Claudine Boeglin @dandyvagabond
Twentieth-century journalism reported reality with a scientific-based approach: fact-based, bias-free, accurate. Photojournalism witnessed and documented evidence with non-retouched, often non-cropped still images; and captions.
Twenty-first century storytelling is moving towards authored stories in the form of documentary-fictions. Stories include the author’s intentions, his background and engagement, his perception of an event.
When asked about the importance of factual content v/s authored content, Joe Wilson, a British photography student, now video-storyteller, answered: “Do you know Werner Herzog? He tells us about the world he wants us to know about.”
New journalism as a catalyst.
Journalism needs to leave its pedestal to create open spaces for intelligent coalitions and conversations to gather, reaching out to academic labs in visual anthropology, sociology and neuroscience; leaning on grassroot activism and its empirical knowledge – often the best antennae of emerging social trends, and open the door widely to creative. Living-room journalism is a sort of digital inertia: to copy/paste wire provided content has no longer news added value.
For journalism to become a vibrant hub for citizen empowerment, its experts need to share openly: best practice and codes of conducts, explain and defend reporting integrity, and the importance of work ethics in its entire chain of production. Tutorials and reporting tips could be shared and complemented by/with contributing audiences, experts and academics, to enhance everyone willing to contribute research and reporting with a common tool kit.
New journalism is a creative lab.
Today’s journalism requires a savant workflow to stage content around multimedia talents and narratives. Writers have yet to fully support visual storytelling; data journalists will be paired with conceptual designers to organise their findings; and script writing to image (think of screenplay) will need best practice and expertise to serve the combined ensemble of: visual storytelling + digital design + UX/UI to form the emotional fabric and flexible articulation of interactive storytelling.
This advanced palette of layers interlacing movable grids of structural languages – lenses, codes and design – elaborates the musical composition of a script, its trembling architecture. “Interface is content,” says founder of Upian, Alexandre Brachet, UX haute couture expert. Bruno Masi, author and transmedia expert at l’INA, says rightly: ‘The web is where data and cinema converge and feed each other’.
When documentary director Brenda Longfellow and technologist Mike Robbins of Helios Design Labs teamed for http://hollowdocumentary.com, they shared the same ‘obsession’ for immersive storytelling: “We wanted to create mystery,” they say, “a visceral atmosphere.” That is the new journalism we dream of: blending reality and fiction, building narratives using the most sophisticated postmodernist systems of references and its storytelling palettes; from comics to cinema to music, art, architecture, fashion; and of course — soon widely; gaming and virtual reality.
Reality is the New Fiction and the screens of all shapes, its stage.
Creative journalism needs global brands.
What this statement requires is new thinking in resource allocation. A media dominated by writers still tied to an endless vertical page of piled-up words needs a drastic new editorial strategy to consider and reallocate workflows and budgets.
Interactive agencies and creative studios with internal UX and visual experts are in many ways better prepared for the challenge. They nurture problem solvers, team play and layered creative workflows within tight timeframes and budget constraints. They feed global brands with ideas and problem solving.
The future cradles of storytelling in the 21st century will be visionary brands with content mastery and the agility to seed and experience around story labs. Brands in media, education, and technology products share the same end goal: to engage digitally the upcoming next generations of audiences with stories in which they are partially or fully involved — and thereby with a better chance to be consumed, shared and talked about.
Collaborative journalism needs assignments.
That is another major and highly exciting component of today’s journalism: the social-media inclusive conversations and its ever-growing participatory audience offer a greater challenge: how smart can we be in assigning and nurturing the next wave of potential online researchers and reporters worldwide?
The investigative platform
http://www.propublica.org has already begun the practice, using audience contributions to gather some of its data. Global media organisations regularly invite their viewers to share discoveries and record material for breaking news type events.
