Videojournalism: the revolution in media influencing academia. On assignment near Syria's border.

In this video, something happens at 1.27, but you need the contexts of the earlier footage, so be patient,

The girl singing survived, you see her ushered into a safe place as her caretaker calls her name.

The caretaker is a videojournalist, an activist documenting the atrocities in his country. Two years ago circumstances led him to pick up a camera. For the next 7 days, I share a space with him and fifteen other so called "activists", in one of the most rewarding and emotional projects I have been involve with for a while.


End of prologue. 

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"Non-emergency personnel and family members" were ordered to leave Beirut and given permission to leave Adana, near Turkey's border with Syria.

This news reported on Reuters couldn't be any worse. No S**t a friend said. In 8 hours time I was heading into the very region, Adana, where Americans officials were being ordered out of.

Was I scared? 

Apprehensive, Yes! Enough to talk about a likely exit plan, if things were to go Pete Tong [wrong] , as we the Brits say.

Last time I had butterflies like this was traveling to Tunisia, Beirut, Cairo and in the 90s South Africa. What's new? Except there was no whiff of air strikes or rogue chemicals in the air.

There are lecturers I know and respect who make it a habit to stay in touch with their craft e.g. Bill Gentiles a figurehead in the world of backpack journalism.

Not by design, more by default, but firstly, the need to stay in touch with the field I'm in is an anti-bored pill. Secondly, it furnishes me with my narrative for storytelling I like to tell. These story-forms derive from a fascination in what experts call the world without theory: Bakhtin's Carnival.

Beirut Videojournalism

I train enthusiasts to become videojournalists, but to paraphrase Mr Cobbs " I specialise in a very specific type of security  videojournalism". I apologise if that sounds arrogant. It's not meant to be.

This videojournalism has been the subject of a six year PhD, [historical and qualitative] which through the selfless help of  Rosensblum, Drew, Turness - NBC first woman president of News -  and several other people.e.g.  contemporary videojournalists such as Adam Westbrook. The thesis should  be evaluated soon.

videojournalism study

The working-in-the-field also, many performance lecturers believe has benefits for their students.
What I do constitutes experiential knowledge. Lectures become hermeneutical. Practice is informed by theory, and the process of curating information becomes wrapped in that most basic of perceptions.

You know the story of the politician expressing a point evoking Mary with one child agreeing that raising taxes puts her 100 UKP in the red each month. Well yes, merely saying that gives you scope to imagine Mary and hear her predicament, even when she's not real.

In performance lecturing, based on actual events, the narrative of teaching journalism, say expressing SEO, ethics or how to keep a low profile, is a story in itself.

A brief visual history of videojournalism from david dunkley gyimah on Vimeo.

Did I tell you the time, I had to Q and A with Nelson Mandela at a press conference and I was terrified out of my wits, and then met him at a foreign correspondence do? South Africa 94.  Or being asked to film for Heavy weight Boxer Lennox Lewis and his camp as he fought Tyson?  Memphis, 2002. Or  back in February explaining cinema journalism to the Arab media summit? Cairo, 2013.

Experiential notes on a page - that mobile narrative.

The story of what happened in the week in Adana is extraordinary.  A series of lectures, exchange of knowledge, seven stories that we  (Marwan, Fires, myself ] had to shape - some of which constitute war crimes of a nature that would make you physically sick.  

 Marwan, from the think tank Menapolis presses a point over verification

The video at the top.. dramatic, terrifying.. their stories deserve a proscenium, where we can learn more about them in ways that are affective Presence reality?

Imagine going to see a film at the cinema, and then seconds after the film finishes the general manager tells the audience to hang on, because we now have a personal skype interview with the participants in the story.

Otherwise imagine I create a story that leads imperceptibly into their stories, and everything from the technology to the social issues become dialogical.

David discusses the philosophy of the 100 videojournalists and specialised videojournalism equipment

Or what about a lecture in which the wisdom of crowds is also the narrative. This is the domain of Touch cast which I explained in my previous post. 

These are methods to bring journallism straight into the lecture room in a more visceral way, but also to pump it out again as both narrative and eipitome [ notes in a lecture]. See my post yesterday on the BBC's secret weapon and popular post, the theory of new videojournalism

It requires a new collaboration - a pragmatism to lecturing emerging from the interplay of the professional practice and theoretician. The two have always been bedfellows, yet academia post 70s has invariably delineated the two. In his wonderful articles Bordwell expressed this in a related way why don't academics and critics get along.

This merge will also spawn a new type of university, one which corresponds to the demands on the one had of emerging technologies, but also as part of its core values thinks up the next generation of practices, not as a theoretical exercise, but by creation.

This new proscenium will see a heurestics of emerging media as key, utilising apps that bring journalism in the field right into lectures. I'm excited by this.


