Journalism is easy. Human Nature and Culture Complicates it. How a C21st Museum Offers Solutions
The streets of Perugia in Italy are quiet now. A week ago they were teaming with international journalists, academics and anyone generally interested in journalism.
Perugia’s International Journalism Festival has become the pilgrimage to either be heard and seen, or otherwise absorb fresh ideas emerging from the world which impact journalism.
Many potential speakers will apply, not all will be selected. Often I catch myself being amazed at the sheer number and range of talking points, because in principle journalism is a relatively easy discipline. Tell a story and be truthful. However human nature, values and the dynamics of culture and society make it less so.
I’ve been a journalist for more than thirty years, twenty of those combined with exchanging knowledge, teaching and training. From my first foray into journalism I recall an editor interviewing several of us.
“What I’m looking for”, he said, “is whether you’re curious about your surroundings and the world”. He went on.
Can you tell the truth or seek the truth, and can you write?
By being intensely curious, the editor could build upon this quality pointing out ideas how to find events, issues, happenings that could be turned into stories. Truthfulness meant in common sense terms the truth was out there, but how bothered would I and others be looking for it?
If say a friend tells you she’s breaking up with a boyfriend for several reasons and you knew the friend, you’d want to hear his side too, yes?
And writing? Well if you’ve little appreciation for grammar, and sentence construction and gathering facts to the tell the truth, delivered to an audience swiftly, then pick another profession. The editor truculently told us, if you want to write and can’t do so quickly, “go write a book!”
Writing is a craft skill; words on a page arranged in ways that can be unforgettable. Poetry reaches this.
The aforementioned simple attributes frame journalism, but then the penny dropped of journalism’s proximity to sociology and hence human nature (behaviour and values) that black box of ingrained prejudices and the dynamism of culture got in the way.
I say got in the way because that’s how they’re perceived. These are factors often left undiscussed that yield the fundamental achilles in practice-based journalism, particularly in the digital age.
The pilgrimage to Perugia appears less about the three simple attributes, but the matrix of values, society and cultures — though not reported explicitly. My speaking engagement that year attempted to reveal this, delivered as reform to journalism storytelling. More on that in a minute.
Journalism’s predicament has been like this since it was birthed in the 17th century and journalism, as a discipline, has largely been taught. Society and culture in practice are rendered almost invisible, particularly when it’s practised in a place where a dominant culture is seen as natural and hence hegemonic.
African people have been recorded being in Britain in recognisable numbers since the 16th century, as documented in Peter Fryer’s seminal book, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain. And yet, even whilst Britain is labelled a multicultural country, Black and Brown people’s views aren’t generally brought into mainstream media’s journalistic stories.
Human nature and culture are not easy to dissect and hence impact journalism in many and different ways. Firstly from the point of view of gathering and telling the story, that is who’s telling and to whom, and secondly there’s the business of journalism. Simply possessing the three basic traits is one thing, selling journalism for profit is another.
In the build up to one of the best journalism events in 2022, the launch of the British Library’s 500 years of News exhibition, as an advisory board member, this above slide simply captured journalism’s systems thinking; each section is a field in its own right, impacting one another.
Returning to the storytelling aspect, on the basis that if you know how to tell a cracking story, you stand a chance of your product being read, and making a living.
Journalism gives rise to several literary forms e.g. news, feature, sport etc., yet just like Hollywood films the forms are sold as a universal ones across different cultures. However, as seen in communications and storytelling through film there are different general storytelling models in say Italy, China, and India. That is there are ways audiences respond to storytelling.
Take this. A general phenomenon, that had me nodding whilst reading Erin Meyer’s Culture Map . The reader hears about Bo Chen. He has something important to say in a meeting, but won’t do so unless explicitly invited by his US colleague in their double-headed presentation.
When too consultants observed Chinese experts answering a question, the story that unfolded seemingly had the answer at the tail end of the question rather than the foreground. I have taught many Chinese students over the years and will occasionally observe this too. There’s no flaw in this, it’s cultural.
