lifestyle. You live news, you see news.

I was like any other producer in news- the people who make it happen, but whose credits lay under the radar.

When television news adopted cinema positions in the 1950s, the producer role was one too that was adopted. However the reality has been that it does not have the same visibility as producers in cinema - a small point, which has no consequence to this post.

News according to Richard Sandbrook is one of those versatile disciplines which provides knowledge for other careers. What it teaches you I add quickens the mind,  elevates the power of judgement and gives you a window on the spectrum of human conditions e.g. grief, malice, sloth etc.

Conversely, traditional news also sets up a picket fence adjudging what is acceptable  and what is not. To the students of Westminster University, Snow's conversation with them may resonate for a while. They are within a golden age of news,  he said, a rebirth, bringing to mind Neo and his matrix-pod moment.

I could not agree more, but what is this rebirth  and how does that translate into anything meaningful?

Data journalism, social networking, coding, software compliance across AE, Indesign and the lot. And videojournalism.

They all matter in this golden age of share. But to share, you need something to share, and videojournalism is proving to be a much sought after commodity.  Read Peter Preston's piece on the challenges the Telegraph is facing with its web strategy and its 'US' editor being at the helm of a British institution, and the schisms in journalism become evident.

Incidently, if you're a Telegraph reader, you're likely to have £100,000 tucked away in the bank, so it's small wonder , the web is not their buzfeed. 

But there's something profoundly at fault with the present model of videojournalism and its custodians, the power brokers, who framed what journalism was, or is.

And herein lies my wrap. The something that is happening in journalism ignores a fundamental theme to characterise its approach and what it offers.

We hold the belief, that journalism is bound by set values, framed by unyielding parameters, practiced by a professional class with their codes.

That's true, and was during its inception, but journalism is a construct. I repeat journalism is a construct. Its values, its legacy comes from men and women, often self-appointed, who debate and share, at that moment and time common understandings, until they're threatened by another professional class. 

Note I said professional class.  This new age of journalism seeks to adhere to rules, many of which need a reboot, but their legacy is so entrenched, we believe them to be immutable laws.

One of those journalism tools is videojournalism. A practice I have come to know and love for what it does. Videojournalism was supposed to be one of the disruptors, to break open a new dawn, to revolutionise the manner in which we create journalism.

But it's rarely happened. The idea that you can shoot and report your own film, is not videojournalism or a radical departure from news. Ask any self shooting camera man or woman who operated in the 1980s.

The philosophy of this new journalism form was the ability to undo the binary simplification of television journalism. In TV if its not black it;s white - one of the most dangerous premises for judging. The texture of this new journalism reportage revealed something far more discursive and challenging.

Oh and by the way, reporters actually with their gear did try this. This image of ITN John Suchet in the 1980s epitomises the videojournalist ( from my PhD research) and don't be fooled by the big camera. 

 In the 1970s Ken Richter produced the smallest 16mm camera that a journalist could shoot with

So what is videojournalism ( not in an academic way) and why is it so deeply relevant that you know what it is and how it functions?

Gina Deeming tweeted this recently

I responded that the conscientious teacher points you to look, but resists telling you what to see.

That's been my mantra with our Masters cohorts and is the subject of my presentation at the International Festival of Journalism opening up a new, overlooked, ignored journalism that is 21st century.

I presented a weakened argument at SXSW in comparison to my present performance lecture. The reviews were largely favourable from  global patriot ,  technology tell and austin bits and atom.

In the lecture room of tomorrow, the sharing zone for future masters students, new fundamentally different pedagogy should align with new social journalism practices.

The ... And now the news, is not just about reform in the way we look at the creation and outcome of stories, but how our cultures, our individualism plays a bigger role.

It couldn't before because journalism as western model, was practiced by a homogeneously same culture, and colour set. 

Remember when news practised parachute journalism, or that the attitude to journalists who were not of the same cultural pool was akin to Farage shouting "bloody foreigners"

In the West in the 1960s/70s, the UK was predominately white. In the Ghana of the 1960s, Ghanaians were influenced by their own values of what made them Ghana, in spite of a legacy of British influence.

The views of say a Ghanaian therefore play little role in the understanding of journalism in another culture. 

It's a related reason why, often on the tech circuit of high flyers the speakers tend to emerge from a particular cultural milleu. Does this matter? 

When we speak of social news and its impact, in the West we're only now coming around to a different idea of news. But as a baffled Ghanaian student of mine, Daniel Kofi, from 8 years ago recounts, news should be something else, than what it is at present- social news.



Well founded sociological research tools, such as semiotics or even cognitivism make no allowance for the culture, race and beliefs of the storyteller. How could they ? 

Both purport to be scientific models to evaluate research, so beliefs and thoughts are not permitted to be part of the person's story form.

News companies that seek to simplify stories are intellectually ill- equipped with the tools to understand  that a take on a story may be influenced by the fact I grew up in Ghana. but can still be truthful.

That wonderful moment when the late BBC journo Komlu takes his shirt of to decree his Ghanaianesss is an example of this.



Only now, through social news are we beginning to understand that who you are, where you're from, your likes, dislikes can be collated to give meaning to readers about you.

