Hold Still ! I’m Changing the Way We Produce and Present News
It’s a question that has taxed news practitioners and academics since its very inception around the 1940s. And its clarion has got louder and louder in recent years.
Is there a different way of news presenting and production?
Why?
Well, fewer people are watching the news, so as an economic model it’s in peril. Also, amongst an increasingly more literate population, news production as it was designed back in the 40s leaves something to be desired. In its current form it has little answer to the psychological warfare, some of which is referred to as ‘dead cats’.
In this post I’m going to tell you about how I was involved in one of the epoch moments that changed news production and how I’m still in that dream, how the initiative found its way into the BBC, floundered, but has shown itself to be on the comeback. I ’ve been so wrapped up with this question of news that it became my PhD.
Turning point
A turning point in my hunt for the holy grail was 2006. It’s here that I spoke at a global event called WeMedia in London. It marked an international coming together for the first time for news makers, academics and new media. One of the organisers Andrew Nachison and I have become good friends. We spoke two days ago and I hope to see a revival of the WeMedia ethos 15 years on.
It was also the year an awards host said I “built the future”.
Today, I’m involved at media.cymru in Wales — a £50m multi-pronged collaborative program to build a new knowledge infrastructure, through interdisciplinary approaches, whilst scaling up a unique creative industries in the region. Its headed by Prof Justin Lewis and Sara Pepper OBE.
So, is there a different way of news presenting and production? My approach picks up where one of the world’s leading change makers in news and documentaries left off. That’s Robert Drew, the creator of Cinema Verite or Direct Cinema. Drew and friends, like Albert Maysles in this photo, changed the world in the 1960s with their News cameras, synch sound and new documentary formats like Primary (1960).
We spoke on the phone in 2011 about his research and what I was doing, which I turned into a short film below. The name of my practice featured in several academic books builds on what Drew’s passion. I call it Cinema Journalism also taking a cue to from doc maker Michael Moore who revived cinema-documentary. Don’t make a documentary. Make a film, Moore says in his 13 rules of doc making.
In a nutshell, cinema journalism reclaims what news was before it became conventionalised in the 1960s when the news package was perfected by CBS affiliates in Los Angeles, NBC and picked up in the UK first by ITN. It was then exported around the world.
Robert Drew discovered what news could become, before documentary adopted his form. Cinema. Look carefully today a number of innovative journalists like the multi award winning Waad al-Kateab are doing that with films like For Sama.
Waad, I would find out was part of a group of young extraordinary Syrian news and filmmakers, some of whom I met near the Syrian border to train whilst working for a human rights group. This video previews them and is a classic example of one model of cinema journalism. You’ll know why when you watch it. Warning! Some of the scenes (lasting seconds) are highly distressing.
How do you change news? You can’t by yourself. It’s insulated by top down self interests. Many people have tried including the great Robert Drew. They took my equipment and some of my ideas but did not embrace me, he would tell me.
It’s not about viewing numbers too, otherwise News would be adapting TikTok’s style. Mind you some journalists like @MaxFosterCNN #TikTokCNN are looking at what makes TikTok work to take into mainstream news, he told me. Max is the most watched mainstream journalist on TikTok with a massive following.
To change news takes a combination of altruism on the part of executives who knowingly will have to relinquish various privileges. Remember it’s a multibillion dollar industry. Inside its structure are interconnected dynamics.
News won’t change from the outside because it knows it has enough clever people to work for it that understand its interests. Each threat to change, and in 2016 it was Vice.com, has been seen off, or styles have been absorbed.
One of the innovations I’m enjoying at the moment is that by BBC’s Ross Atkins atomised hyper news package, in which clip length and analysis is the cinema equivalent of ‘intense continuity’. It’s made for this generation (TikTok Gen) and beyond, with its insightful punchy delivery.
I’ve had the opportunity to speak to senior managers at the BBC who have been welcoming. This from one of the most powerful women in the world. I recorded this when Deborah Turness was editor of news at ITN. Today she’s the CEO.
To a great extent universities too are part of the equation. The more Uni’s continue to teach a model of how journalism should be the more they’re creating a new generation who’ll adopt this and become resistant to change. Because the model works until you’ve spent long enough in it to find it doesn’t and by then a new generation convinced of its worth is at the helm.
First Earthquake change in the 90s
It seems like centuries ago, but as thirty youngsters gathered in Soho and were told we would make history, we couldn’t imagine the impact. Associated Newspapers was entering the news market. It only had £50m to spend, so told the lucky 30 out of 3000 people that gathered in unfurnished surroundings, that they would film, present, produce and edit their own material. The outfit was called Channel One.
The industry, let alone us, was in shock. But it could be done, because many of us were already doing it. Amongst the flock are some memorable names today, such as filmmaker/author Marcel Theroux, brother of Louis, and Dimitri Doganis who runs Raw TV — one of the most innovative companies in the world. Doganis was behind The Imposter (2012) a documentary which won a BAFTA. And his passion for mixing cinema and journalism is what brought this award. Here he sheds light on The Imposter’s back source.
