Inside the mind of journalism and seeing a future — from an award winner storyteller. Stranger Things.
This is a precis of a lengthier article inspired by a scene in Stranger Things. I write how innovation in storytelling particularly journalism has benefitted from the outsider like Robert Drew. And that the future is set to be like “Kansas is going bye-bye”, or Pete Tong if you’re a Brit.
Drew revolutionised journalism storytelling in the 60s and his legacy has had a major impact, but there’s unfinished business. I got to talk to him and inspired by the exchange went on further to develop my ideas.
In the lengthier piece I delve into a psychology which strengthens the idea that conceptual ideas about journalism storytelling are more likely to come from people outside the discipline, labelled as foxes.
Here’s a test to see whether you consider yourself a fox or hedgehog. I explain how collapsing a multitude of disciplines from Maths, Chemistry, Art, Psychology, Cinema, Tech and Journalism I arrive at two new journalism storytelling forms.
One attempts to build on Robert Drew’s Cinema verite, which in effect was cinema journalism, by being explicit. There’s a new breed of journalists who expertly bring a cinema understanding to their journalistic work, not by ramping up their work to be Hollywood movies, but a more nuanced understanding of style, form, and audience reception. And they’re nationally revered figures.
The second approach sees the frontiers of journalism in the next ten years being so radically different to today, that it’ll be hardly recognisable. Just as there was an epochal change in the 60s, and 2000s, this one’s ripe to break because of AI and greater networking and the rest. Here I evoke the work of super forecasters.
A lot of experts and academics will tell you about the future of journalism, but as I detail in this lengthier piece, such experts make terrible forecasters. I don’t refer to myself as a forecaster, but before I gained my PhD I produced a range of work that Apple, Google’s head of UK and Europe, and European professionals said shows the future.
Take this displayed on Apple’s website circa 2006–12, and whilst I couldn’t have foreseen the pandemic, the idea of home streaming was always inevitable.
To read the full piece go here
Here’s what a few people in industry have said of my work
BBC
US, Knight Batten Awards
Channel 4 News
Full piece here
