How Digital Storytelling revives journalism of the 21st century

 

You know you see what they want you to see. The terrorism in New Zealand; 50 dead, and the manner in which some newspapers and broadcasters reported the event reached a deeply depressing low.

Britain’s Daily Mail’s heavily condemned headline posing its angelic tag of the terrorist demonstrated a leaning to hybrid interference, virtuous signalling and morally questionable standards.

Hybrid interference, or wedging is a strategy writes Mikeal Wiegell adopted by external agents in a society to drive distorting concepts of truth and hence heighten divisions. It’s now no stranger to journalism in liberal societies.

Yet, so far it matters not a jot — at least to the proprietors. Newspapers are privately owned and any public standards to which they might be upheld were strafed by a UK government concealing itself behind press freedom, democracy and self-regulation. You need laws? Levenson 2 (UK press enquiry) was about cleaning up the boil after it had been lanced. The sore has been left open.

The crisis a populace faces in seeing journalism as truth telling has some comparisons with a cultures pre-renaissance when truth and falsehood could mesh. Stories were embellished and accepted.

Gilgamesh, a Sumerian King is characterised by documenters as slaying lions with his bare hands. The ubiquitous heroe’s journey told by Joseph Campbell demonstrates a predilection to myths. Daniel Defoe (1659–1731) is said to be one of the first to practise evidence-based journalism, but it didn’t catch on universally. Today, too in spite of his horrendous actions, terrorism in New Zealand can still, it appears, be re-spun.

The difference now as a generally more enlightened society than our ancestors is we’ve been led to believe newspapers are organs of factual realism truth, when some have grown into ideological frankenstein machines — working against tolerance and liberalism.

Papers with News
The history of populists papers requires context. The Daily Mail (1896), Daily Mirror (1903), and Daily Express (1900) were set up by gentry ideologically aligned with the Conservative Party with the alt view of squashing working class pesky newspapers like the Northern star, whilst filling the void with their own brand of stories, which could be sensationalist.

If you had deep pockets and friends in high places, you effectively stood to control millions of British people, by shaping what they read, and feeding their views, however extreme, to others. By the 1930s, Freud’s psychoanalysis had popularised that people were governed by an irrationality that far outdid rational thought. Gustav Le Bon ‘s The Crowd had shown similar findings in the 19th Century. People would behave en mass and were thus prone to group-think and be susceptible to fear talk that hosted a lie , rather than question it.

As a newspaper baron you could tell your version of reality and hand general elections back to governments-in-waiting, whilst earning free airtime publicity from broadcasters e.g. BBC and What The Papers Say.

Clear impunity.

And for all the twitter storms, flagging dog whistles, outright race batting or stirring divisions, it’s no stretch to believe there’s no such thing as bad criticism. Not being talked about is far worse says Roger Stone. The rest? Who cares. Hence they’ll be another storm of opprobrium soon, and another and another.

How do you manage accountability? Does hitting the papers in the pockets mean anything? According to academic and author Chris Horrie who’s written one of the defining books about tabloids e.g. Stick It Up Your Punter! the Sun newspaper’s owners News International have lost £15m a month (in 1989 prices) since their damning Hillsborough coverage and liverpudlians boycotted the paper. Yet the Sun survives.

Such mass boycott action is rarely successful and the Internet today gives newspapers a wider reach from ad spend to boost profits. The Mail in particular, has shown itself to be innovative. Today, it’s the leading UK online paper — a feat it managed devising unusually lengthy front page scrolls which gamed SEO algorithms and slating click-bait titles with articles psychologically shaped to fuel interest.

Sleight of hand
There’s a game you may have played with a toddler in which you present both hands. One supposedly conceals a ball. The toddler makes a choice. You then open your hand without the red ball, feigning surprise. The toddler puzzled looks disbelieving at the hand again and then behind you, by which time you’ve disposed of the ball. This curiosity, falling for the same trick all the time is a bit like the illusionary presence of Father Christmas. But at some point the illusion cracks.

Somehow in today’s journalism, generally the audience can still be viewed as a toddler, not necessarily in the telling of stories, though this happens, but in the illusion of presenting the “entirety” of an event. What’s not happening in the frame, behind your back hides much needed information.

