Democratizing Journalism through Mobile Media

The Mojo Revolution

Ivo Burum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317246718
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Fuelled by a distrust of big media and the development of mobile technologies, the resulting convergence of journalism praxis (professional to alternative), workflows (analogue to multipoint digital) and platforms (PC to mobile), result in a 24-hour always-on content cycle. The information revolution is a paradigm shift in the way we develop and consume information, in particular the type we call news. While many see this cultural shift as ruinous, Burum sees it as an opportunity to utilize the converging information flow to create a galvanizing and common digital language across spheres of communication: community, education and mainstream media. Embracing the digital literacies researched in this book will create an information bridge with which to traverse journalism's commercial precarity, the marginalization of some communities, and the journalism school curricula.

1 Introduction

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.

—Charles Darwin

Overview

This research is an empirical study into the implementation of a set of multimedia skills and digital tools designed to help people become more adaptable to a convergent change process taking place across spheres or fields of communication: community, education and mainstream media. Using a case study approach, this research seeks to introduce and define the concept of user-generated stories (UGS). Whether they are short breaking news type stories or longer features, UGS can include narratives of luck, misfortune, hope and more, portraying the more personal color of life. They require a multimedia way of thinking that inter-laces audio, video, text, graphics and stills to create narrative and story bounce.

A multiplanar storytelling approach, required for creating UGS, relies on a set of neo-journalistic skills that include edit skills. Multimedia stories might (sometimes but not always) require more space on a page. They may need more screen time, which is enabled by the web’s more elastic structure, but not necessarily by online editors, for whom news value can be a deciding factor.

An underlying rationale for this research is investigating a pedagogy for training citizens to create digital UGS, which enhance the possibility of creating grassroots journalism that’s seen more as semiprofessional content that retains its alternative weight. This potentially creates a more meaningful or semiprofessional intersect and dialogue between alternative grassroots journalism and legacy media. Hence, this research contends that UGS skills can form a common digital language across spheres of communication, which can be an important step to generating a more effective public sphere, one with an informed, less marginalized dialogue (Habermas 1989; Calhoun 1992; Bourdieu 1989; Castells 2008; Volkmer 2012; Garnham 1992; McKee 2005; Hartley and McKee 2000; Fraser 1992; Meadows et al. 2010). This introduction works to contextualize the above-mentioned change possibilities within journalism and its subfields (Bourdieu 2005) through an action research lens (Wadsworth 2011; Yin 2003).

Social theorist Jurgen Habermas (2006: 412) believes the public sphere is “the normative bedrock of liberal democracies” that brings together the private autonomy of citizens and their inclusion in debates between state and society. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1998) argues this debate is secured for a mass audience by cultural and symbolic logic, which is applied through the media and the journalistic field.

In the paperback edition of his book We the Media, author Dan Gillmor (2006) is amazed by “the growth of grassroots media,” especially within media such as CNN¹ and BBC that “feature the work of citizen journalists” (2006: xiii). Gillmor is right: accessibility to computer and mobile technologies potentially creates opportunities for citizen journalists to infiltrate more mainstream media. In 2006, Gillmor saw this as a grassroots phenomenon, growing in strength and power. However, two years later, journalist Charles Feldman (2008), in his book No Time To Think, called the digital content stream a “tsunami” and a “potential disaster” (2008: x). Feldman was not so much referring to Gillmor’s early bloggers, who were creating an alternative grassroots ecosphere, that was expanding what Castells (2009) called network societies, or journalists using blogging to connect with their audience. He was alluding to fragmented user-generated content (UGC) that results from social media and smartphone use, which has been described as “kludge” (Jenkins 2008: 17) and “gossip” (Keen 2006: 93). While referring to these shifts in communications as a modern revolution, Gillmor posits an important distinction that needs to be made between communication tools and toolkits. He tells us that technology has given us the “communications toolkit to allow anyone to become a journalist” (2006: xxiii). I believe this can be true only if definitions of toolkits include a complex set of journalistic skills, without which technological tools are not immediately toolkits. In recent times, even Internet evangelists such as Howard Rheingold (2012) have recognized this and moved from their technologically determinist positions to one that acknowledges a need for digital training.

The relevance of We the Media as a chronicle of the speedup of the Internet is invaluable. Released in a paperback edition just before the launch of the first iPhone, it describes a time where the Internet was idealistically seen as an opportunity for progress where “everyone from journalists to the people we cover, our sources, the audience must change their ways” (Gillmor 2006:xxiii). However, at the close of his book, with his optimism tempered by commercial reality, Gillmor laments, “The promise was freedom” (2006:209)—a freedom that Habermas had described as being rooted in,

networks for wild flows of messages—news, reports, commentaries, talks, scenes and images, and shows and movies with an informative, polemical, educational, or entertaining content … originating from various types of actors in civil society, that are selected and shaped by mass-media professionals. (2006: 415)

By 2006, this utopian view of convergence between technologies, platforms and suppliers was being derailed by what Gillmor calls “forces of centralization” by government, telecommunications and even the “pioneers who promised digital liberty” (2006a: 415). The research in this book finds added relevance in exploring the dialectic between media possibility and outcome, and in providing a model for a converging media sphere. This is crucial to understand if, as Gillmor (2010) suggests, citizens are to take control and make media serve us.