The videojournalist brought several disciplines together and in so doing by default mixed up forms. ITN, CNN and the BBC adopted videojournalism. The BBC was trained by our trainer at Channel One, Michael Rosenblum. Ultimately, thought the BBC had its own ideas of what it wanted from one person crews.
With Channel One the TV business would be damned if a newspaper was going to teach them journalism, so whilst videojournalism was a success; (today people film with mobiles) it was resisted within the core of national news bulletin news making.
But, and here’s a big BUT not in the nations and regions of the BBC. There it was adopted, thrived and several videojournalists who became friends went onto win international awards. They were mixing cinema with journalism.
Second Wave
In 2006 comes the second wave. The BBC et al were responding to a new digital age and newspapers were going digital big time. I got a call from the Press Association asking if I could train all the UK’s regional journalists into videojournalists. I did and one of the first groups became the experiment to show a new cinema journalism. But have a read at what one journalist from the Press Association captured written in the Press Gazette.
That however didn’t stop videojournalists from around the world showing how the mix of cinema and journalism wooed audience. This video here features a comparison of styles between Al Jazeera and one of the world’s most decorated videojournalists doing cinema Travis Fox.
Between 2005 and 2016, I was being invited to any number of conferences in Norway, Russia, India, Egypt (were I trained staff visiting them on and off for five years) until I’d run out of steam. By now I was fast having enough of trying to win people over.
My Revived Passions
My two other passions, tech and diversity would take over and as programme director working with colleagues we launched the digital lab. We would approach storytelling not from the news’ perspective, but entrepreneurs and businesses looking for traction.
The Lab was a success and revised version is now running at Cardiff University, where my colleague JT and I have been awarded an Innovation Fund to showcase it.
What this has done has been to restore my faith in changing news from a different perspective, particular work in diversity over thirty years. The below image is taken from a book by Jounalism Professor Micheal Schudson. It should frame news, but actually more specifically frames cinema.
In April 2022, the British Library stages its exhibition on five centuries of news. It’s been almost two years in the making.
I had the pleasure to be one of the eight UK academics on their advisory panel and contributed a 4000 word article on BLM, Language and News that will give some idea of unfolding narratives in storytelling that accommodates diversity. The event will open lots of questions around news.
Furthermore, this year the world’s leading archive body FIAT/IFTA would decide amongst eight international competitors from different countries, to digitise my archive from the 1990s. The archive includes interviews from my days presenting Black London on the BBC. I’m grateful to my colleague Jose an archive producer for helping steer the project and FIAT for putting their faith in the archive. Part of that archive shows news innovation in Africa in 1996.
Third Wave of News
I’m in China, working before I head off to Beirut to train a newspaper group, then Canada as an Asper visiting professor for the University of British Columbia. The insight from China and AI, styles of storytelling which informs the above illustration and their news expansion interests me.
And so to the third phase of Cinema Journalism and how that photo of Clive Myrie symbolises change. I’m back in the UK. In 2020, Clive produced a range of news films. When I watched them I recognised the patterning. But I would carry out research with a new batch of Masters students who had never met me before so could not be influenced by my interests.
I got them to watch two films on the same subject and evaluate them. One was by Myrie; the other a colleague of his. What the students said was extraordinary. It really blew my mind.
And then I sat down to interview Clive and he often made references to his films that aligned with cinema. I’ve chosen this clip rather than one when he talks explicitly about cinema, because here as part of the philosophy of new journalism is the idea of being empathetic. That’s a relatively new approach to the old guard days of distance- journalism.
That doesn’t mean Clive isn’t exercising due impartiality and all the other major tenants in news. My research has uncovered exemplar camera operators who are effectively cinematographers, and journalists particularly international correspondence who are able to skilfully enact a double consciousness. I first saw this thirty years ago, but who could dismiss this in a journalist like Clive Myrie.
In 2021, Myrie won two major awards from the BBC. One in tribute of his journalism. He doesn’t call it cinema journalism, I do. Executives call it great TV and that’s fine. The media and its forms are palimpsests. This year too three major media international media companies invited me to keynote.
What gives the new appetite form is economics. By 2030 streaming platforms will dominate news viewing habits. CNN+ is taking the charge. Vice TV is already there. Netflix is a finger poke away from supplying the question, “What if Netflix made news?”, BUT not as you know it. And who knows where the BBC will be then, or whether a license fee will still be in place
Robert Drew said the future is yet to arrive in our interview. I think its collapsing with the present very fast. Last year working with an AI specialist we discovered a way of news not connected to Cinema, but different. I presented to a summit of young people.
It’s taken nearly thirty years in my experience, but I can see the curve. It won’t take that long going forward now. But for the meantime, I’m looking forward to juror duties and more exemplary films.
For more on the Future of Journalism go to David’s @medium I’m based at Cardiff University where this year I was chair of the organising Committee for the Future of Journalism.