There was a moment in a BBC political interview programme called On the Record, circa 1990s presented by John Humphrys, when the camera moves away from the a face shot to below the table where you can see the politician desperately wringing his hands. His veil had dropped.

Should we continue to call them newspapers, the free press, or impartial broadcasters at all? A wider debate, but as we head towards 5G and the consequences of ultra low latency, deeper relay remote control, A.I. and what Professor Mischa Dohler from Kings College describes as the coming of the Internet of Skills how might journalism and societies tackle wedging?

Perhaps, as this draft moving image of me presenting news superimposed with data arrays illustrates, we need greater co-creating between multi-disciplines e.g. engineering, neuroscientists to reveal the underlying, which I’ll refer to as the fourth wall. Stats at your fingerprints to debunk human perception, and if you haven’t watched Akala’s surgical delineation of knife crimes in London here, in which the media perceive as a black on black problem, do.

Journalism’s so called higher level of proof is under assault and its response has been exposed as woefully inadequate. Because thus far, so long as you can cite others who support your POV, or persuasively frame a point to massage people’s irrational behaviour (War is good at all costs and repatriating Black brits (Windrush) will bring back a semblances of Great Britain), it’s OK. So long too that you have circulation you can pretty much say whatever you want. And so long also that you meet the minimum threshold of what a news story might look and sound like, you’re quids in.

But perhaps like the toddler seeing through the hand trick, audiences should have the opportunity to see into the fourth wall to gauge the iniquities of hybrid interference. How so?

@ledbyDonkeys describe themselves as four friends minded by the level of hypocrisy in British politician’s rolling back, even denying comments they made. So, they took to first plastering billboards with politicians’ quotes about what they previously said, and now crowd source funds to paste their ripostes. They’ve been successful.

This is activism journalism. It should be obvious journalism. @ledbyDonkeys attempt at exposing duplicitous narratives can only travel so far. And this form too, billboards, good as it is in exposing duplicity, is limiting.

What journalism, the public, and journalism studies requires is a visibility of event’s fourth wall. This is not a semiotic exercise in alternative meanings, but a way of revealing, bringing into the foreground, the outer often discarded rims of events.

This is craft work. Take Luigi Pirandello, a Nobel Prize author and dramatist. In Pirandello’s innovative theatre, the audience is given access to the thinking in the conceiving of the play. They become active participants.

It’s the equivalent of showing the guts of television and its operations at work, the type of transparency demanded in academia. How did you get there? Jeff Jarvis sees greater transparency and accountability within various solutions and social journalism. In 2014, as one of twenty global experts invited to CUNY by Jeff to share a vision of television of the future, I explained a new model of journalism through digital storytelling and cinema journalism. “I like your idea”, Jeff said afterwards, “it’s unusual”.

It’s not uncommon for many a journalists to go out to an event, only to observe it’s not the story the editor wants. All background material, dissent, self critique, out-of-the- ordinary is junked for the spectacle of the performance in mind.

On the rare occasion the fourth wall becomes the obvious story, as when a Trump supporter attacked a camera crew at a Trump raleigh. But watch how quickly the camera adopts the conventionalised reality of journalism again in the clip.

Below, an independent camera catches out-of-the-conventional-frame- material, but the larger spectacle of the 4th wall is also ignored, which includes glimpses of the absurdity of the press operators tightly penned in together — Trump’s target for his charade.

In effect it would be difficult, though not impossible for organisations to reveal their own fourth walls — as all this would be is a continuum of their own agendas.

But what if just like @ledbyDonkeys, a crowd sourced network deconstructed what main hybrid interferers were doing? In Latvia, a prime time show Melu Teorija is dedicated to revealing spins and untruths made up by Russian active measure operators. In the Ukraine their show is Stop Fa̶k̶e̶ News

And this is Lithuania’s attempt to fight Russian Active Measures operators by launching a collaboration between Lithuania’s Military Strategic Communications (STRATCOM) and Elves — the equivalent of trolls.

