New Media, New World.
I write a lot on food and health issues these days, as well as doing the digital culture stuff. I wonder for example what all the new media, IT and gizmo stuff is worth if you're not feeling well.
My wife went back into hospital yesterday with a heart complaint – which is savage at 45.
Like they always say in Ireland, at least I've got my health but when you haven't Read the rest of this entry »
I'm reading a book on metaphor (called Metaphors We Live By) that shows how we people routinely rely on metaphors to structure our thinking and it does a good job of showing how confused we really are. So I thought I'd post this picture and ask the obvious question: where are all the real surrealists?
This is a recent discovery for me but hell, the guy’s already famous. I’ve put it in the links section. It’s a lesson, for me anyway and I’m still learning, in what to do with a blog.
And so do we. This is a site we're putting together on Squarespace, to give a better impression of our thinking.
The question is worth asking because hundreds of thousands of people work in creative industries and millions more wish they could. Understanding creative urges will help us understand where niche media is headed.
Creativity has to be about difficult truths.
A few days back I sat with Julian Castagna, winemaker. Julian used to shoot adverts for TV. He worked with James Garrett, one of the most influential advertising guru’s in post-war advertising. Briefly in the 1980s I worked with his son Stephen Garrett, who now runs Kudos, producers of spy series Spook for the BBC.
Julian has pedigree. This is why he gave up making ads. “Every meeting I went into it became an issue of the politics of getting the film done, not the film itself. I didn’t enjoy it anymore.”
He’s an advocate of doing things because you love it, because you have passion. That’s different from getting a high or a kick from doing things.
Most people in the media world have given into a different process: sticking in there, making the profits, getting the film out, getting the paper through the door. I don’t say they submit to these processes for egotistical reasons. But they are not creative processes. A creative process begins with an intractable problem or a breakthrough opportunity. You have to be dealing win the near impossible, the near unsayable.
Routine, however varied, doesn’t invite these intractables. As much as people at the top of the media tree believe they work in creative environments, in reality they work on a production line, second guessing audiences. That was a real surprise to me – the extent to which all decisions are guided by attempts to second guess what an audience will watch and how an audience will think. That’s why I say it is a production line. Making wallpaper and chairs is also about second guessing audiences.
My one anxiety for niche media is that it’s more of a production line.
To explore further where the media industry is going I started this blog. I work in the media industry. I’m not convinced that mainstream media does the good job it claims to. In fact my own experience of it has been a story of moral compromise. I only came back into journalism and TV three years ago, after a twelve year stint in industry. I’m surprised by what I see. People prepared to work for nothing, people forced to work for very little, people prepared to treat the creative process as a production line.
Last year I completed a film that drew an audience of 3 million on the BBC, and my press articles are read by an audience of half a million, then they get circulated around the web.
So far this blog has had 36 visitors. In terms of exposure to an audience it is the worst investment of time I could make. On the other hand it gets me asking questions about why I write and what I’m trying to achieve. I know I’m a net gainer by writing it, but have yet to work out exactly how.
I wanted to come back to that debate about standards and about vested interests. Old media is dying out for a simple reason. No, not necessarily because blogs are great and technology is outpacing all of us. The reason is about a decade ago old media organisations stopped paying media professionals a living wage.
It is possible to make a living as a journalist – if you have a staff job. Most staffers I know are so overworked though they wouldn’t have time to check and double check all their stories. And I’ve been involved in my share of compromises in a recent BBC film I produced. The priority these days is to shove a product out the door with as little downside as is feasible within the constraints of inadequate budgets, even in a world where there is plenty of money to do better.
Among the freelancers I know none can live by reporting alone. The same is true of television and newspapers. When TV broadcasters began outsourcing to independents the obvious but unexpected happened. Instead of one profit centre there were now two. And gradually independent producers have come to see themselves as part of a harsh commercial reality. At least that’s how they like to tell it.
So those two profit centres squeeze budgets, gladly use inexperienced staff, reduce the opportunity to travel, meet and qualify interviewees, and generally force a get-the-job-done mentality.
The National Union of Journalists in the UK is right now running a campaign to keep journalism relevant (to newspapers and TV broadcasters). That’s how bad the situation now is. But this is not yet a cash poor industry, just one with artificial profit centres.
The mainstream media don’t pay a living wage to the people that matter -the journalists – unless you are a celebrity. The same is true of TV and newspapers. It’s common these days for a journalist to have to source pictures for newspaper articles for example, limiting employment for photographers, and increasing the time-burden on a low paid freelancer writer.
The irony of this is that many of the people at the top of the independent television production tree began life as radicals who stepped outside the safety of the big broadcasting institutions with a view to saying something new, and making TV in different ways. What they achieved is stifling free speech because broadcast journalists have fled the business, or daren’t speak the truth for fear of harming the commercial prospects of their occasional employees.
Blogging is a great response to that. Producing or helping to plan minority, niche channels has a healthier feel than the relative oppression of the network and the newspaper. And clearly readers/viewers love it too. That’s a lot of momentum against traditional ways of doing things.
So a few words about who this blog is aimed at. It will evolve but my first priority is to understand changes in the visual media as they effect people like me, a journalist who needs to make a living from writing but who also believes that the public debate, the dialogue, is stronger than the old system. That’s the one where editors, owners, and political intruigers had the final word.
Second I think there’s a level of deteail in those changes that needs bringing out. Few people beyond the magic circle in the visual media know who’s who or which company is doing what. When I look at the websites of Narrowstep, Maven, Roo and other IP TV players I don’t get their character. Future monarchs of the visual world they have pretty flat textual decriptions of themselves that don’t engage me. So a few interviews here might help change that.
Then there’s an important debate to be had about the dying days of traditional media (see next post).
Finally I hope the blog will develop some technique pages, and it might help a reader or two get their stuff onto Akimbo or any other video aggregator.
Mediangle 