When you pick up the camera - as a videojournalist consider who's watching!

This is a matter of record, interviewing the great Quincy Jones, but who's watching?

It would a gross underestimation to say media news is at a diffused crossroad.

The networks continue to lose figures, with hard data from the likes of Business Insider and one study after another tells us something we already know. No news organsation has as yet cracked any discernible strategy.

The crux for the super News is beyond upgrades in the graphics, newsroom set, and personality-driven news presenters and reporters to stem the flow

For the teleported vision of news and its concurring costs, the dilemma is one mimicked in related genres such as docs, which has eased from science and legal frameworks of authenticity to their own branded reality: The observational doc to the reality show.

When you pick up the camera, those explicit choices, though hidden bring on hard choices.

Do you

• explicitly turn your camera into a tool for the simple recording, capturing truth of records by legal standards?
• or do you expressively become the film maker indulging aesthetic and style with truth?

Largely, the institutions with deep pockets e.g. the BBC will seek to maintain integrity through the news camera being a tool of science and uncontested truths. This requires training and investment to find that subtle form of performance.

Get it marginally wrong and the news becomes at worst boring, if no drama ensues. When there is seemingly no story what do you do? I had the privilege couple of days ago talking to a BBC senior figure.

The Videojournalism News Today
Present day audiences will just about sneak scheduled news, but unless the footage is dramatic, in which case it would have been accessed elsewhere, they'll eschew their appointment with the news.

The videojournalist, and I'm speaking from its manifest of 1994 ( Channel One TV) was sought to work the margins, not so much the primary what - which the big news outfits would cover - , but the how something occurred.

Here, aesthetic has more leeway, with the result the VJ can craft miniature films. And here is where the long and short tail audiences online have shown their appreciation.

There's no schedule, guarantee of appointment, but if its enjoyable non fiction, which works on the premise of most dramatic arc stories, of some form of populist resolution, the viewer and videojournalist both win.

There is no panacea for the fragmented loss of audiences, other than a wholesale shift to a semiotic which meets the zeitgeist requirement of your dominant audience - which for the moment may be baby boomers.

This differs for each territory and a bespoke approach is required as I have found working in Egypt (where Television is still strong); China, where investigative journalism is big business; and the UK, where purely on population figures, diversity and increased choice they'll test their braodcasters.

And the generations of 1990s who are unaware of the politics and in some cases the value of news proof versus news aesthetic, will look to sate their appetite elsewhere for news ( The Star Trek effect) . Historically young groups have always been difficult to capture.

So when you pick up your camera consider your bipolar standing.

In my case an interview with Quincy Jones as a record may amount to very little. What you may want to see is innovation within its content, by which it means I'm forced to weigh up aesthetics and creativity of content against scientific truth to win over the audience.

Mmmm

Journalism's deja vu why... the past matters

David as a freelance World Service radio journalist in Cape Town settlement in 1992

I'm peering through the window; the fans of my hard drives are now audible - an irritant, almost.

And I have now seen fit to turn of the other two monitors, three will do fine for the moment. Yes I am a screen geek, but that's for another day to banter.

Journalism's deja vu and why the past matters is a reflective thought from building up a list of to dos for a study, which is also the making of a film I'm investing quite some time in.

It goes back to 1987 as seen through my eyes, an interpretive approach to the changing media. Oh how the past really matters, as I popped open a Hi8 (obscure thing) to watch on its designated player and rolled tape from the settlements of Khayelitsha.

For once, now we might truly recognise there is no grand scheme, no jewels of utter profound thought - though there are shards of occasional brilliance - in manufacturing media.

The year of 1987. Thatcherism. And how desperately I wanted to work in broadcasting. I'm black, a chemistry undergrad transitioning and haven't the foggiest how I might soon transmorgificate myself from post studentism to broadcast professional.

I wrote a piece for our student newspaper, a heated debate at the university about the emergence of AIDS from Africa discovered in Reese Monkeys. Yep!

Black is important. In 1987 colour was heavily politicized, student affairs was akin to a class struggle.

Later in 1992 when I landed in South Africa and was summarily invited onto prime time radio, you could forgive the host for asking the number of blacks who worked in broadcasting.

I digress.

Journalism back story
Reflection! What was once so, those distant times, why do they matter? Because journalism thought it never had it so good, short term views ran the course, the beneficiaries of the so-called professionals arbitrating on our behalf, became a self interest.