But what if the distortion is inside, and how much more could you deconstruct a fourth wall to expose what’s going on? In effect, in UK institutions, 4th wall journalism hasn’t much started, and the public and a new generation of journalists are walking into ever complex wedgings.

Furthermore how can you guarantee people will watch/read what you’ve made? Not unusually too that logical argument you’ve constructed may fail to convince those acting irrationally. Perhaps, a friend said, a new form of A.I for irrational arguments needs building. Emotional Intelligence and engagement also is key.

In the meantime, a combination of innovation in identifying new (digital/ investigative) tools, and also in the production of the stories is merited. Story constructs that takes elide within and out of the ecosystem that guardians frame so tightly as “journalism”, taking us into wider realms of Factual Storytelling or Occured Events Digital Storytelling (OEDS), a term coined to delineate from the multi-verse of digital storytelling.

I’ll explain further in the next post. Other observed trends can be gauged from this short video. 

Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is an international award winning innovator.

 

 

In closed humidity, amid summerish heat of 32 degrees, and a cornucopia of distant sounds, the sun finally turns its golden yellow and begins to surrender for the day. In its diminishing glow hidden in a cul de sac, a convoy waits. 

We have arrived early and are obliged to patiently stay motionless for an hour or so on the outskirts of a village, Asokore, near Ghana’s hinterland city, Kumasi. We wait because it is forbidden to come forth in daylight with one of the village’s returning sons — a respected man from a lineage of popular figures in the days, some of whom were chiefs. 

We wait some more, before the sun disappears over the horizon and the convoy and lead car purr their engines and slowly make their way snaking on the potholed roads. We are here. Onlookers crane their necks and whisper. Written from the perspective of a British journalist, this ritual seems endearing, if perhaps amusingly bewildering. 

What might anyone, with a lack of knowledge of customs and the culture, transported to this spot, have made off all of this?  This is a funeral about to begin its run of three days. The returning son is my father, born in Asokore, who became a police officer, and then sought a new destiny with my mother in the UK. 

Several years later, he has returned home. Sankofa , a well known Twi maxim means “go back and retrieve”. It is almost a fitting prose for what we are to experience. Everything about my father’s home coming had been a system of processes — several business ends in the UK ensuring his safe passage. 

But it is also a metaphor, alongside others, for sonorous journalism. Let me explain. Now in Ghana, rituals that have lasted many years — some extruded to accompany Ghanaian’s penchant for lavish funerals, have now taken hold. It’s said of Ghanaians that it’s at funerals where you’ll find your future husband or wife. 

Three days affords you some time within the solemnity of the occasion. This is so far removed from the clashing of cymbals and gyration of hips to some genre of music in a night club in London, Croydon — where you rendezvous to find your future soul mate. During the three days my family and I will perform many rituals and sermons. I have to brush up on my Twi — the language of the Akans — which is rich in metaphor. Death is described as literally turning your head to face the wall. 

I remember saying this and drawing nods of appreciation. “He’s done well” said one elder afterwards. And then this which has forever stuck with me. On the final day fifteen clothed elders gathered in a room. It is time, a relative tells me, to take gifts to thank them for their time, for their support, and for the appreciation of one of their own through his children. 

For brief moments I lose my guard as a family member, and become a storyteller, a journalist. How might this feature be relayed so it’s less a curio from someone not knowing local customs? I have flashbacks to being in Soweto with white journalists friends who’s parachuted into South Africa’s election from the UK and saw men toying with clubs. 

They looked fearsome, but you’ve nothing to be afraid off. I think back to SUS law arrests in the 80s/90s in which police accosting a black man, would interpret his actions as “shifty”, were he failed to look an officer in the eyes, whilst shifting his weight, head titled.

Were white police officers aware that there were generations of men whose idea of respect was not to “eye ball” their fathers, officials or elders? “Don’t be eye-balling me son” was not an uncommon refrain in some households I knew. Or that further back in time these fathers’ fathers did similar. Under their publishing company X-Press Dotun Adebayo and Steve Pope would release a book Yardie that the met police implored its officer should read. Fiction and non fiction merged to unveil a culture unknown to Police. 

