Factual Storytelling

After countless hours of editing, here is my factual story:

And here is the link (for incase)

http://youtu.be/woPj8PZ30n8

Public Media

Last week's lecture was about commercial media, and this week we investigated the other end of the media-spectrum- public media.

Public media is media that is not profit driven, where the ultimate goal is to serve the public. As Australia is in a democratic society, the public media's role is to be unbiased and give needed information to the public. Unfortunately, with some countries where there is not a democracy, public media can sometimes be a platform for forms of propaganda.

Public media has a very important role in our society. It's function involves broadcasting about national heritage, identity, building and conversation. It can bring the public the information about public news, without having another agenda, as commercial media sometimes has.

This means that public media has some serious challenges. One, is definitely getting funding. Because it is not commercially driven, they need to have enough money whilst still being independent. Another is to get more audiences. There are so many media platforms, and all of them so shiny and inviting, that people have called public media too "serious" and "out of touch". This might be true, but I think it is quite refreshing to have some down-to-earth reporting.

One massive plus side to public media is their lack of ads. As Bruce so perfectly said:

"I am insulted by the ads, because I am assaulted by the ads."

Ads are horrible. Ads alone justify to me why people download TV shows from the Internet. And why I am constantly changing radio stations when I drive. And we are more intelligent than commercial media makes us out to be. We want real information. And we definitely do not want ads that make us feel like eternal 5 year olds.

I think that we, myself included, sometimes takes the public media for granted. Especially in Australia, where we have wide access to information, we do not really think about what a privilege it is. So many countries are under control of dictators or governments that censor the media, or control what information gets to the public. Here in Australia, there are several media companies that are there to spread information without government input.

Commercial Media

Now we have come to look at Commercial Media. This refers to profit driven media, which means that the main aim of this media is to get money, and lots of it, and not to give us the best information possible (as we all wish it would).

Now this can be in the form of subscription media, sponsored media or media subsidised by the Government. And the main aim of commercial media is advertising, social reach and (scariest of all) propaganda.

Now, we would all like to live in a world where we can fully trust on the media, any media, for the exact and all encompassing truth to every important event. But unfortunately, media has become so commercially driven that the wider public has become quite sceptical of what the media is saying, or more importantly, hiding. If it is all about money, then the control over what is published is surely in the hands of the investors? We have no other way of knowing the truth than journalists.\

Let's think about censorship for a minute. We are all a little bit afraid of it. I am scared. I am scared of the fact that so much of my knowledge relies solely on the ethical responsibility of the media. And we all know that is a little bit shaky. And we have all heard of government censorship in its most evil form in dystopian novels, and shrugged it off as a silly dream of something that might never happen.

"Winston’s work with the Ministry is to change history. He is involved mainly with articles in The Times newspaper, and he goes back and changes the text so that it supports the present. For example, if in the past Big Brother had made a prediction and it did not transpire, Winston would go back and change the prediction and destroy any evidence regarding the original entry."

George Orwell, 1984

Ridiculous. Ridiculous to think of in modern society. But there have been several unsettling examples in modern media that are clearly heading in the same direction. One is the so called "Secrecy Bill" that was passed in South Africa at the end of 2011.

You can read the whole story here or here.

Even Australia has problems with increasing censorship over Internet use. But I am by no means saying that the world is heading towards a totalitarian superpower, I don't think it will ever come to that. There are enough safe guards that protect the public from anything extreme. And as romcoms have been teaching me all my life; people hate being lied to. No, I don't think anything serious will happen. But I do think that commercial media can be a very bad idea.

Not just in the censorship world, it also results in news being dumbed down, news being reduced to scandalous gossip and news companies working only to please the public, and not to inform. Don't we have enough tabloids? Do we really want to know how Britney Spears lost her baby-weight or Justin Bieber gets his hair so shiny? As the marvellous Jerry Sienfeld said:

People who read the tabloids deserve to be lied to.

(http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/j/jerryseinf379237.html)

We can never completely get away from commercial media. There needs to be money to fuel all the journalists and newspapers. As long as we do not compromise on the truth of delivering news, we will be fine.

Radio Journalism

This week we moved away from text and pictures, to the other medium: Sound. You quite forget about sound as a way of journalism and this lecture really opened my eyes to radio, which I had never really given any thought to.

We were all asked to listen to a podcast from the ABC where they interviewed 2 different broadcasters; Richard Fidler and Steve Austin and they talked about their experience in the radio field.

Rochard Fidler is the broadcaster of Conversations on ABC radio. I have actually heard several of his podcasts on the way back from the city with my dad. He talked about how radio is very different from television, and it sometimes acts more as background or a voice inside your head.

He explained how when he conducts an interview it is important to feed of, or react on what the interviewee is saying. And to have open conversations that leaves room for the person to tell their own story. This is all so similar to what I have learnt about conducting an interview for a story. To leave space for the interviewee to tell their own story, and to feed off what they are saying.

What really impressed me about what he said is that Silence is Powerful. I think it is great how radio and sound gives you the room to use things like silence to convey more meaning than a written piece could. Steve Austin also said that with radio listeners can pick up on lies or "fakeness" so much easier than in a video for example, because there is nothing to distract from what the speaker is saying. Radio has so many different elements at its disposal than other mediums.

I was also surprised when they mentioned that radio is actually becoming more popular. He contributed it to people being time-poor. I think this is very exciting for the radio industry, that it will never die out because people will always leave it on in the background or listen to it in the car. Even I, who never thought of myself as a radio-listener, have realised how often I actually do listen to it.

Since I could not end this post without adding some sort of sound-element, here is a song by the unparalleled Sigur Ros. Here is my justification, the song is pure sound- the singing is not actual words just random sounds. Pretty cool?

