Kurt Lancaster

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It’s nine o’clock on a Friday night in Mexicali, a city of a nearly a million people just across the border from Calexico, California. The eighty degree Fahrenheit evening cool feels good after a daytime high of 104, as the desert wind whips dust through the air like Santa Ana’s as I tightly follow video journalist Travis Fox through the streets. With him are journalist William Booth, the Post’s Mexican bureau and their translator, Arturo Chacón. They’re not too hard to follow, as Fox is driving a red SUV with Colorado plates, rented Stateside. They’re looking for mariachi musicians who sing praises to the drug cartels — the narcocorridos. And they haven’t eaten since lunch.

Less than two hours earlier, they checked into the Siesta Real Hotel on Calz. Justo Sierra Avenue, got directions, jumped into showers, then hit the ground running. They’ve been driving all afternoon from Nogales — a town with more border traffic than LAX — where they just finished interviewing President Obama’s “Boarder Czar,” Alan Bersin. They made a side-stop in Sasabe, Arizona to look at a “virtual fence”, a multi-billion dollar radar to sense border crossers. Fox and Booth don’t slow down and I’m hoping I don’t have to run a red light and get pulled over by Mexican police.

At one point Fox pulls over to a gas station to get directions. Then they pull over again and talk to a woman walking by. She gets in the car with them, a willing navigator along the back streets of Mexicali. We finally arrive along a strip of road along Plaza de Mariachis,  where dozens of mariachi performers stand and sit by their cars on both sides of the street. They’re waiting to be hired. Fox, with Arturo’s help, talks to one group. William Booth wanders off, finding his own leads. He later returns, and a one-hour conversation ensures. Although Arturo holds a tripod and Fox has his video camera bag strapped over his shoulder, the equipment stays put. They’re gathering information, not shooting until they have their right subject.

Fox explains, “We probably spend as much time talking to people and being directed to a certain area and finding things out as we did you know actually letting the camera roll, so I mean, that’s what reporting is. That’s what we do.”

The performers hand out business cards. Fox and Booth are looking for a bar where they can find performers to shoot. They’ve been on assignment since Saturday, June 13, 2009, starting a border road trip in Juarez and planning to end in Tijuana on Sunday, June 21. Along the way they’re talking to police, citizens, drug czars, and ranchers as they get the feel for the lay of the land in Mexico’s drug war. They’re writing blog entries and posting either video or photos at each of their stops, as they Twitter their way to an interactive audience. It’s the new way for online newspapers to gather a readership and build a community of loyal followers. “They send in suggestions,” Fox says, “and they’re good suggestions.”

“You get a mix of crazy people writing and bullshit, to be honest,” Fox tells me the next day. “But then you also get a lot of really good suggestions. You’ll find someone just write in and they tell about their personal experience.  Someone who lived in El Paso, saw our videos, [and it] brought back memories of how it was to live on the border […], and people share that, and it’s really refreshing to see that, and then someone takes the time to see that.  People also wrote in questions for us, and [shared] their thoughts. And then, for example, when we interviewed the new Border Czar a couple days ago, we relayed those questions and we asked him directly.  And then that will come back on the site. So it’s really a matter of involving the users, and we’re trying to do that with this piece more and more.”

But before anything goes online, the interactivity is face-to-face, reporters being reporters whether the end product is a print story or a video blog.

The interactive experiment may be new for journalists working in the online field, but Fox is learning how to distinguish between the information needed in a notebook, for the blog text, and the information needed on camera. “If you have hours [of video] full of information that you’re not going to use in the piece, but is good reporting, then it just slows you down in the edit.” He learned his lesson from the early days (1999) when he was learning to shoot video and had too much to meet a deadline. “Now I feel like I’m able to get the information I need in my notebook before I even start shooting,” Fox comments. It’s the on the ground reporting he did in Mexicali. He’ll use the notes to “narrate the pieces, and then I’ll record the interviews for the quotes that I need.” With “daily deadlines, if you shoot too much and if you have too much material, that can limit you. Another mistake that beginners make.”

The Emmy Award winning Fox is no longer a beginner. And in the streets of Mexicali, Fox and Booth have teamed up to discover how the drug culture has spread to the folk songs, the narcocorridos, as I get a behind the scenes view of professional reporters at work.

