What price Citizen Journalism?

A post on Twitter yesterday yanked me back to citizen journalism, the topic of this year's Borderlines Debate, Here Comes Everyone:).

What happened was that three images tweeted by a team member of Just Do It, (documentary in the making about the climate camps) were appropriated by the Daily Mail without any form of payment or accreditation. The photos showed queues of voters being turned away from their polling station in Dalston on election night.

Mindful of Christian (Documentally) Payne's advice at Here Comes Everyone:



Emily James, one of the climate camp speakers at the event, invoiced the Mail's Picture Editor only to receive a predictably evasive rebuttal. Read the full background and correspondence here.

It comes down to value. On the ground, Just Do It had caught something of the moment that traditional reporting mechanisms had failed to capture on the Mail's behalf. Nevertheless, using the well-worn amateur/professional yardstick, the paper is seeking to DE-value the pictures by claiming that they are in the public domain.

Citizen journalism coexists. Indeed the public is encouraged to feed old school print and broadcast media with photos and mobile phone footage of breaking events. But the value balance remains precarious; CJ also represents a challenge and threat to the way things have always been done.

When citizen journalism picks up on events that would normally be suppressed - and the film Burma VJ is moving and overwhelming testimony to that - it is priceless, subversive. No-one would dispute that.

On the other hand, with the means to record anything cheaply and well at our fingertips there's also a lot of blather out there. A question from floor during the Here Comes Everyone debate made the point that Christian Payne is special (in terms of talent, facility, initiative), a specialist, if you like, but many who tote cameras and other technology are not. How can we find our way through a sea of voices and distractions?

Back in the '80s I worked on a documentary for Channel 4 about the Super 8 film format. It explored the way home movie cameras were being used for purposes other than those they had been designed for.

One of the people we interviewed was Gwynne Roberts a freelance war reporter who took Super 8 cameras with him on missions to Kurdistan precisely because of what he called "their Mickey Mouse quality". He, a professional journalist for ITN, The Sunday Times and others, went undercover as an amateur to appear harmless, to slip through defences. Later he became one of the few people to interview Osama Bin Laden (Dispatches: The Saudi Tapes).

We also featured a Bolivian organisation that had gone into the country's remote Altiplano region to enable peasants who had never seen or even conceived of film in their lives to make a movie about how a land dispute by their community had been suppressed by the military. Their method was to train them, to show what had been done before and give people the means and the expertise to tell their own story. And this is the key.

The immediacy of being in a certain place at a particular moment is what we buy into with citizen journalism. That sense of authenticity can, however,  be replicated as a style. This is something we need to be aware of, both as media-makers and media-consumers.

The other film that made up part of Here Comes Everyone was The Yes Men Fix the World was all to do with hoaxes, the fact that two self-styled jokers in cheap suits managed to swipe 2 billion dollars off the market price of a multinational company by going on to News 24 and lying (semi-convincingly).

And elsewhere at Borderlines Chris Atkins's Starsuckers revealed the gullibility not just of the public but of a venal media industry, greedy for sensationalism.

So the moral seems to be:
Check the facts.
Keep your wits about you.
Get media-literate
Just do it!

Citizen Journalism and the General Election

With the announcement today of the date for the General Election (May 6th in case you impossibly missed it) there's an excellent and informative post on Blogging the 2010 election by Talk About Local who ran the citizen journalism workshop at the Festival. It gives details of online resources that give this election, above all others, that extra interactive twist, enabling you to interrogate your local politicians directly on pressing issues, dig into their background, share their thoughts, offer yours,  not to mention exploring the betting odds. Whether more digital equates with with more democratic remains to be seen.

In addition, official Election Artist, photographer Simon Roberts, commissioned to document campaign activity in the run-up to the General Election, has made The Election Project a collaborative enterprise by inviting members of the public to contribute photographs of political activity in their area. With some affinity to the Mass Observation project of the late 1930s that, using volunteers, set out to document by various means the day-to-day life of ordinary people in Britain, it claims to be the first UK citizen journalism political photography project ever.

View the online gallery here

Upload your photographs here

Documentally and Ryan Bingham: what they have in common

Have noted before the beauty of festivals, that they generate random coincidences. I was reflecting on Christian Payne's envigorating keynote speech at Here Comes Everyone: Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age in Week 1 of Borderlines.

"What does that remind me of?" I thought. Then it clicked.
 
Travelling light.

Streamlining.

Having everything you could possibly require a fingertip or two away.

It's all in the backpack.

It's Up in the Air!

Take my word for it or compare and contrast the trailer in which George Clooney as downsizing consultant, Ryan Bingham, delivers his presentation about the benefits of not weighing yourself down with material possessions or constricting relationships:


with this from Christian Payne, aka Documentally, at the event on Wednesday 3 March:



Both are driven, experts in their field, both are charismatic. Pie charts, networks, communications, it's all there.

Although I must add that Christian told us that family relationships figure high on his agenda; his son, Minimentally, had a web presence within seconds of being born or was it even in the womb? There's Granumentally too. He keeps in touch.

Here Comes Everyone

Fascinating afternoon yesterday, with the debates around citizen journalism and the various speakers. If you haven't caught Christian Payne yet, I urge you to seek out his websites 'Documentally' and/or 'Our Man Inside'. Better still...catch him in person. I thought I was tech-aware, but that half hour made me feel like a dinosaur! Not too late to catch up with exciting developments in networking. Do it now!

Oscar nominations Up.... and Up!

News came through yesterday afternoon that Up in the Air,  An Education and Up! are all (I was going to say 'up' AGAIN) for Best Picture among a record 10 contenders.

Word is the real battle will be between James Cameron's Avatar and Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker. Bigelow and Cameron (her ex-husband) are also nominated for Best Director and if she wins, it would, astoundingly, be a first for a woman director.

Up in the Air is nominated for numerous other Oscars, including Best Actor for Clooney while both female leads, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, are runners in the best Supporting Actress category.

Burma VJ and The Cove are deservedly among the Best Documentary nominations. I caught Burma VJ on More4 last week, it's  riveting. Amazing scene from a street demonstration led by monks when the young reporter turns his small camera up to the surrounding buildings and there are people cheering from every single window. It's currently available to view on 4oD but if, like me, you suffer from rural (broad) bandwith poverty, much better to see it on the big screen at The Courtyard Hereford, either on or as part of the special day event Here Comes Everyone:) Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age. Makes a pretty compelling case for cit journalism.

And reactions from 2 British contenders in the Adapted Screenplay shortlist (from ScreenDaily.com):

Armando Iannucci, who co-wrote In The Loop with Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell and Tony Roche: “I was having lunch with Steve Coogan when I heard. I still haven’t had my lunch today. It’s an entirely UK-funded film made for a British audience, so when we had the premiere in Sundance [2009] I was hoping they were going to laugh and it was tense when the lights went down. But gradually they did laugh. It doesn’t surprise me that American audiences have responded to it because we love US comedy like Jon Stewart and Seinfeld, which has very fast-paced dialogue. It was America that gave us fast-talking comedy.”

Nick Hornby, writer, An Education: “I read [Lynn Barber’s memoir in Granta] and loved it and because my wife [producer Amanda Posey] is a producer I showed it to her and didn’t think I would write it. When she started talking about possible writers I found myself becoming quite possessive of it. When Lone [Scherfig] got the directing gig she was incredibly sympathetic to the script. The period in which it is set was a bit before my time, but I carry it with me because it was my parents’ time and so much of that time shaped our culture.”

Full nominations list courtesy of Guardian Film