This was the 1990s. Standing in front of the Ghanaian elders, they asked the seminal question. How much did all this cost, the flight, the laying on of food, the gifts to other members and Dad’s resting bed, a patterned gasket. There was murmuring and darted expressions when we told them. Translated into English, with the customery ooms and aams, the eldest of the elders spoke. 

He thanked us for doing one of their own right and thanked some more, and then told us, you in the West are crazy. You’re crazy to spend all this money on the dead, when the living are suffering. Look what we do he said drawing attention to his faith. We wrap our loved ones in a shoal and then commit them to the ground the very next day or after. 

Instead he continued, you’ve given rise to a business — a thriving one for those who are pass on. There’s a passage in Around the world in a trillion dollars a day, where senior financiers from South East Asia assail the Americans who attempt to sell a new package of debt swaps. No more packages, they say. 

In modern parlance, the world has discovered and developed and intricate set of business ends that bamboozle, bind people even as they take their last journey. “We need in this kingdom only priests and school teachers, and no merchandise, unless its wine and flour for the Mas”, said King Alfonso I in a letter to the King of Lisbon in 1526. Alfonso, elaborately portrayed in Hochschild’s King Leopold Ghosts is lamenting the business of human slave trade taking place at alarming rate in his Kongo (spelt Kongo). 

He is tired of merchants. Hochschild tells us what makes stories of the Kongo gripping is that for history, journalism first draft of accounts, whites exploiting the land are not the only authors. Their white narrative sees the native Kongolese as savages, but for once there is a historical account of that era from a black man, learned and understanding of customs. 

The centuries ahead, greater emphasis placed on commerce and business becomes a measure of a nation’s status, its place in the world, as opposed to greater recognition of its priests, school teachers and medical personnel; architects, artisans and artists. Centuries ahead too, the Western world would invent a story form called journalism through which events are comparatively largely recorded through the eyes of those visiting, unaccustomed to customs and rituals. 

They interpret events as curios. They can’t be mindful of the gravitas of events if they lack in its experience. Yet the world is told through their eyes. If learning is about being liberated, then vast swathes of knowledge are entombed through ignorance or otherwise complicity. Alfonso’s letter was met by Belgium’s king with a rebuke. 

The king’s emissaries, he said, tell him Kongo is a vast place and there are many potential slaves, such that the trade will not run dry. One Kongo king’s version against another, the King of Belgium. One version of events against another. One who understands his culture against a King, Leopold who never once set foot in Kongo, but raped its riches and people, brutally. Of all the definitions and frameworks put together to sow together a divine model of journalism — few ever cite how culture is integral. 

That at the heart of our exchanges is in an attempt to make sense of cultures; super, supra, boardroom and community et al. Storytelling of a kind called journalism represses the super, between people, profoundly, whilst cinema saw stories through the eyes of the beholder who knew their apples, and could offer nuanced interpretation. Cinema! Reportage‘s stories are more muted. 

Why? Because, perhaps to those who offer its craft at the highest pedagogical level, from circa 1700s there was no other culture, but the one worthy of note. Rebooted in the 1980s by a Prime Minister it became there’s no such thing as society. It’s as if you’d asked a fish the temperature of its water. 

How would the fish know? It’s only occupied one realm. In the 1700s onwards, culture was one, mono, undifferentiated. There were other people from different places e.g. Gold Coast, but their numbers were insignificant, though not unimportant to contest there existed varying cultures, and as such an expressiveness in contemporary storytelling. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story appears in Hamilton the musical. 

Victors tell the stories, journalism is about power, and the power to shape narrative. Hamilton is pure juju for reworking the agents of American’s founding fathers performed by a significant black cast. Andrew Marr’s My Trade a well written book on a short history of British Journalism underscores this mono narrative. It doesn’t purport to be a history of journalism, for it reflects events of white Anglo-Saxon heritage. EH Gombrich, one of the highest authorities on Art, behind the knowledge expanding Story of Art did not see why he should features black or women artists, believing they were not important. 

