Innovations in Digital Storytelling: Mark Hinojosa

Transcript for 2005 Batten Symposium and Awards for Innovations in Journalism
Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

Mark Hinojosa Batten Awards Advisory Board Associate Managing Editor, Electronic News, The Chicago Tribune

This is kind of perplexing—first of all to be the leadoff, because you all are stumbling in, having coffee, and hiding the banana peels and everything else. But what’s really interesting to me about this is that, as Jan said, the Batten Awards—when we recognize achievement—are not about who did the coolest piece of Flash work. And yet I’m going to show you two pieces that rely heavily on the patois of online; of the sort of interesting and cool ways to involve people. And you’re going to sit back and say, “Well how does this fit into the mission of the Batten Awards?”

I’m going to just give you my theory, my take on this, and then you can either accept it or throw it away. But, when we talk about “digital storytelling,” what we’re really talking about is storytelling, right? The delivery platform is a convenience and it’s a convention, but what we really want to talk about is storytelling and this atavistic need I think that we have to tell stories and to hear stories. I think it’s hardwired into our brains that we want to sit around the campfire, we want to hear a great story, we want to see the cave painting, we want to see the cool piece of Flash. I think we can trace this back through our genetic markers that we do this.

So now we have these two projects that we’re going to share with you. One from Newsday, which—having worked there—is a very traditional media company who took their assets and wrapped them around an idea of, “What did the war mean? What did the war cost?” And you’re going to bounce this off against David’s work.

And now David is the antithesis of what we talked about. It’s very produced, it’s very hip, it’s very “aggressive,” as David likes to say. But at the heart of what David does is a democratization of the process. David has found ways to bring television—the qualities of television, the storytelling aspects of television—down to a level where there’s entry for everybody. There’s no more $10,000 barrier to get into producing your own television. Your own television on the Web means that more of us can tell stories. And I think it comes back to that same idea that if we can democratize the process, if we can show people—like with Newsday—how to get your arms around an incomprehensible story like a rock, who else is inspired to tell stories? Whose stories do we get to hear?

So, I was told not to go on very long, so I won’t. We’ll start with David.

• Continue to David Dunkley Gyimah’s presentation
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