Their on the ground reporting pays off. They’re directed to a bar, and we hop in our cars once more. We pull up in front of La Conga, a bar not too far away from Plaza de Mariachis. But we have cameras and the bouncer prevents us from entering. Fox, through Arturo, asks the bouncer if he can film inside the bar. The bouncer calls the owner on his cell, and we’re let in. The owner, Daniel Angulo, is operating the bar, tonight. It’s after 10pm and the mariachi are playing their heart out, as the music overwhelms the dimly lit tiny bar filled with clientele listening to the music and partying on.

Fox and Booth talk to different customers as Fox tries to figure out who to shoot. He knows he wants the band, and at one point he brings his camera close the performers. There’s no stage. Fox crouches down low, entering their personal space as he shoots a low angle shot of the singer. He’ll hold the shot for some time, before turning the camera, hand-held, to another musician. He surreptitiously shoots customers at a table, then later shoots them dancing. During the musician’s break, he interviews them, translating through Arturo. He picks up an interview with another customer. Well after midnight, we step outside and Fox says he’s starving, and he, Booth, and Arturo wolf down tacos from a nearby vender as they stand on the sidewalk, debating whether or not to return to the Plaza de Mariachis and interview more singers. No money is passed to the vender, until they have eaten their full. They agree and shoot another band willing to sing to them and record interviews on tape. They get back to Siesta Real Hotel at 1:30am.

The evening would net them a 532 word blog entry and a two and a half minute video, “Narcocorridos and Nightlife in Mexicali“. It would begin, however, with a Twitter from Fox at 7:35am: “Today - finally! - we hit the bar! Join us for a drink and a “narco-corrido.” http://tr.im/mexbor #mexborder.” The video shot at the plaza would not be used. Fox wanted to keep the focus of the video story on the bar, while the blog text would contain story elements from both the bar and plaza mariachis.

Fox doesn’t consider himself a documentary filmmaker, however. He doesn’t like the word. “I like documentaries. I watch them. But when describing my own work, I never use the term.” He considers himself a journalist, and he joked earlier how much easier it would be to just write a story. Indeed, he considers shooting and editing video as a type of writing. “I look at what’s in The Washington Post, in the newspaper, and I look at what I do, and I feel like it’s the same information. And I feel like if I’m going to take an article, say an article that Bill [Booth] would do, here, and if I were to adapt that into video, then what I’m doing is what it would look like.  You know it has a strong character, and there are some differences, obviously.  Mine’s more character-driven, in video, but the information is the same, so I don’t feel like there’s a big distinction.”

Indeed, he says later in the interview that video is a form of writing: “I think especially for a younger generation, people who grow up with video, it’s not — producing a video, editing a video, making a video — is not any different from writing. It’s literally that easy. And when we have more people doing it, we’ll have a greater diversity.” Shooting and editing video is not as easy as writing, but Fox’s point should be heeded, for today’s generation raised on multimedia, a video is a form of text, treated as text, and utilized more than conventional forms of written texts.

As more and more journalists adjust to the age of multimedia reporting online, Fox’s words become wisdom when considering the process of creating stories for the web. In “Mexico at War: Journey Along the Border With Travis Fox and William Booth”, they engage the kind of cutting-edge journalism that’ll continue to shift and change in the coming years — but they’re taking current technology — the blog — and using it to create interactive pieces that contain text, pictures, and video, as well as the space for an audience to give feedback, adding their stories and opinions to the story presented by the reporters.

“The philosophy on this project and Hard Times [the road trip about the state of the economy done in Nov. 2008],” Fox contends, “is that it’s kind of wide, but not necessarily deep, and so it’s a matter of building an audience as well and interacting with the audience in real time.” The web is still in it’s infancy and experimentation is the name of the game. “So it’s just a different way of using the medium,” Fox muses.

“I’ve been at it for ten years, but the medium is still young, and we’re still experimenting, so, I think the differences that you see are just, “ Fox pauses, “is experimentation. Seeing what works, and seeing what doesn’t work, and seeing how to really capture the viewers and involve them in what we’re doing.”

Excerpted from a book, The Documentary Journalist, Kurt Lancaster is currently writing.