The past matters for context.

Over the years any number of outfits have changed, shed past ways, looked to the future, shed some more past ways and then made pronouncements about how right now they are in the here and now.

We heard it on the news again this week with the BBC's new policy javelin spearing two hitherto stations, you've probably never heard of. Martin Sorrell, the Stan Lee of advertising says we're (advertising) back. You can wheel the patient out of the critical room.

How prescient of Oliver Stone to resurrect Gecko. There's a looming irony.

Never mind hindsight, but its worth asking and firmly if you're privy to the change business. We all are as consumers, so how really different will the future be? For one thing our views of truth, Walter Benjamin suggests, which is shaped by institutions, by any account has not gone the way of the recession.

There is disquiet over the Tories intended fisticuffs with broadcasting should they toe poke the election. It looks too much like Murdoch's manifesto says the Guardian's Jonathan Freedland

.."the BBC has decided its best strategy for self-preservation is to suffer a little pain now to avoid a lot of pain later".

There is a sense we might be slow walking, not into old ways - that's not possible - but parallels of ways we've co opted that reference those ways.

Goldsmith University's research unveiled early last year that the Internet hasn't significantly altered the structure of journalism seems true to a large point.

Plutocracy rules. Old money, old ideas buy power. Witness the non dom tax debacle of Lord Ashcroft and traditional media tail spinning. Their news is our news.

We've sniffed a bit of lax in the system, but it's only a bit and apart from the odd subject agendas are made in corporate boardrooms.

All Change
And journalism, well it still hasn't fully recovered, question is when it does will it be the one of old or a new one in place - hardly a topic to debate really?

So why does my longitudinal study and the forsaken tapes I have kept from my first broadcast to recently running around Beirut training matter?

Well context Watson, context! Will comparisons with the past truly show how earth-moving this flux has been? Is the change we're witnessing a symptom of Darwinism - evolving - rather than a revolution?

To academics who chew the cud of words such lengthy studies are boringly necessary, because they often reveal not som much the changes made, but what was missed and truly could have been monumental.

Like I said, the next pronouncement you hear from your favourite media will be telling you how they've now got it so right, journalistically, in employment (don't mention the CDN), and socially.

You'll find out whether that's the case in another ten years time.

Broadcasting in style, but does it always work?

The credit crunch, the dour economy, the blood on the floor, now lets cut to our reporters looking immaculately cut in bespoke suits.

There's something incongruous about the image. Reportage has become so slick, you might call it "fashionable drama reporter".

In Ron Powers' The Newscasters - the news business as show business", we see its origins.

The broadcast networks really did seek celebrity status; helicopters carted the super reporter from location to location.

Those were the excess years and they've not been forgotten. Newscasters aped Dallas and Dallas looked to the broadcasters - a veritable circle of admiration.

But then we tired of the slick and drama got busy redefining itself, splintering of to a 'look and feel' that created the impression that this was hard work.

Compare Miami Vice with Don Johnson to The Wire

In broadcasting, reportage has come to look so effortless in its production and delivery that it underscores one of its biggest sells; the drama that takes place in and around the story.

It's the swan syndrome - looking good on top, but disguising the hard work below the line.

And because almost everyone works to this template, it is the convention. But why?


Stage Managing News
A hardened stage managed programme that's supposed to capture the essence of this thing called: News, which is often not nice, pretty or straight forward presents an out of sorts picture.

I believe that's what sublimely viewers are tiring of and I'd like to be in a position to show that empirically.

When the news is utterly compelling you can forget about the background noise for a moment: the suits, looks, immaculately manicured hands.

There's sense somewhere broadcasting from the Paris Fashion Show or Downing Street, but on the streets of crime or the grub road of failing economies, it's odd.

It's particularly jarring when reporting from the scene of a crime.

There is a different way to producing a programme that attempts to explain the day's events and behind the walls of development media companies and media universities is one of the prime places to show this.

Radio discovered that in the 90s, when a slew of programmes wanting to appeal to their constituents went zoo, exposing some of the things that took place behind the scenes.

Others looked for more live events to capture the mood; you felt you were discovering the story with the vast talents of the reporter.

There have been signs of that this week, but no sooner has a live link ended the broadcasters revert to an 80s type.

Anyone with a budget and up for the challenge to develop some thing new?