According to Feldman (2008), the wild flow of the convergence of platforms (PC to intimate handheld mobile communication) and workflows (analogue to multipoint digital), which result in 24-hour always-on content cycles, where information travels “faster than the speed of thought,” can only lead to disaster. Conversely, author and media analyst, Robert McChesney, believes the converged anytime anywhere communication sphere has created a “critical juncture” (2007: 9) in our communications history. Here, McChesney adds, “Revolutionary new communication technology is undermining the existing systems of communications seen by many as discredited and illegitimate” (2007: 10). This distrust of media, partly fueled by their gatekeeping practices, that determine which news is covered and how (Shoemaker 2009; Hirst 2011; Bruns 2005), leaves the audience wondering, “How can media, facing essentially the same material reality, produce different versions of it?” (Shoemaker 2009: 2). As a result of bias, misrepresentation and hacking, audiences are seeking alternative and more dynamic media sources, which leads to shifts in revenue and results in layoffs at established media houses (Zaponne 2012; McChesney and Pickard 2011) and closures of newspapers internationally (Brook 2009; Dumpala 2009; McChesney and Pickard 2011; Hirst 2011). This has resulted in frantic trialing of new converged workflows, platforms and business models, including reader-funded soft and hard pay walls (Coscarelli 2012) and more outsourced living content (Entwistle 2012), to make the journalism business more viable and relevant.

Analysts like McChesney view what some call a potential disaster as a short window of opportunity to reposition communications into a more inclusive, participatory form (2007). This view is now shared by futurist Howard Rheingold, who, in Net Smart (2012), shifts from a position of technological optimism, where he said it was enough to be part of the switched-on smart mob (2002), to critical realism: “Right now and for a limited time we who use the Web have an opportunity to wield the architecture of participation to defend our freedom to create and consume digital media according to our own agendas” (Rheingold 2012: 2). However, his more tempered view suggests digital media will only further our social and political agendas if we learn to exert control over the medium (2012). He, like McChesney, believes smart mobs need to become net smart and create an articulated state where the message uses the medium to its fullest potential. Martin Hirst (2012) agrees, arguing the idea of a social media revolution is a myth of what Vincent Mosco (2004) calls the “promise of the sublime” (2004: 3). He describes this as a digital myth that’s an entrance to another reality, rather than some organizing principle of change that spells the end of history, geography and politics (2004). In today’s more developed digital sphere, Mosco, like Rheingold, observes that once past the point of believing technology will fix society, “people begin to consider the hard work of creating the social institutions to make the best … most democratic, use of the technology” (Mosco 2009: 1395). What is required, Mosco articulates, is a citizen sphere where the euphoria created by a technology will fix everything stage, is followed “by a period of genuine political debate” (2009: 1395). This post in New York University professor of journalism Jay Rosen’s blog, “Press Think,” describes this state from a citizen’s view:

The people formerly known as the audience wish to inform media people of our existence, and of a shift in power that goes with the platform shift you’ve all heard about. … Think of passengers on your ship who got a boat of their own … viewers who picked up a camera … who with modest effort can connect with each other and gain the means to speak—to the world. … The people formerly known as the audience are simply the public made realer, less fictional, more able, less predictable.

(Cited in Rosen 2006)

As telling are Rosen’s own concerns about the socialization of media: “Were we making something happen, because we decided it was good, or inviting citizens to fashion their own goods? And getting down to the nitty-gritty did public journalism work? How would we know if it did?” (Rosen 1999: 8). In 1993, when I developed Australia’s first self-shot TV format, Home Truths, which gave 20 citizens—formerly members of the audience—an opportunity to tell their own stories on national TV and to become producers of UGC, I had the same self-doubts. But Jeff Lowrey, one of the participants, had no such concerns about his experience: “It’s my opportunity as a single dad to get my message across that single dads do it just as hard as single mums” (cited in Burum 1994). Lowrey’s experience was short-lived and his message was a one-off. In one sense, his exuberance is an example of Mosco’s myth of the sublime, “that animate[s] individuals and societies by providing paths to transcendence that lift people out of the banality of everyday life” (2004: 3). However, Lowrey would argue his community perspective broadened his definition of journalism—hence its relevance to his and the wider world. In the YouTube age, this state of euphoric unpredictability, driven by the promise of “instantaneous worldwide communication, a genuine global village [in essence] a new sense of community and widespread popular empowerment” (Mosco 2004: 25), if still a myth, is hard to resist.

