The Mojo Handbook

Theory to Praxis

Ivo Burum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000172355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The Mojo Handbook: Theory to Praxis offers a detailed and engaging crash course on how to use mobile tools to create powerful journalistic stories.

Drawing on both theoretical underpinnings and practical techniques, the book outlines the fundamentals of mobile journalism methods, by placing mobile storytelling within a wider context of current affairs, documentary filmmaking and public relations. The book offers expert advice for how to use storytelling skills to transform mobile content into engaging and purposeful user-generated stories for audiences. Topics covered include tips for recording dynamic video and clean audio, conducting interviews on your phone and editing and post-production processes, as well as advice on how to handle copyright issues and a primer on journalistic ethics. The book also includes a comprehensive glossary of terms to help students navigate the video production and mobile journalism world.

The Mojo Handbook i s a valuable resource for aspiring multimedia professionals in journalism, strategic and corporate communication, community and education, as well as anyone looking to incorporate mobile into their visual storytelling tool kit.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Summary

The history of journalism is tied to the evolution of technology. The advent of TV meant that by the 1950s broadcast TV news was challenging newspapers for supremacy. Just as TV became a watershed for news publication, so too would digital. The lure of the digital revolution and cheaper, more streamlined technology led to a slew of new hybrid forms. One of those was a self-shot form called video journalism. From 1995, the Internet enabled even more citizens to bypass network gatekeepers and publish their own content. This relatively free and limitless publication platform and the eventual proliferation of affordable mobile devices, with an already rampant voyeuristic TV culture, increased the level of self-shot production. Mobile journalism (mojo) is a storytelling form using a smartphone or hybrid forms to create and edit video and audio into complete stories for publication on radio, TV, social media and various other platforms. In global conflict situations including revolution (Arab Spring) and pandemics (COVID-19) the mobile enables communication, story and program production to continue. This chapter establishes the mojo timeline and introduces the concept of mobile journalism before introducing convergence and the current impact of mobile on the news business.

Figure 1.1 Ivo Burum recording piece to camera.

Ivo Burum

The history of journalism is tied closely to the development of technology. Around 1440, Johann Gutenberg invented the first printing press and gave rise to mass daily publication. In 1610, the first weekly newspaper appeared in Vienna and by the 1830s newspaper editors were using homing pigeons to deliver the news. In 1880 the first photograph appeared in a newspaper. In 1920, the first radio news broadcast occurred in Pittsburgh in the USA and in 1939 NBC and CBC, two US TV networks, began broadcasting television. By the 1950s, broadcast news was big business and television news networks began to challenge newspapers for dominance.

The media business was always interested in new, more dynamic and lucrative ways to tell and sell stories. As far back as the 1960s storytellers like Academy Award-winning documentary maker and news cameraman, the late D. A. Pennebaker, were experimenting with less expensive, more mobile ways to tell stories. After shooting with a digital video (DV) camera, Pennebaker, arguably the father of modern-day untethered location-based filming, said “I would be surprised if I did any [shooting on] film … ever again” (Stubbs 2002: 51). Moreover, his documentary partner, Chris Hegedus, summed up the importance of digital when she observed that DV transferred filmmaking into the hands of the masses (ibid). In Yuendumu, a remote central-Australian Indigenous community, this is exactly what happened in the early 1980s. People began experimenting with video and participatory journalism so that they could control publication of their own stories (Michaels 1986).

From 1985, in Australia we were all plugging in to a digital revolution including the advent of satellite television. The proliferation of cheaper, smaller DV cameras provided a milieu within which astute storytellers (in news, radio and television) could experiment with story creation. Affordable digital edit suites with onboard image manipulation technology (DVEs) and inbuilt audio-mixing systems completed the turnkey desktop production chain. Convergence and the reduced cost of technologies meant “sizzle reels” (short promotional video tapes) produced using inexpensive DV cameras and laptop edit suites could be produced cheaply to sell innovative concepts. At about this time we developed a self-shot form of TV that enabled citizens to participate in the digital storytelling process (Burum 2018). We didn’t know it then, but we were in the midst of a mini-revolution, readying our mindset and workflows for reality TV and mobile content creation forms.

