Transcript for
2005 Batten Symposium
and Awards for Innovations in Journalism

Sept. 12, 2005
National Press Club, Washington, D.C.

David Dunkley Gyimah
Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster
Producer, viewmagazine.tv [interactive magazines online]

Can I start by saying, Jan, Batten Judges, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. For me it’s pretty awesome.

Speaking to one of your colleagues, he was telling me that they had something like 96 million hits off the Cost of War, and that really is a demonstration of the power of interactivity. Ninety-six million – that’s far beyond the population of the U.K., so great stuff.

Viewmagazine.tv, for me, is what I’d probably call a labor of love. We were sent some questions, which were quite basic but got to the point, and I tried to address these as much as possible. In fact, I haven’t deviated much at all.

The site itself is called viewmagazine.tv and I pull this one up here first as sort of a prompter as to how it’s evolved over the six or seven months that it’s been up – actually around November. It’s a quarterly. And you can see, that’s the page that’s up now as the headline (pointing to screen, with current viewmagazine showing). But that’s how it started (points to screen after picture changes to first viewmagazine issue), almost as a traditional magazine, and then went to this on the war in countries in Africa, and then went to this, and I now think we’re stuck on this as a format that really kind of demonstrates what it is.

As I said, it’s a labor of love. Believe it or not it’s done on almost a zero budget – in fact, I say negative budget because I pay for the service and a lot of it I do in between my job as a lecturer in the U.K. I have some very very good contributors who are friends from my background. Kim and Mark Riley: Mark, who presents on Air America Radio, and his wife, who’s a Brit but now an American, so I stay with them and I ring them up and I harass them and I say, “Hey, can you get me something on this or that,” and they’re very good. Also, from South Africa I have Palesa Nkosi. So the groups you see here are very much contributors.

I wanted to just take you very briefly into my background, and then this whole concept will make sense. My career more or less spans over broadcast, print and new media over 18 years, and includes working for the likes of ITN, BBC, ABC News in South Africa and as a freelance foreign correspondent during the ’92 to ’94 South Africa transition. And I’ve worked with people like Lennox Lewis, made programs on the CIA, et cetera, et cetera.

But in between being a broadcaster, I’ve had the opportunity to write as well, which is something I don’t get the chance to do much. Jan may remember a conversation we had a very long time ago when I wrote a piece on civic journalism and sent it to her. I said, “Look, I’m not a writer. I’m just a broadcaster.” And her quip back was, “Well, you seem to be writing fine.” So that was quite nice.

So I’ve been able to write about digital media, current affairs and culture, but also had a chance to dabble in new media. Around 1999, after one of my last major jobs working on the U.K. election in 2000, I left the industry and said, “What’s going on in new media?,” and got working with some very clever people, including the next head of Saatchi and Saatchi. And we did something for Channel 4 that won an award – well, it was a finalist – and it actually was picked up by Lennox Lewis, who thought we were able to show how boxing in the community was taking place and use it as an interactive documentary. Along the way it was getting some encouraging noises from various press departments in the U.K. and in South Africa, which in effect doesn’t mean very much, other than when they do these things they’re kind of reflective and it allows you to think, “Well, what have I really done that merits people talking about me.” So for me it’s another driving force of sorts.

The truth really be known, the reason why I was prompted to make viewmagazine.tv was probably partly because I was bored, but probably also because of job prospects, thinking, “What am I going to do next?” Every time I went for a job interview it was, “Well, what do you really do?” And I said, “Uh, well, I like to do X, Y and Z,” “No no no. What do you really do?” So I was pretty restless. And then the other factor really was that, as far as I was concerned, there were certain areas within TV and newspaper where I saw failings that I could spot. The media, TV particularly, has been sort of atrophying since the mid-1990s in the U.K. when satellite TV came on stream. As a result of that, even though satellite has been more pervasive, I think in the U.K. we’ve had less international issues. I know this was an issue that the late Peter Jennings used to talk about – less international news. There have been less minority issues, certainly from my perspective as a black Brit, and less follow-ups. And in the aspect of less follow-ups, it was interesting to read, I think it was USA Today, who said, “We’re going to stick with the New Orleans story as long as it takes.”

