Monthly Archives: February 2009

The ethics of direction in video

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Videographers flocked to catch a glimpse of a running story
Videographers flocked to catch a glimpse of a running story – picture from http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentish/67087395/

Tracy Boyer has an interesting post about the ethics of staging and directing contributors when shooting video. She sets out her stall in the intro

Allowing videographers to stage scenes, situations and/or actions is NOT journalism. We are here to document what we see, not recreate what we missed. If you missed the poignant kiss, that is your fault. How is it that journalism ethics can vary so greatly from print to broadcast?

I agree. It isn’t journalism. But I would go one step further. It has nothing to do with journalism. It has everything to do with the form, but nothing to do with journalism.

Or it could be about  that tired old argument trying to define the difference in the way ‘ethical’ videographers work compared to the “TV personality and videographer” who “bombard the scene and tell the subject what they want them to say”.  But we got past that TV is bad thing a while back didn’t we?

The journalism is in telling the story not the skill of being around long enough for the story to drift past your lens.

The ‘no retakes’ ethical position must also, logically,  require that you would never edit, that you never use lights and you never ask any questions. You may as well set up a hide and stalk your contributors like a wildlife documentary maker.

Every time a shot is framed or a cut made their is an editorial hand at play. In any time based media you cannot claim the purity of the scene when you play with the relationship of the scenes with each other over time.  When you cut out camera movements or slip wildtrack over an edit, in my view,  you have broken the same ethical code. Shoot a cut-away and edit that in… you get the idea.

What we have always focused on is the meaning and in that sense there is no difference here between print and online. We play with copy, editing quotes or using reported speech to tell the story. Asking someone to walk through a door again because we missed the shot is no different.

Of course we  use lights, we pick lenses, we edit to tell the story. We ask questions and guide. That’s what the form requires.

That we always present a fair, accurate and balanced view of the story is what journalism demands.

UPDATE: Angela Grant has responded to my view

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Interesting stuff for Monday

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These are some interesting things I’ve been reading

Hubris and journalism

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I’ve been catching up with some reading (that “mark all as read” option only kept things at bay for a while).

I started with Alison Gows take on the an event at my Uni last week. Mark Skipworth, executive editor of the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, came in to talk about the tele’s digital transformation. In the process he seems to have strayed off the path in to the ‘journalists are better than bloggers’ debate. His phrase – “No one tells a story like a journalist.”

Alison comments on the general feeling in the room.

Ouch, that’s a poorly-expressed phrase, I thought. Except it wasn’t – it was what he absolutely believed… with his next breath he went on to dismiss the ability of bloggers to provide quality, impartial reportage.
I think it proceeded along in this vein but the muttering around me had actually become more interesting than the fuddled point the speaker was labouring towards. (Which was, I think, that journalists are impartial and quest for the truth.)

A bit of a blinkered view. As Alison concludes,

If you believe only a journalist can tell the story then you’re closing your eyes, ears and mind to the millions of people out there who are telling their own stories

But you’d be forgiven for thinking that, in some quaters at least, journalism really is the about the art of not listening to people.

That was my immediate thought as I read. James Silver’s article on n Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s rude awakening to hate comments on a recent piece. Having recieved over 900 comments, some apparently very hateful, to an article called “Spare me the tears over the white working class” Alibhai-Brown is less that taken with the transparent nature of the web.

“I think editors were initially overcome by the openness of it all,” she says. “But the time has come for them to think about where this is going. There hasn’t even been the beginnings of a proper debate and there really needs to be.”

But one commenter on the story thinks this is a lesson newspapers need to reflect on

I think it may have opened a lot of newspapers’ eyes as to the level of frustration their readers have about some of what passes for journalism in their papers.

It’s a sentiment that echoes a splendid quote in the article from Rod Liddle

“Some readers always thought we were a pack of self-obsessed wankers. Now they have both the confidence and the platform to tell us what they think. And seeing their words ‘published’ on the internet, next to lots of other comments, seems to legitimise what they say and spur them on.”

I find myself agreeing with the sentiment. If your gig is to write stuff to get people spitting out their cornflakes then don’t be surprised if some of you targets spit back.  Don’t get me wrong, hateful stuff is out of order but ultimately you have a choice; Invest in good moderation (time and people), leave it open and let the crowd police itself (a brave waiting game) or close all comments and don’t engage with the audience.

The inconvenient truth is that, unfortunately the last option can’t and won’t stand for long. The door is open and to paraphrase Liddles view, the web puts the commentators and commenters on an equal footing. You have to get that right or you lose the respect of your audience.

All of which added an extra resonance for me to the  kerfuffle that has blown up around criticism of the Press Complaints Commission by the Media Standards trust. The PCC is the newspaper industries (self) regulation body and according to the MST it isn’t fit for purpose.  Martin Moore picthes the report  in broad terms on his blog.

You would be forgiven, as a member of the public, for thinking that the system was geared more towards protecting the interests of the press than the public.

The resulting war of words has already raised some interesting debate, and I’m sure it will continue to do so. But it seems that, in the national press at least, there is a real need to move on from the idea that “no body tells a story better than a journalist”. If the MST is to be believed, the public don’t think so and , as the Alibhai-Brown case shows, they now have the means and the motivation to tell them.