Check out Jigar Mehta’s documentary journalism piece, The Recession-Proof Artist at The New York Times. It reveals another example of how simplicity lends itself to a visually-powerful work when the a video journalist avoids the broadcast news style:

It’s not breaking-news, a political analysis, nor a unraveling of a crisis, but there are three reasons why I think this is a strong piece, reflecting three elements of strong documentary journalism:

1. Gives voice to the subject — to Alexander Conner — a student just out of university, working on a budget ($12,000/year) and creating art on the side. No narration provided by a reporter. No heavy-handed production telling the audience how to think or feel. Just the young man’s voice telling it as he sees it. In an interview with doc filmmaker Ellen Spiro (Body of War 2007), she told me that a lot of broadcast news sets up the classic confrontation of one side versus another side. But she feels there are as many sides to a story as there are people experiencing or witnessing the event — as Akira Kurosawa presented to us in his classic film, Rashomon (1950).
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2. Takes us into the personal life-space of the subject. Broadcast news tends to give us a snapshot of either a victim or an overly-cute feel-good subject, as seen on the outside looking in. Documentary filmmakers build trust and take us into a slice of life of their characters. We see Conner create art on his livingroom floor, make bread in his kitchen, and smoke as he talks about how he gets by on $12,000 per year. Because the documentary journalist respects Conner, we sense that he respects Mehta by opening up to Mehta’s lens, and for this, we the audience, get to share those personal moments by putting us in Conner’s livingroom. And this is one of the core differences between broadcast news and documentary filmmaking — the building of that trust in order to get the subject to open up.
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3. Visually compelling. Rather than shoot to script, shots found to illustrate a story, as typically found in broadcast journalism, Mehta shoots like a photographer — a cinematographer (and no, not a videographer, a term I use with derision — reflecting techies with video cameras shooting to script, and not the visual artist who shoots to show us a story through strong visual composition, lighting, and emotional depth in their shots). We can see the strength of Mehta’s cinematography just in the first five shots, covering the first 35 seconds of his mini-doc. The shots reveal strong composition and sense of lighting:

In the first shot, the background wall is lit, but Conner’s foreground is dark, with back light washing over his right arm as he draws. A cup foregrounds the composition. (Notice there is no wide “establishing shot”, another weak point found in a lot of broadcast news.)

The second shot reveals a strong diagonal, pointing the viewer to Conner’s drawing, highlighting his work process.

In the third, we see a wider shot, revealing his tight work space as he draws cramped on the floor, pieces of art scattered. Notice the strong diagonal of light and shadow on the back wall.

The fourth shot brings the camera around to another tight medium shot, as we see light focus on his blue pen and arms, his face washed in a soft fill light.

And in the fifth shot of the opening sequences, a standard head shot, but slightly askew, Mehta giving us a slight diagonal to lend energy to the shot.

Two of my favorite shots include these (shots 25 and 38):

Mehta is an artist, portraying an artist in his personal space, allows the artist to speak his mind, and does so in a visually compelling way.

Here’s a good documentary from The New York Times by Brent Renaud and Craig Renaud.

It does a good job of focusing on characters, while at the same time providing a narrated overview of the context for the characters.

Robert Niles‘ recent blog at OJR (Online Journalism Review), “You’ve got to know what you stand for to survive in journalism online“, closes his entry with these two questions; “What do you know? What do you stand for?” Without these two questions seriously considered, journalists will not survive the current shake-down climate. Niles feels that a good way journalists can survive is to engage these two questions by breaking the “restraints” of mainstream journalism: “If there is anything restraining ‘mainstream journalism’ from articulating and defending the core values that create, protect and elevate the communities we cover, it’s time for them to go now, no matter what purpose they might have served in the past.”

He argues that if journalists don’t have in-depth knowledge of the beat they’re covering, if they’re competing against bloggers with PhDs, then it’s time for journalists to step up and become experts in their beats–especially if editorial staff (the expert gatekeepers, fact-checkers) is lessened: “We now need writers who have more practical expertise and academic training in the beats that they will cover, so they can take more responsibility for the accuracy of their work, without editing assistance. It’s not enough for aspiring journalists to study how to craft a story - they must bring also a passion for and training in a beat to cover.”

Niles also makes the case the journalists should have values they believe in and hold on to: “[...] the news industry, accustomed to and conditioned by being a monopoly has striven to appeal to all audiences - those who value community and those who practice libertarianism, those who value science and those who promote fundamentalism, and those who value work and those who practice Wall Street wizardry. As a result, the news industry has grown reticent to express any values, lest it offend some segment of the market.”