You can’t begin to understand how the world shaped by television and opinions hewn by news, reduces customs and culture to generalisations. It’s obvious through not only the lack of diversity in programmes, but of different people, from different cultures, being on the tables that decide what we eat. Culture matters. It matter a lot. Yet comparatively few intellectuals acknowledge its profound impact in storytelling alongside objectivity, impartiality etc. 

Prof Michael Schudson speaks of journalism as the following: Journalism practice is a cultural construct, dependent on societal changes and literary traditions. To story tell requires understanding those cultures. My father’s burial, as much as how Covid-19 is blighting black communities are stratas of culture — that require exegesis in play. 

The sun is appearing on the 4th day ending our ritual. In the future across the world we see the prospect of a new dawn. I carry forward my father’s legacy and new knowledge for new ideas and co-creations as cultures meet. Journalism Storytelling Ghana Culture BlackLivesMatter

In the week of UK-Africa investment, Dr David Dunkley Gyimah, voted one of Ghana’s most influential people in the UK, reflects on his visit to Ghana to find it boxing clever and taking on heavyweights

He’s tipped to be Ghana’s next sporting boxing megastar, and embodies the characteristics with which Ghana is being described via boxing metaphors. Sporting allegories befit some countries more than others. Ghana is one of them. Not the worn tropes, “punching above its weight” more “shaping up” and “boxing clever” on the international scene.

The country’s pedigree in the sport is legendary. At the nondescript venue The Gym in the capital boxing legends, such as former World featherweight champ Azuma Nelson trained here. On the wall is a photo of another World Champ for whom I was his cinema journalism filmmaker during his epic fight with Mike Tyson for the undisputed world championship. I would accompany Lennox Lewis to the UK Ghana High Commission en route to Ghana.

Ghana’s economy is catching world attention. Growth saw movement from 5.6% the previous year to 6.7% GDP, just shy of its forecast, but making it one of the fastest growing economies, alongside Rwanda, Ethiopia and Cote d’Ivoire. How the turn around? Oil revenue, and the further discovery of off-shore fields, pumping out their liquid resource is one, just outside the capital there’s evidence of another, which will play well into the dynamics of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Fields of Dream

On the outskirts of Accra, I meet CEO Francis Osei of ISEO’s Agricultural consultancy. In just two years, deploying tech, world expertise and home talent, he’s created one of the largest Maize farms in Ghana, the size of 6000 football pitches. It’s a template that has attracted interest outside of Ghana and he’s preparing to scale up.

CEO Francis Osei has created a 440 hectare farm, the size of 6000 football pitches in 2 years.

There’s a knock on effect for job creation, manufacturing and services adding to Ghana’s domestic GDP. Government policies reported by DW have also acted as fuel for growth. But as in boxing parlance a round is not the match.

Ghana’s heavyweight status has materialised over a lengthy period. Trade and current account deficits, mounting external dept and poor growth has often been the mood music. Twenty eight years ago, I reported for the BBC on US Secretary Ron Brown’s foreign direct investment (FDI) visit to South Africa, to stimulate its economy. The rub? Multinationals were drawn to the country’s favourable market policies but the impact on local jobs and the GDP were comparably minimal.

Ghana’s flank exposes similar patterns and requires forethought. Several more multinationals attracted by trading conditions are due to set up shop in 2020. Al Jazeera report

Nissan, Suzuki, and Volkswagen will open plants in the country in 2020, transforming the region into a hub for the African car industry.

Part of the pull is Ghana’s spend against its revenues coming under check and efforts to clamp down on commercial corruption. A friend, who’s a senior executives at a high performing multinational, has hit on an ingenious scheme for transparency and due diligence and its making and impact. We’ll report on this in the future.

My late father was part of the wave of Ghanaians who left the country soon after independence, swelling and popularising, like so many others, the label of “diaspora” — which the present government last year designated the year of homecoming for the many dispersed. It attracted, and continues to draw attention. At Elmina castle, where last year US House speaker Nancy Pelosi and 13 Congress members visited, photographers approach us and we share a conversation.

They request we pose and moments later will appear with the prints for a fee. I thank them and also suggest politely they’re missing a vital component of storytelling. Rather than capturing events for as representation, they might do so for the drama as documentary photojournalism. It’s the story and emotions that country’s lack when telling their grand vision.