So for me there was too much of a swing to a sugar-pop culture and I thought this was an opportunity to do something completely new.

In ’94, I worked for a company called Channel One TV owned by Associated Newspapers, and Channel One TV very much is a sister of New York 1. They’re two different companies, but it was the advent of “D.I.Y. Television.” Get your camera – UVW, Bx/100, whatever it was – shoot, and go off and do your story. And I remember the head of ITN bumped into me a couple of years back, saying, “Poor Channel One. The trouble is you were before your time.”

The Internet changed all that – the idea of being able to shoot and do everything. All of a sudden, here was the Internet, here was broadband, and here was an idea that I came up with helped by a very good friend from the BBC when we were in Amsterdam. He said, “What are we going to call it?” And we went through a couple names, and he said, “Call it IMOL.” And I said, “OK.” So Interactive Magazines Online, the concept being a magazine with embedded pictures, which, when you hit those pictures, what you get in the end is video behind it.

The research was the second question that Jan sent to us. Who does the research? Given that we’re quite small, we’re quite disparate. We’re not a company, per se. And I interpret that question in two ways: Research of how we got the product together or research of how we put the programs or the articles together. Well, both really. Who does the research?

For the audience we’re looking at, I’ve called them Jenny and Bradford, just to give them an identity so I know who I’m hitting. They very much mirror me. They consume all media on the go, they read Details or GQ – and as I walked into New York Airport yesterday, the first thing I did was pick up a copy of Details just to see what they were doing, because it’s the magazines that really drive me. They’re 18 to 45, a broad demographic, they like films, they like music – they know who Hendrix is. So they might like Justin Timberlake, but they have to talk to me about Hendrix. They’re interested in politics and social issues, and they’re broadbanders. They have the net, but they’re not just on dial-up, they’re on broadband, otherwise they couldn’t see this. And they’re very discerning about TV. If it doesn’t meet their requirements, they go. But if they see Lost, 60 Minutes, The Office or hard news, they’re onto it.

In terms of how we put our stories together, the stories from the contributors are very much done by themselves. I have a hand in it in so far as saying, “OK, can we do this? Can we look at that?” And that’s really just my gut feeling and international experience. I look at what’s being covered and what isn’t being covered, and essentially I pick holes in that. So I look at TV and think, “You know, the stuff on the tsunami is not being followed up, minority issues are not being picked up, and there’s a great story in there. Let’s go after it.”

Also, in terms of follow-up features, “What’s Happening to Live 8?” was a story that we did on Friday. I went out with a friend and said, “You work for APTN, you were here covering it, you actually shot some pictures for me. What’s happened to it?” So we went and did a vox pop and did a piece just to illustrate that.

Also, I try to look at sort of “timey” pieces. I was in Turkey about three weeks ago on holiday with my wife and two kids, and she hates me for it, but I took my camera with me. And while I was there I came across a story of Brits actually, to use the expression, “invading” parts of Turkey. They are setting up communities there, and in one community there are more Brits almost than Turks. It’s just a phenomenal story of people buying out of Britain and going to Turkey. It’s almost like Spain many years back.

Those are the sorts of things that I looked at. The London bombings we covered from a particular angle of talking to Chatham House, which is a think tank, and NewsTrust, which is a conference I went to about six weeks to two months ago in San Antonio that looked at the issue of restoring the trust. I’ve got to thank Leonard Witt for inviting me to that.

My mantra is very much in line with a lot of major TV companies: Inform, entertain, educate. But I also say “Interact” as well.

The case study for how we put together trust in the media, which was about needing experts and why the public was losing respect for them, was very good to do. And it’s actually on the site – I’m not going to show it – but you can see it there.

How I put it together: When I look at a mission like this, I go through a lot of media first before I do the writing, and even when I’m traveling I pick up things. I’m on my holder, I pick up facts, I read background issues, and if I find something interesting I log it. Before I actually write the feature itself, I’ll reference a number of Web sites, and they’ve got to triangulate for me. If I see two or three hits that say, “64 percent of U.S. public do not like the media,” it’s not good enough. I’ve got to find about five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 before I’m certain that 64 percent is the figure. If I don’t get what I want, I’ll go and ring up friends in the industry. I can talk more about that on producing.