Thus when learning how to write journalism stories the structure can mimic societal and cultural structures. Hence in a globalised world, unless students have set them selves the task to be trained and assessed by a Western model and values, neither system in superior.
In film terms it would be tantamount to saying all film directors should adopt the Hollywood model. This brilliantly made clip here expands on what I mean between general storytelling from the US and Italy back in the 1940s.
I like many entered journalism because I liked telling stories, considered myself truthful, and was curious about several things, yet was aware of fundamental holes in journalism’s ecosystem. Representation!
Not everyone gets the opportunity to tell their side; sometimes they’re plaintively ignored. The yearning to have different groups represented is scarcely new, but in digital people have found a way to express their disdain and challenge the status quo which has gathered traction with audiences.
Today when I look at the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, the general spectrum of talking points observed emerge from the tensions of culture and representation in storytelling. Technologies is itself inherent to cultures. These parameters cut to the crux of storytelling, yet like many journalism events representation can be hived, separated off into a single plenary.
Learning from each other grows ideas across boundaries; sometimes the knowledge on offer may work, other times in can turn out to be a bête noire. Digital, has facilitated more expressions, each as an antidote to readdressing journalism’s weaknesses.
Ghana enjoys a robust and healthy display of journalism and outputs. Yet at one university I visited there was little interest from the next generation in pursuing it. In some places journalism doesn’t require new clothes, more an overhaul. In Europe I’m part of an international group looking at journalism which is described as “Integral”. They are high hitters.
Some years back when I had the opportunity to present my practice-based research at Perugia, it was to share knowledge from a young group of video journalists from Syria. They were former students, pharmacists and theatre directs who had downed their books to pick up cameras to document the ongoings and atrocities in Syria.
They were a tight knit bunch knowing each other’s work and forming a strong bond of trust. They weren’t formally trained; some found outlets and training with networks, others in telling their compelling stories gleaned artifices from cinema. Some saw their approach thus like fictional cinema and as such fictionalised scenes, as seen here on Channel 4 News.
But what if they could tell their stories using cinema but strived to be truthful of events? I’d been investigating this for more than a decade and in demonstrating that it works could reform storytelling to be more nuanced and culturally specific.
This knowledge, backed by my more recent research, provides sound evidence of storytelling in which the theme; “You’ve told your story; it’s time we told ours” is an emergent force.
Back to Ghana and Africa at large. Could a new super network driven by a super app re-awaken storytelling across Africa?
This is George Twumasi, CEO of ABN Holdings Ltd. He’s a Joan Shorenstein Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. My answer, yes!
Could a growing form of storytelling, Applied Storytelling, supplant the strait jacketing of journalism and its conventions in telling rich truthful narratives and some?
Could Cinema Journalism find ways of telling compelling fact-based stories that captures audiences, and facilitates how they tell their own stories?
In the meantime, a major public body, the Pan African Heritage Museum has its sight set on content and storytelling that will be radically different to the status quo. The publicity and vision is immense and has been reported across the BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN and a host of platforms.
Its founder and visionary Kojo Yankah is a veteran entrepreneur, educationist (founder of African University College of Communication) and former national newspaper editor, The Graphic. His team is a mix of exemplar historians, sociologists and multi-hyphenates.
Could this progressive platform become the new ecosystem to not only tell African stories and their impact across the world, but also become the festival hub for a new type of gathering in which sociologists, historians, behaviour scientists and storytellers gather?
Museum’s generally are repositories of scientific and historical artefacts. But Ghana’s Pan African Heritage Museum is not a model of conventional museums. It’s alive!
Like Perugia then, perhaps it will when launched become the festival hub to be seen and absorb fresh ideas emerging from the world which impacts storytelling and representation at large, as well as this thing we once wholly relied upon to learn about the truth, journalism.
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In my next post I share photos and conversation with Emeritus Professor Kofi Asare Opoku, African Studies, and Chairman of the Pan African Heritage Museum, who has created an Eden of natural medicine plants on his farmland
