MIT Stata Center R&D Commons, 32G-401, 4th Floor (32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA)
MIT Building E15-318 CMS Meeting Area, 3rd floor (20 Ames Street, Cambridge MA)
MIT Stata Center, R&D Pub, 4th Floor (32 Vassar Street, Cambridge, MA)
Documentaries, Journalism, and the Future of Reality-Based Storytelling
Documentary and journalism have a complicated relationship. They share commitments to reality-based storytelling: speaking truth to power, unearthing corruption, informing and connecting the public. Yet they have distinctive legacies and institutional histories. They share technologies, vocabularies, and authority. Yet they have different notions of time, from the ‘now’ of breaking news to the ‘timeless’ status of classic documentaries.
But something fundamental has changed. The once platform-specific operations of print and broadcast journalism and film and broadcast documentary now share a common place on the Internet: what implications, possibilities, and concerns attend these once medium-specific endeavors? As evidenced by the hiring and use of documentarians in the digital operations of such newspapers as the Guardian, the New York Times, and LA Times, journalists are beginning to make productive use of the affordances of documentary storytelling for long format and visual storytelling on the Internet. Interactive and participatory documentaries seem even more suited for online journalism since they take advantage of the Internet’s linking structure, its potentials to organize information in non-linear ways, and its abilities to engage ‘interactive’ audiences accustomed to navigating their way through data. Emerging technologies such as mobiles, tablets, wearables, virtual reality, and 3D are now storytelling platforms for both documentarians and journalists.
When platforms merge, do documentaries and journalism become less distinct or more? Can we translate interactive documentary techniques – which make use of game based mechanics, immersive storytelling, participation and other techniques – to explore worlds, to reinvigorate journalism and make documentary storytelling more relevant and accessible to larger audiences? Can these new affordances help us to enhance civic participation and develop a more informed and empowered public? In this session, we will explore what the convergence of interactive documentaries and journalism can do to ensure an informed and engaged citizenry.
Raney Aronson, FRONTLINE deputy executive producer
Katerina Cizek, National Film Board of Canada documentary director
Jason Spingarn-Koff, New York Times Op-Docs editor
Francesca Panetta, Guardian multimedia special projects editor
Moderator: William Uricchio, MIT
Documentary Forms and Processes
Once the common currency of journalism and documentary, things like authorship, craft, and professionalism have acquired different critical weights, at least in documentary. More widespread presence of user-generated content is one reason; and new forms that require the user to make choices, to follow their interests, to explore on their own terms are another. Digital journalism has not stood by idly. As journalists and documentarians choose different platforms to tell their stories, both are experimenting with new forms and processes that better fit these platforms and improve user experience. Interaction design, iteration, user experience, and participation are now common ingredients of online visual storytelling. Dynamic data visualizations and various media (photos, video and audio clips, and documents) increasingly accompany traditional journalistic forms; and newer platforms such as Storyful and Vox offer robust ways of presenting multi-media and multi-voiced content. But the documentary has a tradition of experimenting with aesthetics and storytelling techniques to engage audiences. It arguably has been more daring in its exploration of these possibilities, experimenting with radically different interface metaphors ranging from maps to scrapbooks, to databases, to games, to document-laden comic books.
What can we learn from these experiences that might be of use to journalists? How can we productively reimagine the relationship between story and form in ways that enrich journalism and speak to new constituencies? What kind of partnerships and collaborations across media institutions are enabling better coverage, more engaging experiences, and greater audience share? How do we rethink the production pipeline, taking on new collaborations with reporters, developers, and interface designers? What processes can be adapted from documentary for journalistic practice, when and where do they fit in, and how do they scale in these different institutional worlds? From drawing on new domains of expertise, to altering the curriculum of our J-schools, to more intensive use of hackathons, what are the most effective strategies for making critical use of these possibilities? In this fast changing news ecosystem, how might legacy institutions, start ups, and independent documentarians work together and distinguish themselves?
Gabriel Dance, The Marshall Project managing editor
Adnaan Wasey, POV Digital executive producer
Margaux Missika, Upian executive producer
Francesca Panetta, Guardian multimedia special projects editor
Kamal Sinclair, Sundance Institute New Frontier co-director
Moderator: Mandy Rose, Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England professor
Technologies in a Changing Media Landscape
The interactive documentary and start-up journalism scene stand out for their embrace of new technologies and for their creative repurposing of the old. They have enabled new forms, new processes and new opportunities for exchange with the public. Unfortunately, in a fast-changing technological environment, many of the most innovative projects have been produced with custom-built software and significant investment, limiting widespread deployment of new tools and techniques, and hindering learning through iteration. Moreover, many news organizations are forced to choose among using limited resources to keep existing staff, engage in investigative reporting, or invest in new technologies. At a moment of exponential change in our media capacities, when Moore’s Law promises yet another doubling of processing capacity, is a tipping point in sight that might permit standardization and the efficiencies of fixed tool sets rather than constantly reinvented technology solutions?
When does technology get in the way of the journalistic mission? And how might it help us reimagine that mission? What new affordances can we take from the world of documentary? What kind of tools will assist journalists, both as hunters and gatherers of the news and as tellers of stories? What barriers to adaptation can we anticipate, beyond the very real dilemma of where to expend dwindling financial resources? What are the challenges of integrating new tools into the newsroom, and what roles are appropriate for 3rd party services? How can we create tools that scale to the needs of large publics?