Why interactive? This picture here (points to screen with photo of woman using digital camera), which I took in Times Square, for me sums it up. This lady has a digital camera, but she’s not just shooting stills, she’s shooting film. I call it the “digital reformation,” and it’s really a throwback to the Reformation – Martin Luther, 1517 – or even Gutenberg’s press when the Bible was mass-produced because there were printing presses. And here we are today in another era where digital equipment is available and we’re able to deconstruct what the Bible is saying. Everyone is reading it now and actually understanding that it says this or it says that. So there’s something in a kind of throwback to those years, which for me exist in the digital era now.

The media are no longer in control. Well, yes they are, and no they’re not. I understand the argument. They’re no longer in control so much as if you look at the London bombing, people are contributing pieces. Citizen journalism is a force to be reckoned with, and that’s become obvious because of the ubiquity of software leading to a lot of do-it-yourself.

Frankly, why interactive? Because if you were going to launch a site today or you’re with any company that does not have some kind of interactive element, then you’re in a hiding to nowhere.

Something else when answering “why interactive?” is that for me there was a chance to demonstrate areas of interactivity, engage readers or viewers, offer new user experiences, and also a bit of a paradigm shift, and we’ll come to that in a minute. Also, the great school of Jakob Nielsen, grandfather of the Web, almost to subvert his ideas, not because I wanted to but because I felt conventions are only there because we feel safe with them. There’s a way in which you navigate your site which is always left-down, on the left-hand side, or across. No, there has to be another way.

For me there have always been two elements to Web interactivity: passive and active.

The passive stuff is so obvious: There’s a Web site, you click. You click here, you click that, you click this – it exists, you click. And there’s another one, which I think is in itself an interesting paradigm here that I just demonstrated very briefly with an existing one in the report so you can see, and in effect really it’s a timeline. We’ve done a video report in which there’s a timeline which when you click on the video, you’re able to drill into more video. If this is a timeline of your site, what I’ve done is hypermark the video interview.

As you can see here, this is the main video (points to screen) – just think of the main video in that inverted triangle – and any part on that timeline, if you click it, goes into another external video. So I did an interview with Dan Gillmor and within the piece there’s about 40 seconds of that one and a half minute piece. If at any point during that interview with Dan you see a flashing light, you can click that and it goes into a Q & A, which I did with him before, which I couldn’t put into my piece, which is about five minutes. And then it goes back into the report again.

So for me that’s fairly active. And it’s a way also of saying, as a broadcaster, when I go outside and I do an interview and I come back and I just take 40 seconds, there is now a way I could use all the other stuff that I wouldn’t have used before. Now, if a viewer thinks, “I really like what that guy was saying,” they can drill through to him. So you can actually see that report.

And also, something that we did with the Live 8 one was even more, I would say, subversive, because on the end of the Live 8 report, I have placed – and I’m speaking to Apple on Thursday in the U.K. at one of their region stores so it’s going to be fun there because I’m going to give them access to my server – a report on what’s happened to Live 8 as a vox pop, and at the end of that report, I have put a placeholder there at which the URL will probably be something like live8.swf. In other words, for anyone that puts in the server a vox pop of live8.swf, the video will pick up. So on viewmagazine.tv the whole thing will show, so it’s almost going to be a chain. I mean I have control – when I go inside and I don’t like it, I take it out – but if someone puts in the bit from wherever saying, “Yeah, what did happen to Live 8? I thought blah blah blah,” that stays.

How we produce it: I like the definition – in the U.K. it tickled everyone pink – when we were called “backpack journalists.” And I have an American student, Corrine McDermid, who’s very good and who worked with me on the NATO exercise, and she explained what it meant and had to explain it to all the other students as well.

The core skills really depend on my editorial judgment and values and a technical understanding of a range of software. We are in an era where software is very much king. So we work with Final Cut Pro, PhotoShop, Director, Flash, Action Script, HTL, After Effects and a lot of compression technology. At the heart of it is really video journalism.