In the city, the Overseas Development Institute is training young people in documentary photography, as well as an assortment of skills. It’s encouraging to see. Youth and employment are rousing themes in Ghana, with the president acknowledging there’s work to be done, particularly in educating the next generation, training them and helping them find jobs.

Perhaps one of the biggest stories which should have global recognition is caught in what could be termed “Start-up stasis”. Ghana’s government has made education free for students to secondary school. That’s a big deal and politically requires traction. Unesco’s 2010 stats says eight out of every ten 15–24 year-olds is literate. For the over 65 years-olds that drops to three out of every ten. That’s a huge story to champion and sell which which should impact skills.

Parallels with South Korea come to mind when in the 1950s the average income for South Korea and Ghana respectively was $490 and $491 respectively, by 1990 South Korea was $4,832 to Ghana’s $481 — a ten fold magnitude jump. South Korean boosted learning and savvy businesses.

MEDIA

Akushika and Earl, former presenters of the Breakfast Show. Akushika is today editor of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation

Media is one of Ghana’s success stories in its matured democracy. The air waves reflect a liberalism and free speech, unlike many other African states. I’ve arrived at a time when there are ongoing talks between the media and government over press freedoms and the protection of journalists. In the offices of Joy FM Ghana’s leading independent stations I’m introduced to Israel Laryea — one of the country’s most prominent newsmen courtesy of one of my former Masters students.

It’s clear from when we start talking we share mutual interests in, amongst others, an old friend I’ve not seen in 21 years, the former BBC Ghana correspondent Kwaku A Sakyi-Addo who now heads up Ghana’s media regulatory body — the equivalent of the UK’s Ofcom.

One of my first project in Ghana was in 1997 working with the then Turner executive Edward Boateng, whom is now the Ambassador to China. Together we launched Ghana’s national television’s Breakfast Show taking them on their first outside broadcast to South Africa where in the early 90s I was an Associate Producer for ABC News.

The digital entrepreneur and start-up culture too in Ghana is shaping up. Tech Nova writes that four Ghanaian start-ups lead the way for the Africa Prize for innovation. AfriTech announced several digital entrepreneurial schemes for accelerator funds. The challenge however to accelerate these program depends on a strategic theme favouring a different philosophy to nominal tech start-ups and that is the Chinese model of leveraging innovation and business supported by local government, rather than the organic growth witnessed in Silicon Valley.

I’m leaving Accra. The Arts centre is a microcosm of Ghana’s future. Craftsmen and women accost us for sales, driving hard bargains. They’re determined, persistent, and have a vision of what they want, but to expand it requires joined up and local government thinking. Unquestionably solutions are complex, but as my seller poses in his shop no. 163, I’m reminded. A country’s brand and character is shaped by the people. Can Ghana keep its up it momentum and how transformative does the various sectors set different goals. It’s up to you them to Keep jabbing.

Dr David Dunkley Gyimah was voted one of the top 40 influential Ghanaians in the UK’s Ghana Abroad. He attended Prempeh College in his teens. A former broadcaster, he’s an academic specialising in Tech, AI and Entreprneurs and runs the Emerging Media at Cardiff University. He’s worked or consulted in Lebanon, Tunisia, China, Russia, Egypt, India, South Africa, America etc. More on him here

Training in foreign news reporting in the digital noisy age.

O

ana couldn’t believe her misfortune whilst setting up in one of the world’s hot zones, Ukraine’s Maidan Square. It’s quiet now. Five months earlier it was under siege; a battle zone between government security forces and protestors against president Ukrainian President, Viktor Yanukovych,

She’d checked and doubled checked everything before she left London; equipment, risk assessment, pre-shoot research script, but now one of her contacts had bailed on her.

When you’re on your own and a chunk of your programme idea falls away your options are either to can the idea or improvise to save it whilst evaluating the risks. Great improvisation comes from a canny instinct and understanding craft skills. You can’t make up what you don’t know proficiently. Today tech calls that agile production.