In the late 1990s, when I was managing editor at COLORS magazine, over eighty stringers across the world contributed to research. They joined with various backgrounds; some had broadcast experience, others were writers, and in places where we needed a pair of eyes and ears, a few were improvised researchers. The experience taught us the importance of anticipating workflows with crystal-clear creative briefs, and when needed, one-to-one conversations to fine-tune a story angle. Previously unseen treasures of stories emerged from the ground up through this practice, often changing the initial editorial idea.
Citizen journalism for shared responsibility.
To collect information and generate social interaction with actively engaged users requires a decentralised cellular production structure for a sustainable reporting ecosystem to enhance debates, undermine clichés, reduce/support costs on the ground, and access places where coverage remains difficult: and just that type of ‘architecture’ requires think/do tank.
What actively shared consciousness along evolving technologies will do: is to better fight the indifference. Too often complex issues remain cryptic out of fragmented news coverage. We still produce news as if we had a print daily newspaper audience; an event follows another event. We still have no great templates to lay out historical perspective and contextualisation; we only now start to bridge analysis to visuals to design to screen-friendly experiences.
We have to step out of the diktat of daily coverage because it constrains content production to its bare minimum – blogs, news alerts, text based fact boxes, etc. It is reactive v/s active journalism. Sophisticate concepts and editorial ensemble require to set the agenda and stretch production temporality to allow visual authors and curators, designers and coders to translate, organise, and streamline the information. With more content producers in the workflow, clarity in the story angle increases — and to understand who to involve in which brainstorming, will be key.
‘Live anthropop’ is the next trend captor – in real time.
Live anthropology does not respond to a news event, it observes and ‘captures’ social phenomena by collecting trends in real time and observing its patterns through social behaviours with a selected group of actors of the trend to lead the research. The 1990s print magazines were best to capture niche lifestyles and trends — so were some digital fanzines in the mid late 90s. What ‘live anthropop’* could do is to democratically gather information for the study of humans in the present — with their collaboration.
*‘Pop’ refers to the pop culture twist it will have in its DNA.
What if we had for instance collected and questioned the trend of human body expressions from the last two decades on? Never in such ways has the body become a limited space of ultra-curated publication: tattoos, scarifications, piercing etc. became ways to express a ‘radical indivialism’ through ‘skin branding’.
And what if we had dynamic templates to browse through, place side-by-side and overlay street-art artifacts from pro-democratic public protests, to analyse them as a whole?
The cities have become vibrant theatres of individual rebellion to be captured in real time. Public expression has always existed from the Chinese Dazibao (public poster published by a citizen) to the fanzine (indie publication) until the London’s Hyde Park Corner, but the current protests have produced increasingly more activist material: it needs to be collected, discussed, compared, and archived in accessible time capsules. Social media have contributed to the “protest decade” and empowered “citizen journalism” — but it’s hard to find any form of anthology of this social phenomena.
Exit the posture of neutrality in creative journalism.
The powerful narratives of tomorrow will interlace images, words, code, design, and interactive navigation; replacing the pyramidal writing hierarchy with creative of mixed generation and complementary skill sets. Once more: inclusive management, defined angles, anticipated coverage, team play in research and transparent workflows will be key.
If English will remain the passport-language, ‘code is the new Latin,’ and the structural movable architecture of the storytelling pools. Thus UX expertise needs to be rooted in the fabric of each story.
The posture of neutrality is now itself a convention of the past. A digital screen is an experience: that’s how the user is exposed, involved and engaged in the story. We are entering an era of creative journalism. Creative practice is subjective by design – any creative decision making (framing, composing, retouching, etc.) is a point of view. Images used as wallpapers to wrap written content will soon be old practice.
Will gaming be the storytelling quintessence?
To successfully involve digital audiences all layers of knowledge and talents have to come together: the originality of the script is as important as the storyboard, and the premises of digital technologies – the user is the pilot – will require a clear mastery of intuitive navigation to move user experience into user engagement.