We've come a long way from  the traditional journalism that was apt for its time, but in the transition to a new technological flattened culture, we're still perpetuating beliefs that ill-suit the potential of story telling.

That's what I will be sharing in Perugia at the journalism festival. Hope to see you there.

The reality of London Live - how to launch a station in London

And then it came to pass. London's newest TV station was launched writes former Newsnight and Channel 4 Producer David Dunkley Gyimah.

Here's the catch 22. If you're launching a station you have to big it up. You need eyeballs on your product to make advertisers open their purses.  

Trouble is in that traditionally English sporting tradition of "knock- the- TV- of- its- peg", you run the risk of creating expectations so high that unless you're shooting stardust from the TV it's not going to cut it.

It's a delicate win-win.

Success of a kind though can be measured by the fact the station launched. I watched the opening and it reminded me of youth show BBC Reportage and the Mirror's Live TV.

That's not a criticism but a semiotic reflection of the product, as seen by a critic who watches and analyses television. I chair the jury for the RTS News Innovation awards this year and I used to work on Reportage.

Julian Raesmith commenting on BBC Radio 4 about LondonLive compared it with Network 7 with its cool speak and talking at the audience, er somewhat patronisingly. 

Mark Lawson was complimentary in sections for his piece in the Guardian, praising the diversity of the panel: three women and no white metropolis male.

Ellen E Jones of the Independent gave LondonLive a resounding thumbs up. However, the Independent is also owned by Evgeny Lebedev, who also owns LondonLive. Jones says: 

Londoners often wistfully observe that even with so much culture on the doorstep, they never seem to find time to be a part of it. Well now, with London Live delivering all the good stuff direct to your living rooms, there really is no excuse

The ghost of Network 7

picture Saj Idranizovic

Network 7 in the 1980s was an influential programme for a generation of youth. It launched the careers of several uber slick TV people, at a time when, do you remember Davina McCall's late night dating show "God's Gift" and cooking show "Get Stuffed"?

Honestly, I used to stay up to watch this after a night in the student union  (Leicester) watching Terrence Trent D'arby and some red haired bloke daftly calling himself Simply Red.

After the launch party
The dynamics at LondonLive look interesting. Having been involved in the first 24-hour station, 20 years ago, here's what's going on behind the glam.

You've launched. Whehey!

The reality is now, keep going. However, having worked up to the launch with rehearsals upon rehearsals you mentally begin to feel tired.  You don't have a BBC staff quota so it's still all hands on deck.

Management are in celebratory mood. Nothing has fallen of air. Pitches will be devised for new advertisers and sponsors and the metrics from viewing habits will be combed over.

The approach to the 18-30 year olds needs to work. However because LondonLive is new and they have a mixed constituency: experienced managers, youthful staff, and the suits, at some point conflicts arise. 

As one manager said of Channel One's videojournalists, we created prima donnas. It's natural. Londonlive is still finding its way and is experimenting. But as soon as the younger staff become confident, what works with 18-35 year olds - their target audience - begins to rub against what a late 40-something manager says.

This is the time to hold your nerve and build alliances. When it's not working, it's usually because the audience are getting used to the grammar. All TV station's go through this e.g. BBC. 

If you want to create new TV, don't employ TV people who've come through the system is the radical thought. This thinking is more prevalent in cinema. Tarantino, Soderburgh, Lee, Fincher came at cinema from the side with a vengeance. They were not industry bods.

London's special TV
London  is such a diverse community, that it almost requires a different metric to measure audiences. 24-hour TV is what is known in the industry as a "dip-in service".

Audiences will rarely stay for a long sitting. For the networks, strategic devices like tent-pole programming come into effect.

This is where you create an exemplary programme e.g. The Voice and you dovetail it with two lesser well known programmes. The effect is a spill over from the tent pole programme before a portion of the audience leaves.

In the mid 2000s when Al Jazeera launched, its lead creative designer used my site Viewmagazine.tv to create their website. Last week one of the cleverest former BBC's techs Erik Huggers, now the president of Oncue spoke about the primacy of the web to develop programming. I agree.

What's the next generation of web that will pull in the upwardly mobile? Because the perennial problem of 18-35s sitting down to watch TV will not go away.

So far, with flat design all the trend, Londonlive is yet to use the net as a strategic portal.

But it's very early days. Television is a bummer. News drains resources and just when you get better, other networks are breathing over you e.g. Vice - a network rather than a London-based network. 

London's new station will provide lots of intelligence for how to launch a station, but don't expect to read about anything negative in the press. Jeremy Hunt who launched the local TV programming will be watching with interest. If it works, it debunks all the intel that local TV in the UK can't replicate the US model. Let's wait and see.

End+

Post script added September 2014. 
As I write this additional texts, London Live is struggling financially and from a lack of viewers. Its appeal to the commission to change its status, so it could ditch its London content was rejected. In all likelihood, the station will either down size or fold within three years. The group brought this upon themself. Rather than solicit advice from executives behind Channel One which launched London's first 24 hour station in 1994, they chose to go it alone believing they knew something many TV executives do not.

David will be presenting at the international journalism festival (april 30th 2014) on producing a radically different approach to 21st century news story forms from his 6-year-PhD research. (See what Apple say)