Back in London, Oana’s grafting would earn her report high praise. Rare footage taken by a videojournalist she acquired provided unseen knowledge behind the bloody protest. She graduated from her Masters and duly found work at the BBC and made a number of special reports from Poland. Her desire was always to work for the international arm of a network and become a foreign reporter. Somewhere in the world, I know she’s doing just that.

The Foreign News Reporter Paradox

By definition reporting from a foreign land makes you a foreign news reporter particularly in the digital age where everyone is a potential broadcaster and no one needs to vet your skills. In his promo, multi-award winning mojo Yusuf Omar explains:

I wanted to be a foreign correspondent in Syria and they said I was too young. I wanted to tell stories across Africa and they said it was too dangerous…

Thus Omar did what legions before him would do, he went it alone reporting for his citizen journalism outfit. The big or brand named publishers may have alluded him, but he probably gives that short shrift now as he travels the world delivering workshops on journalism with a mobile phone, as well as acquiring celebrity status.

In practise, and by convention (if you listen to convention) becoming a foreign reporter, or to use its much less loaded word, “international reporter” for a named publisher calls on an expert understanding and analysis of a country’s socio-politics, or at least how to source it.

Being around the block enough for industry figures to have a measure of your ethics and professional standards which will be tested. Meanwhile you sport unkempt grey hairs suggesting you have skin in the game and sharp elbows — a firm desirable. Being an international reporter is not for the meek. You may taking the OCEANs test find you’re not cut out for its rough and tumble.

Viewed as the plumb of plumb jobs, with all its romanticised travel, daring-dos and hotel hopping, it’s small wonder scores of reporters want a crack at it. In reality writes Tony Grant editor of BBC Radio 4’s flag ship programme, From our own correspondent, it’s far from it.

The job involves a great deal of hanging around, often late at night or early on the morning, waiting for people to arrive at airports or to emerge from hospitals or courts clutching statement.

After stints at BBC Newsnight, and reporting on BBC 2’s Reportage in the early 1990s, I too felt the itch. Naturally, after several rejections I became aware no one was going to hire a Chemistry and Maths grad with a penchant for African politics. Hence, I made my own way to one of the world’s trouble news spots, South Africa, and slowly but methodically listened and learned.

Eventually I would be reporting for the BBC World Service, its African and Caribbean Service and BBC Radio 4 documentaries. By the time I’d left South Africa filing my last report covering President Mandela’s inauguration the Head of Studies at Chatham House, Professor Jack Spence would invite me to become one of its youngest full members. Twenty-five years later, I’m still a member.

Skills and Knowledge

What I learned becoming an international reporter has been put into practice countless times helping a new generation and whilst age is not a defining quality, craft skills and embedded knowledge of a subject do matter.

Tamer, written about here in 2007, had come from Gaza to gain an MA in journalism. With the course barely over, he told me he was going for a job as Gaza correspondent for the soon-to-be launched BBC Arabic service.

There were two major skillsets he’d learned. Here’s what you do I advised. At the age of 24-years Tamer returned the next day to break the news. “Mr David I’m now the BBC’s correspondent from Gaza”. He beat a field of experienced practitioners. He did it.

Today those technical skillsets have changed in a new digital era, but the underlying principles and artistic skills remains in tact.

This is the storyverse, which you’ll want to master. It correlates with the workflow of storytelling, digital tools and pre-visualising how to proceed in the digital noise age where disinformation is rife.

What you see and how you interpret events is framed by your cognitive thinking — the black box; your approach and dissemination of knowledge. Skills can be easily acquired. A few classes mastering camera work, or shooting on mobile is enough to get you up and running, the knowledge of how framing and camera movement affects the audience takes longer.

There are competing interests, but one of the first things is to develop an idea of your audience’s persona. A butcher sells meat, a lawyer legal services, as a journalist you sell stories. Buzzfeed and Vice magazine’s case studies are informative and worth studying. There are several ways to build a likely audience’s profile, perhaps from surveys. In the digital noise era which I’ll explain in a future post, I’ll show how you can get even more granular.

Next in competing interests are ideas. Creative ideas and problem solving, two highly ranked characteristics in the World Economic Forum’s 2020 data, have a direct impact on your audience’s needs.

