Digital storytelling. Created by anyone who knows how to do it, digital storytelling can give you insights into the lives of anyone and everyone: tales about love, loss and baseball.
Or it can give you this.
Thursday, 30 October 2008
Digital storytelling, and why I remain unconvinced
Tuesday, 21 October 2008
Print is dead; long live print
The sad truth behind journalism is that while reputation and readership are important, it’s advertising that ultimately matters. And with that in mind, it’s no great surprise to see pioneers of online journalism citing rising digital advertising revenues to sound the death knell for its print-based counterpart.
But Marcel Fenez, entertainment and media guru for PriceWaterhouseCoopers Hong Kong, has challenged this supposedly inevitable death of traditional media outlets. Fenez said that global print advertising is set to grow 1.8%, and although digital advertising will continue to soar, even by 2012 it will represent only 10% of total advertising for newspapers
Obviously statistics are always fascinating, but potentially more interesting are these claims:
“Traditional media isn’t dead yet and won’t be for the next five years” [emphasis mine]
“The over-50s are helping to sustain traditional media”
So: newspapers are OK for now, thanks to people over the age of 50 buying them, but in five years they’ll be dead (the newspapers, not the over-50s).
That leads me to wonder: what’s going to happen in the next five years to win over the oldies? We can’t predict the future for technology, especially as it develops so quickly (only 10 years ago all films were on VHS), but with so many extras for online readers already, what else can possibly be invented to move the over-50s away from print and onto their computers? In short, what is the future when we’re already in it?
Hopefully the next five years’ advancement will involve online newspapers realising less is more. The reason so many middle-aged and older people don’t ‘do’ the internet is because they’re intimidated – not scared, unless you subscribe to the generalisation of anyone over 50 being an octogenarian pensioner who treats a computer like a bolting warhorse – but intimidated by the sheer number of things you can do with it.
I know these internet add-ons are designed to lead the nervous in slowly. “Hey, Grandad, look: this thing tells you which of your friends read this article, and this thing lets you tell them you’ve read it too!” Admittedly that’s quite a cynical view – there are add-ons that genuinely have use for older internet users. But the fact is that it’s simply overdone: see, for example, just how elucidating this BBC ‘word cloud’ graphic really is.
The most useful benefit for older users is that they can read a newspaper online when they’re not able to buy it. Gone are the days of finding The Telegraph sold out at noon, and having to make do with a Times. And gone are the days of having to wait until the next morning to know what is going on in the world. THAT is the strength of online journalism, and THAT is what it should be focusing on.
But hey, if you disagree, let me know and I’ll make a pie chart of everyone’s opinions, post it to my blog, you’ll get it on your RSS and I’ll see what you Twitter about it tomorrow.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
A philosophical diatribe to kick things off
Here's a question for you: do you actually care what I think?
No, I thought not. Why should you? I am but another person, just like you. This is, of course, a well-known problem with blogging, but it's a bigger problem with journalism.
Look at journalism, and take away reporting for a moment, in any sphere: local and global news, politics, sport, the arts - all reporting of events. Take away analysis, which is just the reporting of details. And take away features, which are essentially the reporting of things people didn't know about before (if news = the new, features = the old; a rounding-up of old news compiled into one spread. Think of a feature - any feature - you have read and consider whether or not it is the reporting of things that have happened). For one minute, just strip away reporting from journalism.
What are you left with? Opinion. My one true love, and my one true burden. Why? Because opinion journalism is a career cul-de-sac.
And yet it penetrates almost every facet of journalism. Reviews - what I thought about this album/film/exhibition/etc. Travel writing - what I thought about this place or that, and more reporting behind it. Interviews - what other people think (and why do we care what they think? Because they're famous, or if not then different from us in some way). Looking at The Guardian today I noticed there's a 'Viewpoint' on the front page. That's some highly-regarded opinion writing.
Obviously there's some opinion in every facet of journalism: even in news reporting, someone has to decide what they think the reader will find interesting. The same thing is important in opinion journalism, not that you could tell by looking at the blogs of many luminaries blogging for the nationals. But in actual press, opinion journalism isn't just in the comment pages - it's everywhere. And now, thanks to Web two-point-oh, it's on the internet.
Yeah, I thought you might have been waiting for me to bring this back to online journalism in some way. With the rise of blogs, citizen journalism is becoming increasingly prevalent and increasingly powerful, and with citizen journalism comes opinion. There are few citizen journalists out there who think their improvised reporting is part of a noble calling to tell the world what is happenning without adding their views on it. Why would they? You've just taken a video - the first globally - of a bus exploding. This is a perfect opportunity to tell the world what you think. They will hear you. Maybe they will listen. Can you stay silent behind that lens, sombrely filming the events? Or do you add a reflectively murmured, "I can't believe it. What has Bush done to our world?"
It's shoddy, it's desperate, and it's the only way. You need the news as fast as possible from whomsoever will give it to you, and the same goes for blogs. Journalists have been reduced to the same level as citizen journalists, publishing blogs to get their views out as quickly as anyone else. It's all part of the same (blogo)sphere. What makes Andrew Marr's opinions more important than that of Crazyfist1991? His journalistic credentials? Quality of writing? Perhaps. But who's to say that will make his blog more widely read?
Thank you for reading this far, if indeed you have (making this sentence something of a paradox). You have done well to negotiate the navel-gazing, the cod philosophy and the seemingly neverending series of rhetorical questions in this post and emerge the other side a weary, confused traveller (blimey, that was pretentious). This has, in fact, been a very poor blog post; for better ones, visit www.weeekspotblog.com [/shameless plug].
Opinion journalism is a dying art - some would say, not an art at all. After all, what talent does an opinion journalist have? Writing his or her opinions? Literally everyone in the world has opinions, so what can the opinion journalist offer the public that they can't offer themselves?
So I have for you one final question: if news and opinion can come from anywhere, who cares what journalists have to say any more?
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