Let’s compare it to the advent of the car. What is driving? To experience a landscape in an active individual and dynamic mode of transport. A driver curates a journey from a geographical set of options into a highly personal sensorial experience seen and felt through multiple screens. We’re far from that kind of immersive experience but we get there one day soon with virtual reality.
Digitally active navigation through non-linear layers of storytelling and visual landscapes confers the quality of an individual road trip. Interactive documentaries and serious games will be fun immersive ways to navigate an complex issue. A set of data combined with a sensorial experience not possible for most in the real world (touching, traveling, feeling, failing, winning, and reflecting) is a pleasurable and complete learning bridging rational, emotional and spiritual.
Gaming is addictive and one of the most viable business models in the digital world not just because it’s violent — that’s a cliché. A game’s wealth of visual exploration and sensorial simulation is what places the pilot in a speed-dating series of decisions which yes, might sculpt his/her brain into expanded capacities; and yes, for the better and the worst.
For now we have mostly games prompting to kill, but with games prompting to build and experience along original scrips; a new generation of coined ‘news games’ and ‘serious games’ could become the quintessence of storytelling in our century – authored, collaborative, and immersive.
Documentary–fiction impulses a sense of emergency.
Investigative journalism needs documentary as much as data journalism needs design: to streamline complex issues in engaging formats and affordable attention span.
Documentaries bring a sense of emergency to an issue: ‘Here is the world I want you to know about’ is replacing the posture of neutrality. For a point of view to come across, integrity and accuracy in reporting are essential, but that won’t prevent an active series of actions to be rooted at its core.
Isn’t to share story involvement to share citizenship responsibility in an interconnected global world? Inequalities in accessing resources, gender-based relationships, global security, human rights to privacy, and understand to the full spectrum of modern conflicts… Is our problem.
Digital technology and social media help gather instantly in protest, raise individual and collective voices, and revealed talents without the filters of entrenched authority.
Inclusive technologies and collaborations should therefore help analyse and layout radical ideologies much faster and openly with creative problem solvers invited to contribute current states of affairs.
We need more creative solutions for infrastructures to resist climate disasters, for cities to become human-friendly to parents, new comers and vulnerable populations. We need to communicate with ‘visual moodboards’ to go beyond the barriers of language to share values and practices. We need to re-set mindsets and templates to dust out national memorabilia and news clichés.
In short: proactive journalism needs to cut through the noise, set the agenda, dispatch creative assignments, animate expert talks; and through its findings, promptly detect and report on patterns, alert on pressing issues, call for expert answers, and so on…
Could active journalism solve things before they break?
The best stories are those building knowledge, emotion, empathy – and lasting impact. More than ever, we
need authors and artists to capture the world’s fabric and its morphing. We need
authors and artists to look at reality not just as it is, but as it could be.
We need to disrupt reality, intrude upon its current logic, question its static powers; and color it with individual perception and experience.
Reality is the New Fiction
– We need iconoclastic imagination
– We need to highjack the palette of fiction and gaming
– We need collaborative UX/UI for intuitive experiences
– We need storytelling – genesis of humanity, to remain ethical
More than ever, we need collaborative creative thinking for storytelling to become radically groove!
Basta.
Copy proof by Thomas Ridgway
Photo: Palermo, Italy. Mercato di Capo.
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www.realityisthenewfiction.com
Has been created the first August 2014 as an empty shell, presage of the future of media. It could be a possible platform-lounge for creative partners-in-crime in social responsibility, open UX and design simplicity – or maybe a collection on medium.com
Independent multimedia journalist and creative — founder of Dandy Vagabonds Ltd.
Claudine Boeglin worked with:
Thomson Reuters Foundation – Multimedia Director
Human Rights Watch – Creative Consultant
Magnum Photos – Co-founder of Magnum in Motion
Lemonde.fr – Managing/Creative Editor
COLORS magazine – Managing Editor
First publication on
medium.com Oct 16, 2014.