I see these two arguments as key in understanding the power of the documentary journalist. If the broadcast news journalist represents a style that avoids offending anyone through its omniscient voice of apparent neutrality — often taking a tone that represents the mainstream dominant ideology — then the under-represented (especially those who are outside the perceived mainstream), tend not to get a fair voice in broadcast news stories, especially if journalists orbit their stories to those in power (the primary news definers, as Stuart Hall, et. al, argues in “The Social Production of News”).

Although there are exceptions by broadcast journalists, on the whole — due mainly, I think to the style and form utlized — they are not giving us stories that really matter, stories that provide both in-depth knowledge and meaing Niles argues for in the journalist of the 21st century. I’m seeing a different approach by documentary journalists, who, more often than not, are given voices to the under-represented and whose stories mean something, as can be seen in many of the examples below in this blog.

Stepping up with Writing, Blogging, and Video Journalism — the digital journalist must do it all.

Recently, Nicholas Kristof, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, got on camera, wrote an op/ed piece, and blogged about the process — a multi-faceted way of presenting a story in three different styles, each engaging different ways of telling a larger story.

In the op/ed piece, “A Boy Living in a Car” (March 28, 2009), Kristof writes about the world-wide impact of the economic crisis: “One of the newest street children here in this northern Haitian city is a 10-year-old boy whose father was working in Florida but lost his job and can no longer send money home. As a result, the family here was evicted, the mother and children went separate ways to improve their odds of finding shelter, and the boy found refuge in an abandoned wreck of a car.” The second half of the column describes two young women helping Haitians utilize compost toilets in order to create fertilizer for crops. He concludes: “But I love the idea that even when the needs of the United States are so immense, a couple of young Americans aren’t complaining or finger-pointing, but are hard at work to assist others whose distress is incomparably greater than our own”  (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/opinion/29kristof.html?ref=opinion). The video focuses on the story of the two Americans.

The video, “American Ingenuity in Haiti” (produced by Erik Olsen), is presented in a style I’m calling the “Op Doc”. In Kristof’s case, it reveals a fresh approach to how video journalists can create engaging stories on video, while maintaining their original mission–in this case, Kristof “writing” a video op/ed column by having a video camera turned on him. By placing himself into the short documentary, Kristof thankfully eschews the tired style and omniscient voice of the broadcast journalist who typically stands with microphone in hand, almost pleading with an audience to emotionally engage their sensationalized, “must-see” story. “Look at me and what I have to say!”, seems to me the pervading style of the news broadcast journalist (I’m not talking about Bill Moyers or the broadcast docs produced by Frontline, for example, but the style presented at CNN, FOX, and local evening news stations).

Kristof holds his reporter’s notebook in hand and at times talks to his subjects, and in one scene sits on the steps, facing a tilted camera, as he talks to the viewer with respect, relaxed in his delivery–no overbearing broadcast personality bombarding the viewer. Kristof talks to his audience as if you’re sitting with him at a coffee shop. This is the kind of work I would like to see more “print” reporters create. This is a style that may become the future of short news, as the nightly news broadcasts slowly fade into obsolescence, just as the traditional newspaper has begun to fade away.

As Kristof notes in his blog, “On the Ground”, the video isn’t about the results of the economic crisis in Haiti, as he writes about in his column, but rather,”a happier side of the picture, and so I focus for the latter part of the column on a couple of American aid workers, Sasha Kramer and Sarah Brownell, who have formed a group called SOIL that tries to turn human waste into fertilizer” (http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/).

Click on video to play the piece on The New York Times site
(http://video.nytimes.com/video/2009/03/28/opinion/1194838983811/american-ingenuity-in-haiti.html).

What I like about the blog is how Kristof reveals a behind-the-scenes process of a 21st century journalist, as he tells us how he found the story that would become the video piece: “Incidentally, I came across SOIL because I originally noted on my blog that I was headed for Haiti and asked readers for story ideas or interesting groups to visit. Some readers suggested places I had heard of, such as Dr. Paul Farmer’s hospital, but several offered good leads that I wouldn’t have thought of — including SOIL. I tried to do my due diligence about SOIL on twitter and through friends, and everybody said it was the real thing … and that’s how the column came about. I wondered about whether to focus on a couple of Americans, when there are so many Haitians doing heroic work, but I figured that it would be more engaging to an American audience to look at Americans” (http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/).

I love the fact that there are journalists adapting to new ways of doing journalism, that just because a journalist uses a video camera or appears on-camera, they must hold the the “rules” of the television news broadcasters — rather, they’re approaching their work creatively as they engage in multiple media for their work. They are using writing and video to examine and present stories that means something and maintaining the respect of their subjects and audiences at the same time.

