Journalism should look to its roots of visual & audio storytelling -Cinema. Here’s why?

It happened along these walls as a revered combatant, barely free from fighting, came across another figure. It was an ominous sign. “Get out of my sight” he’s reported to have said.

The response from the other Black man chilled him. It portended his death. “You have been all things, now, O conquerer, be a god!” Superstition or otherwise, Severus would die soon after following his encounter.

“Does the name Septimius Severus, a Libyan-born Roman Emperor mean anything?”, I asked an attendant at the The Sill: National Landscape Discovery Centre, in Northumberland. Combined with The National Trust, they oversee the wall, offering guidance to the public seeking out Hadrian’s monument.

Can’t say it does, he responds. Hadrian’s Wall is 84 miles of heritage traversing across Britain; symbolic now, but in times of yore, a Roman protector from marauding armies — unbreachable.

My story underpins how Africans were in Britain, some 10,000 to 15,000 (a division) of moor soldiers from North Africa, circa 250 AD.

Along these walls, far pressed into the future, and at the end of this dip a contemporary crime is recorded. It’s here that one spring morning would reveal the shocking disappearance of a well known landmark, a sycamore tree.

News pictures show how its had been felled at its base. What remains now is its stub, protected by fencing with a sign heralding growing shoots. But the mindlessness of it all. Why? Two men are due to appear in Court in December.

Pondering both events on my walking holiday, as I trace my route back, I think to a new year of cohorts at Uni and how these two events are allegorical: diverse history and meaning-making.

A Milestone

In September it’ll be thirty years since thirty young journalists and I were part of a grand experiment when a newspaper group launched itself as broadcast journalists (BJs). These were no ordinary BJs. For the first time in British media history, journalists, with tacit sanction from the union (NUJ) would do everything under the monocle “videojournalists.”

Today as a lecturer of the next generation, much, much has changed in those years in videojournalism, the world, and storytelling.

Videojournalism is now media furniture, complimented by new innovations with business propositions: DSLR, mobile, drone, etc. The world of politics has intensified its involvement into the mind of psychoanalyst Edward Bernays’ obfuscation. Bernays, the father of PR, invented mind-melding ways to get people to do what he wanted. And journalism? Well it’s sought to try on new clothes at its own party.

This oncoming year of journalism newcomers will continue to march forward with their traits and habits. To borrow a phrase: they’re not going back. They are more leaning towards diversity and inclusion and learning about the past — Britain’s past. They’re conscientiousness is eco too. And Mckinsey’s Report says there’s “the search for truth, in both a personal and a communal form”.

And yet broadly the journalism-world they’re entering has yet to acutely acknowledge diversity and is suffering a crisis of truism and how to achieve it in a post-truth world. Broadly, the present traditional model of journalism cannot cope with the social world, politics and online psychological strafing.

Academics uncovered these through research trends, yet for journalism practitioners what were they to do? Just how do they neuter lying? How do they fess up to their role in propagating harmful content, and understand the true impact of diversity shaping output, and that diversity accords decision making? There has been no other way to travel except the one they knew. Keep on doing what you do. It’s evident on screen and at journalism events.

Generally academia and practitioners burrow into their own silos guarding their positions and views. Academics are accused of not knowing what it’s really like on the hustings creating stories, whilst they see journalists as cloth-eared to the ‘obvious’ changes.

It’s when the two become one, for instance journademics, or journalists step into the world of academia that the light bulbs drop. Former BBC Newsnight journalist Emily Maitlis’ MacTaggart Lecture, a self confession, exemplified this. It was an erudite exposition of a messed up world and journalism, which every journalism student should watch.

Onboarding Change

For several years I’ve been advocating a new genre, teaching networks, newspapers and students across the world a journalism form that affords more psychological understanding and protection, and innovation.

My doctoral and post-doctoral studies framed it as cinema journalism (CJ). It’s a journalism that traces its roots to its antecedent and several influences. Yes, broadcast journalism emerged from the language of cinema and docs, but competition and the new medium of cash-strapped television with its 4:3, 13 inch screens forced TV execs to make choices in the 1950s.

For instance, Cinema as a language considers the criticalness of visual dynamics (the explicit, implicit and symptomatic) and its impact on viewers. A scene, like it or not, is imbued with meaning, cultural too.

Television news, discarded these for the referential. What the scene literally told you according to its founding execs. That’s worked until those being filmed knew how to game it, with doughnuting, bothsidesism, and weaponising words.

The seeds of this knowledge were sown thirty years ago when thirty youngsters brashly were handed cameras and sought to interpret the world their way. In a retrospective study decades on I revisited a core of them, many now trailblazing other careers, to understand what it was like, and how it changed their views on journalism.

Thirty years later, a new technology is about to complicate the journalism we tend to know. AI‘s’ wider preambulation will commoditise through algorithms and pattern recognition an old model. It’ll make sense of what we know, rather than could know. It’ll carry through fault lines when like Hadrian’s wall, the journalism we know through a different lens, is in plain sight.

As I gear up for the next year I’m left wondering why we continue on this path.