Robert Doisneau

I was just thinking of my post about pictures, when today I was happily opening the Google webpage and I saw that the fickle logo had changed to celebrate Robert Doisneau's 100th birthday. Well if anyone had an eye, the special talent for telling stories with pictures, it was this man. I do not even have to say anything, his pictures speak for themselves. Which is the beauty of his artwork.

Here are my favourites:

On a last note- does this picture remind you of anything? Well, I could not help thinking of:

Picture Stories

"A picture has no meaning at all if it can't tell a story"

-Eetu Sillanpää

Beautiful words.

This week's lecture was about the other side of journalism- pictures. Bruce talked about pictures from their origin, to modern photojournalism- photoshop, news photos and moving pictures (new television). Now, it comes as no surprise that pictures are incredibly important in modern journalism. They are everywhere; newspapers, magazines, television, movies, graffiti, ads, computers. You just need to take a look at 99% of all Tumblr blogs and you can see that everyone is a photo journalist today. Because people like seeing pictures. It makes it easier for us to understand what a story is about, to place ourselves in the midst of an event.

The lecture explained how news pictures have developed through the ages, from cave drawings of events, to stained glass windows, to illuminated letters and more modern drawings published in newspapers. I find it rather romantic to think of the ways people have communicated pictures in the past. So much effort and talent into a immortal drawing, and now all of that happens at the click of a button.

Pictures soon developed to photographs in newspapers. The first published photo was by Henry J Newton in 1880 of Shantytown in New York. And we all know the rest. Now the problem is not taking a photo, but choosing a photo out of the million we are bombarded with. Photojournalism has escalated so quickly to be dominated by photos taken will iPhones, iPods, cameras, Canon's, Nikon's, surveillance footage, heaven knows what else. Imagine what it will be like in another 100 years. Holographs? Engraved gold? Singing cherubs? Teleportation? It is actually quite scary.

And now it is not only about taking the right picture, but it can be adjusted in whichever way we want because of the double edged sword called Photoshop. (<<< click it, I dare you)

Bruce showed this amazing example of the power of photoshop:

How shocking is it? That anything can be so subtly altered, that we as consumers would not even notice. As I have heard some people mention- no wonder women have so much trouble living up to media-beauty- it does not exist! This is why I miss (not that I was around for it, but nostalgia is my friend) the golden days when it was film camera developed in a dark room and smudged onto a newspaper page. Or hours spent on drawing a picture to resemble a person for a news story. It might have taken longer, but this modern power has me squirming in my seat.

Does anyone else find it uncomfortably similar to dystopian predictions? 1984, anyone? Brave New World? Fahrenheit 451? Hunger Games? That the natural, normal is not sufficient enough, that it needs to be altered and transformed into something unnatural to make it socially acceptable. Shivers.

Here are some examples of photoshop images that have been greatly misused:

Missing leg anyone?

Bruce showed this one in the lecture. I find it rather sad that she needed to be enhanced to be commercial in America. Also, I find it kind of funny all the same.

This one was actually a combination of two photos that made the e-mial forwarding rounds a few years back.

This one is rather disturbing. Someone photoshoped a tourist into a shot of the planes flying into the Twin Towers. Rather a dark side of photoshop, I think.

There is a whole list of other photos like these on The Guardian website.

Evil photoshop aside, to have a good news photo you need to think of:

>Framing

>Point of view

>Exposure

>Timing

>Capturing that elusive moment

Here is an example of one of the most famous photos:

This was taken by Kevin Carter, a South African photojournalist. He won a Pulitzer Prize for it. I think this is a perfect example of how a picture can say more than any amount of words can. And I am a huge believer in words. But nothing can convey the message as strongly as this one picture can.

And with that I will end this exceptionally long post. Pictures have a power, sometimes, that cannot be expressed in words.

Text in Journalism

This week's lecture was given by one Skye Doherty and talked about the importance of text in modern Journalism. The many different news platforms and online media places, gave me the impression that photos are the main way that news is spread to the masses. But this lecture reminded me that with text you have much more control over what and how you present your article. Even with the pictures we have online, they need to be supplemented with text to make them searchable, since text dominates online.

With news and journalism becoming increasingly online-dominated, the articles written for mass communication has to adjust many things, including layout. It now has the additional importance of hyperlinks (handy little links that interlink different sites and addresses to an article), searchable titles, and be adaptable to different layouts. In light of the importance of hyperlinks, I have chocked this post full of hyperlinks to (completely random) links. Let's see how this goes.

Another important technique she mentioned (more a fundamental FACT, than technique) is the inverted pyramid. Where the important what, why, when, how, where and who is described. This is very important so that readers can immediately be drawn into the story, otherwise they will get frustrated and bored and simply not read further.

This also relates to the new shiny "features" online news gives journalists to play with. Although, it seems like a lot of extra work. The articles written look different on the different platforms they are displayed on; Facebook, news sites, twitter, etc. Therefore it is so important to have a good, attention grabbing and search-friendly headline and good introductory paragraph.

Here is an example of the devastating earthquake that hit Indonesia on the 11 of April, as shown on the Brisbane Times website:

First when you access the main page to read the headlines, this is what is shown of the story:

Note how the headline is short and contains the most probable words to be searched, and the only sentence shown has all the important information that people would immediately want to know. Then when you click on that link, this is the next page shown:

This has a different picture again, and has a little bit more information, but still the main sentence that was used in the first page. Then there is a hyperlink to the full story which looks like this:

This finally gives the whole story. This layout works really well, because it gives people the immediate information and they can then go deeper into it for more information.

Basically, journalism and news is based on text. Headlines, captions, stand-firsts, content, blurbs. Even with the new online and picture "direction" it is moving in, text will always stay fundamental to news writing and so it is important for us to get as much of a grasp of being good writers as we can.