The lure of the digital revolution and cheaper, more streamlined technology led to an array of new hybrid forms. This resulted in a proliferation of TV channels that changed what was programmed (Jacka 2000). In the early 1990s I began experimenting with self-shot television formats that were produced by non-professionals and mirrored the stylistic and technological development of factual television. This was a form of skills convergence where ordinary citizens (consumers) created content (became producers).

As self-shot became popular and users became proficient, the form found a home on prime-time television, particularly current affairs programs, where it was called video journalism. Popularised by video journalists (VJs) like Michael Rosenblum in the US and Mark Davis in Australia, the style involved the journalist also being cameraperson and sound recordist, and where possible the editor. The VJ style of storytelling was a little more personal, had more of a journalistic presence, and was often embraced by younger up-and-coming journalists wanting to make a name for themselves or camera people wanting to make a shift to being a journalist and/or producer. The holistic skill sets required by VJs are almost identical to the skills required to produce mojo stories.

By 1993 Tim Berners-Lee was stabilising html—the Web was born, and publishing was about to change forever. From 1995 the Internet became a public tool for communication that enabled people to bypass network gatekeepers and publish their own content. This relatively free and limitless publication platform, the eventual proliferation of affordable mobile devices, and an already rampant voyeuristic TV culture increased the level of self-shot production. By 2020, almost 500 hours of video was being uploaded to YouTube every minute. That’s enough video content uploaded every 18 minutes to fill a television channel running 24/7 for a year. As technology got smaller and more powerful, DV cameras made way for smartphones. Users could now edit high-quality user-generated content (UGC) into user-generated story (UGS) and publish it from almost anywhere. Smartphones spawned a new group of citizen content creators who found the technology addictive and the lure of free publishing platforms like YouTube irresistible. Content was shared across fragmented digital network societies where participants with similar interests engaged in activities of importance to them (Meadows 2005, Castells 2008).

By 2007, communication moved from the desktop into the palms of our hands and a new, more personalised smartphone era was born. In theory the Internet created a more democratic and diverse publishing model in a potentially more robust marketplace of ideas. The assumption is that an audience with diverse content options consumes a diversity of content (Napoli 1999), which potentially promotes a diversity of views and public issues. In this essentially Marxist view of a network society, communication technologies potentially lead to greater inclusivity for participants. This can lead to greater deliberation around freedom, ethics and use value, which media critic Robert McChesney (2007) believes are “central to democratic theory and practice.” In particular, news could now be produced by legacy media and social networks and published and watched from almost anywhere.

Crucial to appreciating the impact of the shift to online communication is an assumption by users that they are part of the fabric of a networked society—not merely as consumers, like those before them—but as producers:

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)

The above trope, widely attributed to Professor Jay Rosen, is not his. It was made on his blog, PressThink, by one of his readers with a growing frustration with legacy media. At the Melbourne Writers Festival (2011) at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne, Rosen told the audience that “everything that broadens your horizon is journalism.” Media analyst Robert McChesney felt current opportunities for media reform were so profound that in years to come we “will speak of this time as either a glorious new chapter in our communication history—where we democratized societies and revolutionized economies, or as a measure of something lost, or, for some, an opportunity they never had” (McChesney 2007). How will educators and trainers embrace these possibilities, and new horizons in communication?

A conduit in the home, work and play continuum, the mobile is our new digital pen and we never leave home without it. All we need to know is how to write with it. Not just single words, but cursively, where individual words (pictures and video) are joined into sentences (edited sequences) and stories. To achieve this, we need to democratise relevant skills to enable journalists and citizens to use digital and mobile tools to create politicised stories. As renowned filmmaker Ken Burns observes, “we love the new technology and the accessibility to everybody, that democratization of the process. But at the same time, we see, particularly with regard to the Internet and video, the way in which the technological tail is now beginning to wag the dog. I think we’ve lost touch with story” (cited in Stubbs 2002). The ever-expanding reach of the media gives us the opportunity to send stories beyond borders to billions. But is the speed of the clickstream eroding the overall quality of storytelling?