Just over three years ago, Larry Pryor in “Teaching the future of journalism”, claimed that video online is not TV news:
1. Online video is not TV news.
Online video requires different tools than broadcast news and has a different purpose for the audience. Authentic images have become dominant in the online world, superseding both text and traditional TV news presentation. A new medium or “voice” is emerging, Howard Finberg said, one that we should recognize in our classrooms.

• Broadcast TV news works well on websites and blogs as short segments, cut to illustrate a point or highlight a conflict or outrageous behavior, or to cover a fast-breaking event. On a routine basis, full streaming of news casts, the video equivalent of print shovelware, may be a tough sell.
• The user chooses online video elements to verify or amplify an event described or showcased by text, often “real” or “raw” images taken by eyewitnesses with video recorders or cell phones. Sources for “reality video” can be Web cams, surveillance cameras, police video, official websites (NASA’s or the Pentagon’s) or global niche sites, such as Islamic online news outlets. Images can range from photos posted on a blog by a U.S. Marine in Iraq to a video taken by insurgents who are shooting at Marines. Propaganda and ideological visuals have value when identified and used in a neutral context (e.g. the many videos available on the horrific power of roadside bombs).
• The work of online photojournalists has a “raw,” over-the-shoulder viewpoint that may seem chaotic but can help to place the viewer into the scene. As Al Tompkins put it, this natural technique allows the user “to experience information and they will remember what they feel longer than what they know.”
• This approach stresses accuracy and authenticity over traditional production values. It creates a sense of presence and participation in the scene.
• The online editor or photojournalist can create multimedia collages, presentations that put control over non-linear narratives and visual perspectives in the hands of the user.

The Message: Because online video is different, a convergence curriculum that stresses conventional broadcast production, the use of high-end equipment, news teams and text-heavy websites may not be doing students any favors. Not that print and broadcast writing and reporting should be scrap-heaped. More emphasis on “the basics” is badly needed, employers tell us. But all students should be at least exposed to new methods of video and audio storytelling. They may never know when they will need this experience.

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060212pryor/

But rather than engage low-end video–which has certain uses for breaking news–good video journalists utilize some of the styles of documentary filmmakers, making their video better, not worse, than broadcast TV news.

To be authentic, doesn’t mean you’re not telling a story–good video journalists need to drop the inauthentic, omniscient-voice narration and start allowing their subjects to tell their story in their own words. This is an over-simplification of the problem, since a subject can be edited in such a way as to change their point of view,  but the patronizing tone and writing style of much short-form broadcast writing not only strips away the dignity of the subject, but also of the audience.

So in this sense, raw is better than broadcast news, but online video journalists can learn something from documentary filmmakers who do better work than most TV news creators. Good stories and good-looking video still can be done and should be done in online venues, as can be seen in the examples given in other posts on this site.

Both of these stories deal with a powerful and heart-rending story: Taliban belief system attempting to force girls from getting an education. Over two hundred schools for girls have been destroyed in Pakistan.

In the first video, from CNN, “Girl poet takes on the Taliban with her pen”, we see the story of a girl, Tuba Sahaab, who fights the right for her education as the Taliban try to prevent her and other girls from attending school.

Click on the image to go to CNN video.

Again, as in examples given in previous posts, we see narration guiding the viewer along into the story. The piece from The New York Times, below, also has narration, but the differences are clear: the first one pushes us into the story in a rapid style telling us what to think, taking the story at face-value, while the documentary–while guiding us with narration–feels more like an invitation into the story, taking us deeper into the emotions that circulate among the characters.

Of course the longer length of the film in the New York Times video helps when creating more depth. But these are the kinds of choices that online newspapers can offer–outside the corporate broadcast news model–allowing for the publication of a nearly 15 minute documentary that gets at the heart of what makes good documentary journalism: a character centered story of a man and his daughter standing up for their rights against the narrow spectrum of Taliban’s Islamic rule. This documentary is by Adam Ellick and Irfan Ashraf. It contains a great story structure that balances cinema verite style with a newsy narration approach that provides context for the political struggle occurring in Pakistan’s fertile Swat Valley.

Click on the image to go to The New York Times video.