I was online a while back having a look at what Jakob Nielsen was saying and he was talking about how Internet sites were actually making good use of video. So that’s heartening to know that the godfather of the Web has actually finally gone past the idea that it’s just text, text, text.

But I also wanted to make use of Director and Flash in such a way that whatever I did could be organic to the site. So I wanted to get past Windows Media Player as much as possible and ask a fundamental question: If the Internet were being built today, in an era where there was speed available, would it still be modular? Would it still be spatial? Because the whole idea about the Web being spatial was that we were in an age of 28K modems when you needed to cram as much information on the Web as possible, so you had these little pods that people came along, looked at, and went, “Yeah. I take this. I take that. I take this.”

There is actually a precedent, which a friend of mine in the city was saying, that when they first did launch the Web, there were people trying to create magazines like that but they didn’t work because of the speeds. So in fact we’ve kind of come full circle.

The production equipment I tend to use is a Mac laptop; my DV cam – which is pretty old at the moment so I’m going to have to get a new one, but HD’s are more suitable; I always go with my net connection; my iSight; and whenever I’m traveling I have my dictionary, my pad and my magazine. I put down here that magazines are very important, because when I get uninspired or I can’t write, I flip to a piece, I read it for about 10 minutes, and then I’m able to go back into the piece again.

A typical report to produce from start to screen varies. The Live 8 one took me about an hour to film, two hours to edit, and an hour for post. A lot of the stuff we do is heavy posted, just because I think if I’m going to go and watch a piece on the Web, you’ve got to give me a real reason why this piece is aesthetic; why I have to leave TV to go and watch it. So I always say to people and friends doing something that once we’ve cut it up, there has to be some heavy post that gives it an aesthetic.

It takes me about 10 minutes to do a write up or even more when I’m doing the big pieces, which exist online, and then half a day for coding and compression, and a couple minutes to upload. And Mark asked me, “When is the next edition of The View going to be online?” And I was like, “Oh man...” because it’s very much a death march. It’s a throwback to the days when your Andersons were trying to create a mosaic, and they would go for 13 days on a shot, 12 hours at a time. And it’s very much like that for me when I get into the sort of zen of doing something.

This is on one of the NATO ships in the North Atlantic (on screen), which I do every year – I just did the last one. What NATO does is it just calls me up, along with 20 other journalists. As the editor I’m there and there’s a simulated war going on and we’re reporting live, which NATO brass are able to look at.

So what we’re doing I think very much embodies a kind of 21st-century broadband-caster.

I put down here “Press Association, U.K., Sun Newspaper,” only because the Press Association is actually going down the route of something very similar, and I’ve been told to come in and talk to them as sort of a consultant.

The reactions have been very favorable in blogs and chatrooms. Somebody compared us to Google’s “The Grid,” which I think was done by the Poynter organization. There were some very favorable chats going on. At one point we spiked at around 8,000 hits, which compared to 96 million is just ... yeah, right. But some of the comments are basically what people are saying about the site, and some of the less encouraging feedback really comes down to how heavy we are. It’s a very heavy site, but because I work in the university where we have a one megabyte or two megabyte connection, I’m fine.

I’m talking to a guy who’s just introducing 24 megabit connections in the U.K. What we’ve been told, what I’ve read and what I’ve seen, is that at eight megabits we enter a new era where this screen can almost ape TV because the quality of the visuals become DVD quality. That will be really interesting.

Some of the industry has also been very kind. This is Jon Snow (on screen). And if you go in there and you log on, you’ll hear the sound of him talking about me, which is always very nice.

Jon Snow, from video: “I’m struck by the fact that he’s an original.”

Thank you.

The Press Gazette in the U.K. likened it to my knowledge report and one U.S. expert sent me a very nice message – it was a little bit rough around the edges – saying “I saw your piece. Why didn’t you talk about my site as being very cool?” And I said, “Oh, sorry.” He said, “Because you must know about my site.” And I said, “Oh, I didn’t know about it.”

The future. The future, the future, the future. It’s a mug’s game to try and predict the future, and I can’t do that. But what I can offer is sort of a scenario planning based on what we’re already doing. And for me the concept of what we’ve come up with very much mirrors something called “the outernet.”