End



Thanks to Marwan and the team from Menapolis

Viewmagazine.tv is about to undergo an overhaul to reflect what academics refer to as an autoethnographic study, where I use myself as the narrative to express the changes to journalism and communications, such as shift media and videohyperlinking - my most recent post.


David Dunkley Gyimah is a Knight Batten winner for innovation in journaism, an international award winning videojournalist and Channel 4 Digital finalist, among other awards. His PhD research reevaluates videojournalism repositioning a new understanding of the form. David is a senior lecturer in online ( social) and videojournalism. he is a juror for the RTS awards.

Beyond News and Videojournalism

Innovation fuels ideas; that much is in agreement.

And innovation is determined by technological advances. We require it and in so doing run to the next show with its clear label of techno-fetishism, where everything we surmise about video and videojournalism is about equipment.

Watch online as bag after bag is opened to reveal its camera-porn contents. Its proclamation is "You too could be a great video maker".

Sometimes our ideas must marry with the latest camera technology to realise our dreams; James Cameron waited ten years to make Avatar, the equipment had not been invented.

And then there are others when technology leads us to play, like a kaleidoscope, and through serendipity, we make a find, dramatic or otherwise.

American film makers dumped Edisson's Zoescope for the Lumiere's Cinematographe more than a 100 years ago to make movies. Serendipity is how Laforet might explain his ground-breaking film which launched a generation to DSLR filming.

In 1994 Sony could not have predicted its 3 chip consumer camera would be gobbled up by professionals; the price rose overnight, just as Canon never saw the rush for its DSLRs coming. There will be new ones soon; technology is cyclical.

Yet innovation is not wedded to technology; it is about ideas. And ideas are about the philosophies of thought, their complexity and simplicity.  Ultimately whether you're using a super 8mm or Hollywood-set Arriflex, it is about how you translate a concept to something that has meaning - for you and the audience.

For Heidegger a part of that thought lay in Dassein; where for instance we need not have experienced flight to the moon to be able to conjure up lunar imaginations. Yet also the complexity of thought relies on the nutrition of experiences.

These experiences can be experiential; you went through them directly, hence the bragging rights on your CV about travel or years of doing, or otherwise epistemological - you learnt by reading, and looking and are a grade A student.

So knowledge, broad knowledge, is desired and knowledge is not fixed. What was known yesterday, is not the same now.

This was one of the enquires within hermeneutics, which is increasingly why I argue against the notion of the expert's knowledge, and as former students will testify to a "wisdom of intelligible crowds" approach.

The solutions sought for this generation must be a fundamental overhaul of corporate News, the biggest of impostor of our times as a naturalised construct.

Because corporate News as I call it still holds sway to our thinking, a thinking instituted in the 1960s, and that is in spite of the Internet.

We require new voices to explain the ramifications thematic events e.g. European elections, against the backdrop of the destitute, the Rosettas (1999) the Dardenne's award winning Cannes film about a young girl looking for a job; or Le Fils (2002).  And we need to reflect unsighted themes that interrogates societies such as Asgar Farhadi's movie Seperation (2011).

The test for beyond news is tilting audience's expectations to matters that concern contemporary audiences in a braver syntax that challenges the present construct called News.

Because at the moment few seem to care.

Videojournalism. It's more than news, plurality, diversity to name a few

I interviewed one of the UK's respected senior broadcast executives today.

Dorothy Bryne is the head of news and current affairs at Channel 4.

It was a wide ranging interview around the future of news. I have been interviewing some of the well known figures in news e.g. Dan Gillmor, Craig Newmark, Jeff jarvis since 2005.

I hadn't formally started my thesis then, but by nature I'm a collector. Later this week I meet the figure behind convincing the late Sir David English - a powerhouse in British journalism for many years until his death in the 90s - for bank rolling videojournalism in the UK.

On my way home from the interview I reflected on a couple of things, which I intend to expand on later.

1. Videojournalism is about the person. You may be visually gifted and that's a plus, but that can't substitute the bloodymindedness of good journalism, which is story construct from nothingness. By nothingness, eking out something of good use from the chaff of every day chat

2. Videojournalism delivers the media multi linguist. One of the assets I discovered working as a videojournalist within a broadcast framework was an ability to speak to different professionals in their own language. You may not need to know what an "L cut" is, "top and tail", "As live" or any number of strange broadcast terms, but it helps, particularly in team settings.

3. Videojournalism was meant to deliver plurality. Diverse groups delivering their stories. In the UK, many senior news exec lament the lack of a diversity in journalism, which would vary the news agenda.

Next week, I join a team from the Knight International team in South Africa lecturing on videojournalism. I'm excited because in 1997 I headed up an international team from Ghana and their South African counterparts getting their first taste of videojournalism and its profoundness in programme making.