Twenty years after my first experience in self-shot television I am researching the possibility that a more complete set of skills, rather than a broadcast opportunity, will give citizens a more sustained voice, and professional journalists more relevant job prospects. Hence, my investigation into whether developing UGC to a more holistic, thought-out, mobile digital storytelling form called mojo—the production, editing and publication of complete UGS on a smartphone—can provide a countervailing force against a high level of social precarity² (Neilson and Rossiter 2005a, 2005b). The low level of employment, the lack of a political voice and no functioning press, drove the Arab Springers to revolution. This state is also common in many marginalized communities; in education, where teachers need to become digitally literate more than being technically adept; and in professional media, where digital immersion is required for job stability.

In this state of uncertainty, this research investigates the creation of UGS in three communities of practice where knowledge and resources are shared to enable production and publication (Wenger 2007). The case study communities are marginalized Indigenous people learning to bridge the digital divide, students learning to communicate with a global community, and print journalists learning digital skills to make them more employable. These three sectors of communications form a continuum along a spectrum of the public sphere, described as a “zone of communal engagement in which communicative rationality prevails” (Hadland 2008: 4), in a civil space that influences “a network for communicating information and points of view” (Habermas cited in Castells 2008: 78). With the right skill set and access to technologies, these spaces have the potential to support a digital communications language and praxis that could enable such groups to organize the public sphere more than any others before them (Castells 2008). Their shared UGS are published online where they have relevance and use value because they are developed stories. UGS circulate in new global knowledge economies extending the individual’s and community’s reach and power structures, beyond geographical limitations and even social media frenzy. In this environment content is created and potentially vetted collaboratively before being shared (Bruns and Schmidt 2011).

In 2013, according to Ilicco Elia, a mobile pioneer at Reuters, one key to any shared community strategy, or advantage, whether social, educational or business, is digital and more specifically, mobile. “Social media is nothing without mobile. If you had to wait to get to your computer to talk to people, they wouldn’t do it, or if they did, it wouldn’t be as intimate a relationship as you now have using mobile” (Elia 2012). Elia believes mobile provides a revolutionary modern-day campfire extended storytelling experience because “it enables you to take people on an anytime anywhere cross platform journey that creates the social in social media” (2012). But is this enough and does everyone have the same access? The simple answer is it’s probably not and they don’t—hence not everyone is able take the journey.

Even though the Internet is far more social and open to minority voices than print, television, or other broadcast media ever were, access to new digital media training and tools is still marked by inequalities and severe participation gaps (Wilson and Costanza-Chock 2009). Rosen’s blogger may have arrived, but many citizens are still caught in a digital divide—the economic gap in opportunities to access communication technologies and learn skills that exist at different geographic and socioeconomic levels (Radoll 2002). The digital divide points to an irony in the current stage of the global information revolution: the contradiction between the promise of the sublime—cooperation and accessibility for all—and the realities of conflict among stakeholders. The reality suggests that many communities, especially those in remote or developing worlds, failed to create networks to empower people to employ digital communication technologies (Wilson 2005). But this is changing, and if we get the technology skills formula right, we may realize enhanced communication possibilities.

In 2007, just “10% of the world’s population in developing countries were using the Internet, compared to almost 60% in the developed world” (ITU 2008 cited in Wilson and Costanza-Chock 2009). In 2013, this figure was 31 percent compared to 77 percent in the developed world. This ratio, and hence this research, is of particular relevance to Australia, a developed nation with almost 1200 discreet Indigenous communities, of which 865 have a population below 50 (Rennie et al. 2011: 17). However, we have not been able to provide these remote communities with generally available Internet communication terminal (ICT) access, or the training required to enable inhabitants to tell their own stories. This is vitally important because as Lisa Waller (2010: 19) points out, “senior Walpiri people from Yuendumu in Central Australia consider that because journalists don’t listen to them or take an interest in issues they regard as important, their agendas and perspectives are not heard in public discussion of Indigenous affairs.” Journalist Tony Koch’s sobering advice that listening is the key to Indigenous reporting (cited in Waller 2010: 20) is critical. But perhaps even more relevant is providing training and technologies that enable a sustained and more holistic representation, as Waller suggests, of Indigenous people’s own understandings of their world.

McChesney believes the accessibility of technologies and the anytime anywhere ability to communicate suggest “we are in the midst of a communication and information revolution” (20...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Story in the Age of Social Media: A Theoretical Perspective
• 3 Defining an Action Research Context and Methodologies
• 4 Convergence at Click Speed
• 5 Mojo Working in Communities
• 6 Supplementary Workshops in Education and Media
• 7 Training: A Common Cross-Sphere Pedagogical Bridge
• 8 Recording Video and Audio and Editing on a Smartphone
• 9 Conclusive Ways Forward
• Appendices
• References
• Index