In the first minute, we get images of Swat valley, followed by the sounds of gun shots and the images of burning. We hear the father talk about how “there are some people who want to stop educating girls through guns”, followed by his daughter talking about wanting to become a doctor. The shot stays on the two for a few moments, then cuts to a close-up as the daughter covers her face, the emotional truth of the Taliban’s will overwhelming her. The moment doesn’t feel rushed and we don’t feel the reporter is pulling us out into the personality and produced-style of broadcast journalism seen in the vide from CNN.

Dai Sugano’s work at San Jose Mercury News is emblematic of the the kinds of video journalism coming out of newspapers engaging the techniques of documentary filmmakers. Is it important that broadcast journalists keep with their techniques or can they enrich their stories by following the path of documentary journalists?

If this piece had been produced in a typical broadcast news style, what would the piece look like?

Follow the saga of Sunnyvale mobile home dwellers as they fight for their homes, then relocate after developers take over their property. Click on image to view story.

The contrasts between documentary style journalism and broadcast journalism could not be made clearer than comparing two videos from a CBS News story in 2006 and a San Jose Mercury News piece in 2008. In one, the visual is designed to illustrate the story, while the other uses images to show the story.

The first, “Progress And Poverty In Today’s India” by CBS News’ chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan, presents a typical heavily narrated piece. In one section, we hear about a woman selling old plastic bags for a dollar per day: “Designer Anita Ahuja knows what it means to her — finding ways to reach India’s poorest. Her answer is recycling plastic bags. Anita turns scraps of plastic into glitzy designer handbags, shoes belts and even photo albums. But the real purpose is to make it possible for destitute woman like Basanti to earn money for the first time in their lives. Basanti makes an average of $1 a day selling the used plastic bags that Anita turns into art — but even that’s enough to put decent food in her home.” (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/03/03/eveningnews/main1369212.shtml).

Basanti collects recycled plastic bags to sell. She makes about one dollar per day. Click to play video.

Everything here tells a story and this type of storytelling is designed to not only present some emotional moments, but it does so in a concise way (3:30). Visual images accompany a script. Indeed, the narration tells nearly the entire story. The images are almost not needed — you could listen to the audio and almost get the entire story — the images of the bags and Basanti digging through the trash add visual elements that  grounds the piece in visual reality, but the images are not the primary means for telling the story, as I feel film and video is designed to do. CBS News uses video to illustrate their story.

Contrast the Logan’s piece with one shot by Dai Sugano of San Jose Mercury News, who used video to show the story in an emotional way:

Here, we hear no narration, but we see text slides and text on images. The main focus of Sugano’s piece is the images that capture the emotional feel of the poverty of those left behind India’s economic rise. The images tell the story, while the text acts as bullet points, providing some factoid context to the visual story.

This is a penultimate example of documentary journalism. It must be noted, however, that Sugano is a photojournalist–he is a trained photographer. The video of the CBS piece lacks the trained eye of a photographer, but it also feels like a collection of random visual samples that doesn’t cohere visually — if you turn off the sound, can you see the visual story unfold shot by shot? In contrast, Sugano’s piece feels like the images are threaded together through montage, a form of dialectical editing that makes its point through a contrast of images, threaded together thematically.

Can you imagine Sugano’s piece broadcast on CBS News? Why not? Why does broadcast journalism have to follow this heavily narrated pattern that doesn’t give much voice to its subject, presents the story superficially, and feels a little imperialistic and paternal — we’ll t

ell you how to think and feel, packaged in a tight script? Certainly Sugano’s piece manipulates his audience, as all images do, but it feels like he’s giving his subject their voice, a space to show them in their environment, rather than we being told in a paternalistic manner:

“Ram Nihori, a 45-year-old rickshaw driver, is in danger of being left behind. He and other drivers in Calcutta who carry this city’s more fortunate around are fighting a move to ban them from the streets. Modern India, they’re being told, is not a place where one man pulls another man. The problem, Ram says, is that he has no other means to support his family of five. Banning his rickshaw would leave them destitute.” Now we’re being told. Indeed, if you look at this quote above in the video, we’ll see Nihori say how his life is changing–but this written text says it all without even quoting Nihori. The point is made. His voice is taken out altogether. In this style of broadcast journalism, the video isn’t needed to tell the story.

Wouldn’t it be more fascinating to show the audience a three minute piece on Nihori and how his life as a rickshaw driver is being challenged by India’s economic growth? We are told he has a family of five. Documentary style journalism would show us how Ram Nihori not only provides for his family (and how that may be lost), but it would also show us how he interacts with his family. The documentary journalist would show the audience the family. There still may be narration — it just would be used in a different way. It would serve the story as told through images, rather than the other way around.

