Secrets of the Future. How Audiences Will Come to Love Your Work.

In my last lecture for the year I told my Masters students something they know from their own habits, but how broadcasters and many centres of learning resist.

It started with a slide: If you’re sick, you see a Doctor. If you have a leak in your home you call a plumber. But if you’re in need of information how many of you will reach for a foreign news reporter, read a newspaper or watch something on the news?

You can answer this question too. Would you put your hands up?

Stats show general news is in decline. Whilst the proportion of that as international news is difficult to gauge, (the site lists the Ukraine-Russia war) the proportion of people interested in news in the UK is lower that the global average of 43%, according to Reuters News Digital Report (2023).

News isn’t sacred, or necessary because it’s called news. It became a feature of our lives because it gave us narratives, stories, information, that were emotionally pertinent to us.

The Pew Research Center for People cited major reason for news avoidance, such as people’s lack of background knowledge of a story and its seeming irrelevance and apparent lack of impact on their lives.

Meanwhile, I asked the room. How many of you have a Netflix account? What was the last piece of memorable media you watched and where? Stats, plus research sent to me from Media analysis expert Ben Keen show Netflix’s rising popularity over several years.

So what I said if storytellers could learn something from what makes Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, and above all cinema popular and what would that be? I said similar in a keynote to TV2 in Europe. This is more a practical question in their careers as image makers, rather than a bookend to an exam question.

I played them clips from my research. BBC News CEO Deborah Turness is one of the most powerful news people in the UK. A decade plus ago I interviewed her at ITN. She acknowledged the way news was produced via the package, and that the holy grail for her would be to find what could replace the package.

Pat Loughrey, a former head of BBC’s Nations and Regions told me, the package created in 1956 when he was born cannot be the answer for modern news making.

If we look at several media over a period, music, dance, literature, architecture, advertising, art and cinema — all show narrative changes by innovators to meet societal needs. TV News hasn’t.

I showed them news film I made, and a series of individuals, like EMMY 2024 winner Raul Gallego Abellan, and the BBC’s Clive Myrie and David Mcilveen. Two news films, same topic, near duration, different authors: choose the one you like and why?

Universally they chose one, and offered reasons, like dramatic, cinematic, emotional. Interestingly an academic and former broadcast exec chose the other one.

So I said this to them. Many institutions are teaching a form of TV news you as future journalists don’t watch, that more than half the population doesn’t, not because you aren’t interested in issues, but because of its form and the way it’s made. Why?

It’s partly because of the Goldfish theory; it’s what the industry knows. There’s some truth in this clip from the Mile 22 (2018).

Also, it’s the conventional method perceived for entering the industry — particularly legacy media.

Then I gave them a bonus thought. You know all that gaming politicians and populist do, they’d have a hard time getting around cinephiles. That’s because, the most innovative filmmakers are psychologists of the image e.g. Martin Scorsese. They know how obfuscation and the implicit (Freudian images) unfold.

Ironically, the master of Russian spin Vladimir Surkov came from an avant garde theatrical background English author Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Tarkovsky.

The answer I have for you is in plain sight, I said. It’s not a replacement any more than the synthesiser replaced live music. But it’s a medium you’ve grown up on, that you understand and by studying it enables you to make innovative media. It’s a fusion. One of journalism, photographic schema, art and cinema. The class nodded!

I’ve come to call it cinema journalism. It’s a different form of videojournalism — for which I was one of the first thirty journalists in the UK.

It has nothing to do with fiction film or simply copying a preferred movie. It is the ART of modern news storytelling using a schema which is varied to suit the purpose of the subject and film and expressing what film scholar Prof David Bordwell calls “feelingful qualities”. For more insight I would advise reading Francesco Casetti’s The relocation of cinema, and of course Andre Bazin.

Over the years, with knowledge that went into my PhD, I’ve interviewed a growing number of remarkable exceptional individuals. As a Royal Television Society juror, I’ve watched and studied their films. I’ve shared my knowledge in Russia, Beirut, China, India, Syrian border, Ghana,US and Sweden, to name a few places building up trust on the form.

Here are clips of two incredibly talented ones, RTS winner David Mcilveen from the BBC, and Emmy winner Raul Gallego Abellan, at the top of their game.

If you’d like to know much more. Raul ( above), who is one of the premier global leaders in the form and I would like to share our thoughts with you at SXSW 2025, but we’d love if you could vote for us here.

You’ll find us under the filter “Film and TV” with the post’s profile image above.