We had the Internet that was inward looking; that showed us what we could do in our homes. In this picture here (on screen) – behind you is City Hall, that’s Tower Bridge behind you – that’s The View mocked up on a giant screen. As a public space digital vision, this is the sort of thing that a community could have, a local bar or counselor could have. You walk past them, and you’re actually watching their news – it could be anyone’s news – but you go home and you can watch the same thing as well.

Here’s another shot of that (on screen), so you can see two people. They’re not actually watching, I should say, View Magazine. They’re watching something else, but having comped this in it kind of makes sense.

One of the pieces I did earlier was on a guy called Ozwald Boateng, who Mark, again, drew to my attention, because during the piece he castigated me for not wearing one of his very expensive, 3,000 pound designer suits. I’m going to get him back by suggesting that it would be nice if the report I did for him existed in his shop so people could come and see his report. So it’s almost like broadband TV in his own shop, and people go home and watch it.

I wanted to be doing more on hypermarked video packages and downloadables so that these videos become available for people to download. And the only request I would probably have is that if you download the video – you can use it; there’s no sort of copyright issue – but use it in its entirety, and if you do upload it onto your site you just have to have a link back to the The View Magazine again.

I want to look at new models of the IMOL, which I’ll show you in a minute, and actually further explore citizen journalism, and also something on IMOL-casts because I’ve got a lot of archive – I worked in radio for many years as a presenter – on things like Louis Farrakhan and various persons who I spoke to that I think would have some value.

Also, this is a new thing that I’ve done in the last six months: The View but with video. It’s for a generation that would rather not read, so when you get into the package what you get is just the experience of video.

In line with one of the first pieces here was a very good piece by an American student at our university who was on study abroad, who did a thing called “The Flag,” which was awesome. He used timber and nails to signify the stripes and the stars. And the nails represent, at the time he did it, every single soldier that’s fallen during the war in Iraq. He’s a gulf veteran – young guy. And the timber gives it a very stark, very morbid kind of realization of what’s going on. And that piece is in one of the contemporary arts places in the U.K. But he would come to me as a student and say, “What do you think?” And I’d say, “Go for it.” So it’s a huge piece.

Mark Hinojosa:
I have to admit that the first time I saw this when we were judging – they send out the entry list to the judges and we look at them at home – it was about the 20th thing I had seen and I was about to bag it for the night. And I got to David’s site and went, “Damn, this is interesting.” So I went and got my 14-year-old son, sat him down and said, “What do you think?” And I watched him navigate this, totally caught up in it. I mean he was just flying through it, reading some of it, clicking on it, making me think this has got something to show me.

I really encourage you to go visit this site, viewmagazine.tv, because one of the things that you’ll find in it is that David does a lot of the things we don’t do in traditional media. It’s a very point of view piece. There’s a lot of opinion. It’s very first person. It’s very much following the reporter’s experience through the situation. So you’re caught up in the storyteller aspect, not as the objective outsider looking down or the fly on the wall looking in on it, but as a participant moving through the experience. I find that very engaging, and I think it’s something that you all will find engaging, too.

Audience Question:
How could people contribute if they wanted to?

Gyimah:
It’s very much predicated on the idea that if it’s a good story, it’s a good story, it’s a good story. I have had people ring me up or e-mail me and say, “What do you think about that?” And I've kind of said, “yeah yeah yeah.” But the thing I really want to encourage is to have what I would call a multiple-angle story. So if I do something, say, on the U.K. and their lack of wanting to be part of the war, then I want to have something from the U.S. or South Africa as well. So actually what you get in a story is these three different points of view from three different areas.

Now I don’t have access to those so-called contributors, so it’s really going to be a case of someone just e-mailing me – and I do read them – and me saying, “That’s really good, and this is what I’m doing here. You could do something along those lines. Post it up, let me see it somewhere, and let’s really take it from there.”

But The View is only one project under the Interactive Magazines Online umbrella. The View is one product that I think could be mirrored in so many different quarters. And if I could divide my time up – which I don’t think I can – then we can create many more different models of this kind of idea where you can have just a theme, very much the way they did with the Cost of War. So you have people from across the globe, if you can find them, and you have this one magazine that exists with a theme.

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