For those interested, I’ve provided a link to a thirty minute interview with Dai Sugano at MultimediaShooter.com.

We all know broadcast style journalism—we see it on broadcast tv news channels from CNN to NBC. The format typically involves two to three minute stories that rely on heavy narration. It’s designed to capsulize a story in a punchy, attention-getting way, emotionally driving an issue without providing the time to go into depth. As a case study, let’s take a look at NBC’s “Among Sudan crimes, stealing childhood” produced by Ann Curry (Nov. 16, 2006):

The link to the transcript can be found here: Among Sudan crimes, stealing childhood

As Michael Chanan notes in The Politics of Documentary (BFI, 2007: 6-7): “In the mainstream model, subjects and subject matter are mediated by the impersonal director, who hides behind the voice of the commentary and serves as both intermediary and gatekeeper.” This is the model of broadcast news and it tends to avoid in-depth coverage and lacks a personal point of view of the journalist—the form is “closed” in its creative approach. The piece opens with a hand-held walking wide shot following several boys walking through a camp in Darfur. The shot is held for six seconds before cross-fading to a low angle medium shot following walking feet for two seconds, followed by a reverse shot (wide, high angle) of the same boy walking towards the camera for a few seconds, then cross-fading to the same boy standing in a doorway in a medium shot, cross-fading into a close-up of the same boy standing in the doorway, his eyes down-turned his face in a sad expression. This is followed by a wide shot of two boys walking, holding boxes of what appear to be refugee supplies, which is quickly followed by the side angle close-up similar to the shot before. During all of this, we hear Curry’s voice narrating a story:

“From a distance, Khamis and his friends look like any schoolboys, but when you look closer you find a stolen childhood. His mother is dead, his father is lost. At 13, he is an orphan, and home is a refugee camp” (Curry 2007).

Ostensibly, there is nothing predominantly wrong with this approach. It’s compact. It tells a story. It draws the viewer in. However, it comes across as sensational, a story designed to arouse emotions, to make the audience feel bad, but giving no means for really addressing the underlying issues causing the problem. It’s a form of imperial victimization.

In contrast, washingtonpost.com’s video journalist Travis Fox’s series of videos covering the same crisis in Darfur eschews the techniques of broadcast journalism practiced by Curry for NBC. Rather, he engages a new genre of journalism: documentary journalism. Within the documentary field, Chanan contends that the institutional point of view has shifted to an “individual or personal point of view” that tends to be more “persuasive” within the “public sphere” (2007: 6). The stories tend to be longer, more in-depth, and presents a more personal or creative “voice” from the documentary filmmaker. It is more “open” and therefore lends itself well to interactive websites as well as an artistic and personal point of view, as we see in Fox’s Darfur piece which stands in stark contrast to Curry’s work on a similar topic:

Fox gives the first 40 seconds of his 6:04 piece entitled “Testimonials” to introductory material revealing pictures of a refugee camp–a wind swept desert, children singing, playing ball, an expanse of refugee tents in Chad–all of which revolve around a variety of shot sizes, angles, and dissolves in an artistic way. No narration. We don’t see such techniques often in most broadcast news journalism.

One of the most powerful moments includes a crossfade of a wide shot of children singing to a low angle long lens shot of the the desert ground with debris blowing in the wind, buildings out of focus in the background, and a blur of what appear as footsteps walking by close to the lens–the music slowly fades as harsh wind noises increase in volume. This piece contains a strong, artistic point of view that challenges the type of neutral broadcast journalism some of us may be use to. Even though every film is a form of manipulation as expressed through Eisenstein’s theory of montage, we feel less manipulated.

Furthermore, The Washington Post designed a Flash website containing Fox’s video, providing a larger context for the story, additional videos, and panoramic photos (site designed by Brian Cordyack):

The Post’s multimedia contains the original videos in a Flash designed site: Crisis in Darfur Expands (site designed by Brian Cordyack). (A link to a print article by Fox gives a date of March 8, 2007).

Chanan, Michael. (2007). The Politics of Documentary. London: BFI.

Curry, Ann. (2006). Among Sudan crimes, stealing childhood. NBC News. 16. Nov. Accessed 19 Dec. 2008. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15733832/.