Larry Birnbaum, Northwestern University professor
Matt Carroll, MIT Center for Civic Media research scientist
Nathan Matias, MIT Center for Civic Media PhD student
Jake Shapiro, PRX ceo
Angela Morgenstern, Al Jazeera America, VP, product & innovation
Moderator: Bjarke Myrthu, BLINDSPOT founder
Journalistic Standards in Transition
Both documentary and journalism claim to be reality-based, but new documentary has a greater repertoire of techniques to enrich the rendering of reality-based truth. In the American context, documentary makers have the latitude to be more engaged, partisan and even action-oriented than their journalistic counterparts, who are generally expected to be more balanced, fact-based, even objective. These differences are historical creations which have changed over time, and perhaps we are witnessing a turning point in representational norms similar in magnitude to the one that took place in the first quarter of the 20th Century. If so, we might ask what can be learned from interactive documentaries, freed from the constraints of linearity and single-voiced authorship, and permitting users to follow their interests, and explore multiple and radically contradictory points of view? What lessons can be gleaned from documentary’s deployment of user-generated-content? Ironically, despite greater levels of participation and choice, we have not escaped from the echo chamber, and like-minded users (along with troll-infested discussions) seem to limit the plurality of ideas.
At stake are long-cherished journalistic aspirations for accuracy, transparency, impartiality and integrity. What challenges do the field’s ethical and professional values face in a world of changing platforms and publics, and can documentarians, who have hewn to a different set of standards, help us think through the implications? Is there room for transparency and common ground in a world increasingly shaped by news aggregators and feeds designed to filter and (re-)position the work of journalists? What’s the future of impartiality and common knowledge … and are they worth saving?
Ariane Wu, Center for Investigative Reporting Multimedia Producer
Andrew DeVigal, University of Oregon’s SOJC Chair
Jeff Howe, Northeastern University Professor
Jason Spingarn-Koff, New York Times Op-Docs Editor
Moderator, Raney Aronson-Rath, Frontline Deputy Executive Producer
Rethinking Participation: What Can We Learn From Documentaries?
Participation is a fraught term, as celebrated as it is feared. Its modalities in the world of documentary include crowd-sourced funding, co-designed projects, partnerships with local communities, user-generated content and feedback, sharing and cross-linking, and even the act of navigation through an interactive experience. Journalistic endeavors, bound to a different institutional rule set, share some of these participatory behaviors, though in more tempered measure.
What’s the balance between participation, authorship and control? And what are the ethical, legal, as well as professional factors that constrain participation? How can we broaden our definition of participation and look to alternative, viable ways of enabling new voices to be heard and facilitating deeper engagement with the news, more nuanced understanding, and greater relevance and sustainability? What are the implications for journalists and documentarians alike of optimizing algorithms (in customized news aggregators) that anticipate user needs and preempt user action, both responding to and shaping an ‘acquiescent’ form of participation? Where do notions of civic engagement, social change and action – all compatible with the world of documentary – fit into the journalistic mission? Can we draw upon community-based documentaries and process such as those developed for the NFB’s Challenge for Change to better understand (and foster) civic engagement as a source for crowd-sourced journalism, rather than relying exclusively on ‘the professionals’? And how can we keep stories alive and meaningful for a community (Homicide Watch, Hollow), rather than simply superseding them with the next news cycle? Where do technologies such as sensors fit in as enablers of participation and news gathering? We will explore these difficult – and familiar – questions with the help of detailed case studies.
Katerina Cizek, National Film Board of Canada documentary director
Mandy Jenkins, Storyful Open News editor
Henry Jenkins, USC professor
Michael Premo, Sandy Storyline creator
Lexi Mainland, New York Times digital projects editor
Moderator: Ethan Zuckerman, The MIT Center for Civic Media director
Audience Engagement & Impact
Audience first! Almost every media strategy cedes pride of place to the audience. Whether as a cohort to attract, inform, persuade, count, leverage or monetize, the audience finds itself conceptualized, constructed, and measured in very different ways. The shift from ‘pull’ to ‘push’ media together with a media-savvy and enabled public have challenged mainstream notions of the audience in ways not yet accounted for in our language, resulting in Jay Rosen’s notion of the ‘people once known as audiences’. Those who look at and produce for audiences have shifted their attention from ‘exposure’ to ‘engagement’ and most recently to ‘impact’. And with this shift has come an awareness, particularly in the documentary world, that process can generate engagement and impact every bit as much as the final product, that engagement can take place throughout the production pipeline, not just at the end.
Might we meaningfully differentiate among ‘maker-audiences’ and ‘spectating-audiences’ in terms of engagement and impact? What can we learn from such domains as citizen science, sentient mapping, and crowd-funding – all of which have been drawn on by documentaries – in terms of reaching and having impact upon audiences? How can we connect with those demographic sectors that have abandoned – or never connected with – reality-based storytelling? Can different platforms, different stories and experiences, help us reach a greater range of the public? And if so, can we leverage points of contact to bring these audiences across platforms, to new and differently structured stories? Is impact, the topic of a flurry of recent research activity, too narrowly conceived as something like the unspoken twin of marketing metrics? Might we expand the term to include the conversations sparked by multiple and divergent experiences of an interactive documentary; or the sharing of links as people bring others to the experience; or the confrontation and clarification of opinion as audiences learn more about an issue? Journalism certainly does all of these things, but usually in different ways: what can the two genres contribute to one another?
Sue Schardt, AIR, Inc. & Localore executive producer
Rob McLaughlin, Post Media, Inc. vp of editorial
Amanda Zamora, ProPublica senior engagement editor
Steve Herrmann, BBC News On-Line editor
Philip Napoli, Rutgers University professor
Moderator: Sean Flynn, MIT Open Documentary Lab research assistant