When I landed in South Africa for the first time and each time I travel on a story I ask to be taken to a popular coffee shop or pub, where you can hold a decent conversation. I usually take a curio which can easily start off a conversation. In South Africa, as a genuine Rugby fan, I’d wear an England shirt. The sight of a black man, wearing England colours would often spark incredulity before the archetypal question. “Are there black people in England?” or “Why are you here?”

The next thing was to analyse nupes and trend extrapolate their output; a pattern soon emerges about what the region’s main newspaper or digital publishers produce for their audiences. This can be significant but also requires caution. If Buzzfeed or Vice followed the popular signage they would not have been successful as they are. There’s a swathe of untapped readers that publishers are vying for.

The third for this post is style and form for your audience. Over the last two decades several branches of journalism have emerged, each of them a reaction to a deficiency in the market. I’d like to think, amongst them there are very few that are platform agnostic and deal with story structure.

For dye-in-the-wool videojournalists that would be cinema journalism — a craft that subsumes all other forms in its quest to tell stories. A crude analogy to imagine is its fictional form. Films like The Big Short, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and The Kingdom (below) are three different movies that incorporate styles in seen in data, Tik-Tok and motion graphics. The Kingdom’s opening sequence is still one of the best journalistic stories told, which can be achieved using after affects. You can find more about videojournalism and cinema journalism in my medium posts and this short film here .

Five life lessons learned; the importance of relearning

When asked about his talent, his awards, his performances, he stopped looked the interviewer in the eye and simply said: “I just wanna work, man!”

Society sets a series of de facto rules. Who get’s to make their way draws currency from its bank. It’s a loan with varying interest. Other side, it’s an application which more often will be denied. So you build your own imaginary reserve. And slowly, inexorably work to a plan that seems ad hoc, but there’s meaning, because like the actor: “You just wanna work”.

We listen to stories because they give us something to anchor. Sometimes these stories are stars lighting up a hidden destiny.

I once had a meeting with the foreign affairs editor of the BBC in the BBC canteen. After perusing my CV for a moment, he asked somewhat confused: “So, what is it you do?”

You see my CV reflected a myriad of interests, which could either suggests the convention of a lack of focus, or an interest in many things. I grew up working in my active imagination. I was a foreign correpondent, a firefighter, an at one time a milkman, then I wanted to become an artist, but my father wanted a doctor. I got so far as Chemistry and maths.

These aspirations; I didn’t quite make firefighter and milkman, I lasted two days before my parents told the milkman a child of nine going out on milk runs, was well, not right. But if I have learned one thing, you’ll either conform to what people want, or you’ll forever chase lights with moments of fulfilment.

I do these, not because of anything than I just wanna work. So since my encounter with the BBC head, I chase them lights, often hoping and have taken people with me.

1. Give yourself different experiences. I once dived with British and Turkish navy divers into a world war one wreck off the coast of Turkey. Thirty metres down, I was trapped by a thermocline and ran out of air. I don’t advocate that, but in the process somebody from the BBC was interested to hear my thoughts.

1. Collaborate, share your gifts. It won’t always be accepted, but that’s not the point: I imagined with a friend what it would be to shine a light on the incredible array of people who are talented. We created the leaders’ list, sixty of the UK’s leading BAME producers.

1. Humility is the key to people giving you their success. My friendship with a senior tv figure would result in an invitation to a dinner, and whilst eating, a tower of a man appeared. We stood. I said hello, shook his hand, and like many was and still am mesmerised by him. It was President Nelson Mandela.

1. Search for them stories: I’ve loved stories from the time my mum would rerun Doris Day’s Calamity Jane. That love has fuelled me towards coding, a different form of journalism storytelling, and photojournalism which my peers have recognised through international awards. But, I just wanted to work.

1. Live life with the certainties that uncertainties is but a rock in your path. I recall my foster parents, my boarding school, my parents and mum who recently passed. She was a figure of hope. We shape our world by the way we let society frame those conventions. Each journey can finish like you want it to, when your imaginary reserves materialises as they will. It all starts with that simple commitment; I just wanna work.