MOJO: The Mobile Journalism Handbook (2015) describes a form of mobile storytelling that I called user-generated story (UGS). UGS involves using a mobile to record and edit real events, strong narrative and gritty actuality into powerful story and to know how to employ hybrid recording forms when mobile is not enough. Complete UGS can drive grass-roots diversity by promoting more relevant content that encourages development of the user’s own counter-discourses, identities and deliberations within a wider public sphere (Meadows 2005, Burum 2018).

A lack of training diminishes a potential for more diverse local media representation. Andrew Keen believes the Internet is full of online “gossip” produced by groups of “untrained amateur monkeys” (Burum 2018); however, Archer (2007) doesn’t see the “digital noise” as all bad. Her analytical dualistic approach posits that without people and their noise, there would be no structure. Hence, she argues, internal conversations in whatever form, noise or otherwise, generate important patterns of social mobility. In other words, the effects of associations (like those created online) will depend on how they are interpreted and how individuals relate them to their own subjectively defined concerns.

While technology can provide a vehicle for a global forum, diversity only comes from balanced and reflective representation (Rheingold 2012). Hence, what’s required is a media sphere that’s conceived as a politically active voice, based on ideologies and supported by digital communication skills. Once people are trained to use portable mobile technologies, they potentially become local change agents. The type of training required depends on the environment. Erik Sonstelie, Editor-in-Chief of Oppland Arbeiderblad (OA), an online newspaper in Gjovik in Norway, has continued mojo training we began many years ago. After training his staff to mojo, Erik began training local citizens to deliver their own cultural, sport and political content for OA’s online site. Unlike the Arab Spring, which trumpeted the potential of mojo (see p xx), Gjovik citizens are producing work across specific genres and for a specific site and pages.

Ilicco Elia, a mobile pioneer and now Head of Mobile at DeLoitte, believes the 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 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” (Elia 2013). While an interesting analogy, the question still remains, how do we increase mobile’s use value?

I understand Elia’s campfire concept because it drives the reason for this book. As a child I lived in a small village where telling stories around the kitchen table was how we learned stuff. I listened trustingly as my parents told me about events and characters. In the twenty-first century the nature of storytelling and the language and modes of story delivery have shifted from an oral culture, of telling stories around the table, to an era of global communication. Where the book, newspaper and text once dominated, today’s world of convergent media captures daily life and plays it back to a global audience in real time. Today’s smartphones are mobile creative suites with more processing power than NASA had at its disposal when it first put a man on the moon. With around 80% of Facebook revenue coming from mobile, the smartphone is key to new revenue streams. Its utilitarian form is one reason people are willing to pay for news again. The question is, what are we doing with all this potential? Access to powerful mobile technologies made us one of the “smart mobs” (Rheingold 2002). However, a decade later, after the proliferation of user-generated content (UGC), in particular in the mobile-aided Arab Spring (see p xx), Rheingold’s view shifted from a techno-determinist position, to one of social realism. To benefit from the revolutionary opportunities afforded by convergence and mobile, to gain “techno-agency,” we needed to get “net smart” (Rheingold 2012).

What sets our smartphones apart from any phone or computer that came before them is their ability to run third-party apps that transform them into hand-held computers. More than 6 million apps are available, generating an expected annual turnover of US$190 billion in 2020. It’s a brave new world that mobile pioneer Ilicco Elia says is changing the way we run our lives: “When we look for a restaurant on a computer we want to book, when we do it on a mobile, we want to eat” (Elia 2013). With millions of apps available, we are doing a lot more with our mobiles than booking food, especially in crisis times like wars, floods, revolutions or pandemics.

Initially, journalists used smartphones for calling, collecting email and texting; then smartphone cameras became part of the content creation workflow. Because many of the editors running digital were ex-print journalists, their view about what smartphones “could be in news” was restricted by their own experience. This very flat representation generally involved nothing more than a still, a raw interview or the odd shot of a riot used to color an online print story. In a sense we weren’t yet ready to use the technology to its fullest potential. In 2011, only months after the Arab Spring uprisings, the director of the Global Editors Netw...