Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Advancing videojournalism

"If the solutions to solving the world's seemingly intractable sustainable energy problems are so attainable, why haven't we reached them ?

Economist Jeffrey Sachs article in Newsweek proffers a poignant answer: we are facing up to the problems in the wrong way

Sach's feature deserves a film treatment.

And fortunately ABC's link at the bottom of the page points to a piece by World News' Charles Gibson.

I'm yet to see the report, but it strikes me how apt Sach's argument is to a profession I'm more familiar with.

New ideas can often present challenges delivered through any medium.

In print, it might be too abstract to grasp whilst TV suffers ignominiously from dumbing down an argument?

But we hardly need lecturing about the power of the image deconstructing complex ideas: see an Inconvenient Truth.

TV news, and now web video present at best a canvas to decipher many an analyses.

Instead however online news' staple diet looks set to reflect its real world model of divisiveness.

Read more

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Incisive comment. Author Michael Crichton reveals his perspective about this struggle in "State of Fear" and calls attention to the post 1989 meteoric development of the PLM (an acronymn for the politico-legal-media complex) which uses media to cause and continually profit from "fear" issues. His suggestions about how to approach reporting on and filming "science" based issues at this link would be helpful to VJs: http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-sciencepolicy.html

Dr David Dunkley Gyimah said...

Thanks anonymous. Long read huh which I'll return to, but skimming through he's pressing the buttons.

Crichton's pedigree is such that he'll have few, if any, naysayers attacking him.

But it's so easy to consider the current status quo as adequate. That is the way news operates.

Today we learn that a raft of national brit newspapers have paid out huge sums of money to a couple, The Mcanns who lost their daughter, and the papers admit by way of an apology that they weren't honest in some of the stories they wrote.

I think the point many might consider is with the net now a credible medium ( not the story telling, but its carriage), we a generation have a choice.

Follow the status quo or invent a new one.