The true strength of videojournalism, the efficient use of this tooled up practice lies in some of the aforementioned in the features and the news, in holding people to account and to expanding our horizons because we have both the aptitude and tools.

Will 2009 be any easier on traditional media?

In the summer of 2005 Leonard D Witt, the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, held a prescient international conference in San Antonio.

The title: Wake Up Call Can Trust and Quality Save Journalism?

The programme attracted some of the heaviest hitters in the business, whose names, though synonymous with the digital social renaissance back then amongst new media types, are today more common place.

It may not have seemed obvious at the time, but the public's flagellation over the news industry was opening up and news execs were now ready to tell the board: "Hey Bob this sales decline is no glitch".

Blogs were about to go critical mass, Flash would finally embrace video and video journallism would be adopted by the UK's first newspaper group, the Hull Daily Mail - a scheme I would be asked to look at.

After 6 or thereabout months online with Viewmagazine.tv, Guardian Journalist Jemima Kiss, then the news editor of Journalism.co.uk posted this piece, Wake up Call for Magazines and this, Online Journalism News - a site for sore eyes, that would come to the attention of Prof Witts.

Somewhere in July I got a call too.

media gathering
The conference lived up to all expectations and to hear in person some of the figures whose work I had admired for a while was the icing.

Dan Gillmor, Neil Chase, Jay Rosen, Clyde Bentley, Craig Newmark, Charles Lewis and Chris Nolan were just a few of the headliners on the programme.

It also marked the beginning of me using my video journalism reporting skills introspectively on the new digital industry.

In any one year working as a staff Video journalists I'd roll of near 500 reports. Most of those covered a wide range of subjects, but few looked at the media itself.

Around 2000 the emphasis changed with a raft of magazine articles for the likes of Sony, The Producers, Creation Magazine, and Blue Print.

Writing for The Producer Magazine 2001, the role of video journalists reporting 9/11 was critical

New Media itself was undergoing its own revision. Some of the best innovative and educational publications e.g. The Production Show, Video Age, The Video Mag, were either defunct or being repackaged.

New Media was not so new any longer , it was rich and packagable as digital - ones and zeros.

The speakers, self effacing, spoke on camera, my old skool VX 1000, about what was wrong and how the future would shape up. The report itself included a prototype deep link from one video to another, and embedded video within an article.

Dan Gillmor's view:"It's happening because it can". Craig Newmark was looking for greater news variations, and Clyde Bentley likened the public's apathy to traditional media as a tiff that would resolve itself.

None of the aforementioned will be disappointed. But the broader question those years on is has the Trust returned and equally important are we passed the period of innovation?


Is it over yet?
The consensus from newspaper publishers is this new stuff is bedding down, the digital after shocks are there for all to see: twitter, video, google maps and the rest.

This hasn't staved of the depreciating trend. In the news at the moment is the Chicago Tribune, which filed for bankruptcy last week.

I too had a friend who was one of the early casualties. Now almost 15,000 employers are going through something none of them deserves.

Trust may be harder to quantify and a round up paper is therefore due from Prof Witts, but in terms of innovations, I don't think we're in any ways out of the trees yet.

Interestingly, there's a chasm opening up again between journalism and geekdom; they've come together albeit in limited fashion to help each other.

But if you broadly ask journalism experts, this is it, we're plateauing. It's the long road ahead. In business terms the seven year cycle.

If you ask the techs, the last few years have been the warm up act. The tools and code are toddlers waiting to grow up.

It's something the head of BBC Interactive at the time Richard Deverill said to us in 2004.

Back then working with a broadcaster, we assembled some of the best creative brains in the university and under the guise of News Futures, looked at social sites, moblogging, geospatial interactivity and where they would go.

"The students predict that the mobile phone will become an increasingly essential tool for journalists, with moblogging replacing digital video footage and blogging on increasingly sophisticated content management systems.

Students were encouraged to be imaginative but also realistic, said Mr Gyimah, presenting practical ideas and tools for journalists to explore in the next few years. But the push towards new technology, particularly take up of mobile services, will be mostly consumer-led." More BBC Hears the Future of News

So the question is will 2009 be any easier on traditional media?

The economic downturn will drive its own disruptive course. But will it lead to us digital beings becoming more innovative or will we simply batten down the hatchets.

Truth is this scenario in micro ways has played itself out and it'll take a brave Canute figure to claim it's over; the disruption and innovation is done.

In any case that's what I'll be looking at producing with a series of short films in the future.

Meantime posting real soon on the front cover of Viewmagazine.tv here's that report from San Antonio: Wake Up Call Can Trust and Quality Save Journalism?

What do you think?