When you disrupt higher education, things fall apart, and then magic…
This is a story that’s just started, but it has legs, roots and this is a draft of so much to come.
In 2005 I was dumbfounded to find myself speaking at the National Press Club in Washington DC, from being honoured at the Knight Batten Awards for Innovation in Journalism. Apparently I was the first British entry ever to be honoured at all at the award. Psss it wasn’t the Guardian newspaper as they claim here. Sorry!
I had been innovating before then, and after garnering a string of industry accolades from Apple, Google, Jon Snow, FT.com (see reputation).
But there was one area I’ve remained restless. I’m a dreamer. I used to peer out of my chemistry grad classes and think why don’t they teach art, or economics lectures and wonder why empathy or green economy wasn’t part of the core narrative ( read Wolff here).
And media and journalism? To think it’s a about communicating without any rational recourse to underlying psychologies, history of politics, the dangers of mono narratives, and an abrogation of the business end influences, is like thinking of watching Mama Mia 2 without the singing. It’s actually not natural.
When the multimedia wave hit the industry post 2000, it was a silicon valley revolution, with nimble companies catching the wave e.g. Metacafe, Brightcove, Rocketboom, Hillman Curtis etc. Then industry finally sniffed the time for change.
By 2006 the BBC and Reuters, huge juggernauts that turn around slowly, had turned. The BBC’s iPlayer, and a slew of external tech-savvy personnel arrived. Both media teamed with an independent organisation Wemedia captured in these above photos. Its directors Andrew Nachison and Dale Peskin, for the first time at this scale, brought the two churches together; mainstream and new stream. A younger-looking Jeff Jarvis lamented the endless squabbles between them. I (top right photo) was trying to explain videojournalism and blogging.
Gradually, a multi causal approach to change and negotiating content became serious. Mainstream media by sheer weight, hegemony, dominance of any space, found its mojo and flexed it like a 400 pound Gorilla. The rise of Sili-hybrids arrived. Youtube — part media, they wouldn’t say — part content hosts allowing us to control content — at a cost — did their bidding.
We innovated. My word we did. Sacha’s Soul of Athens, Koci from UC Berkley, Media Storm and so on. Institutions, colleges, varsities, embraced change, but had to pay attention to the group think of what media and Sili-hybrids wanted. After all it was media that was going to hire them.
Here’s a thought, if you’re graduating this year in media or journalism, the likelihood is many of you will look to mainstream media armed with your trusted skills — and why not. Some of you will cast an eye to independent media, your expertise codified to meet where you think you’d like to go. It’s difficult. Journalism’s payment scheme still hasn’t sorted itself out from when I presented the Internet to viewers here in 1995. Everyone want’s something for nothing.
Yesterday I shared a video of leaders I’d filmed with a colleague on linkedin and the CEO of Channel Four Alex Mahon’s responded as such
The audience will come with us when we get the stories right
Of course she’s right. Getting those stories to commissioners when you’re outside of the media network is difficult. Inside the bubble, too many of us are generally chasing the same stories, with same styled execution, competing often with the same people, trying to gain traction with audiences. Journalism troped stories, like the tulips of Amsterdam, have super saturated our fields and minds and lost value this time in attention.
Small wonder then some companies like Netflicks and Penguin are innovating with different approaches, from different authors, with different themes and are opening up new audiences.
In higher education, I had an idea. With the help of London’s leading entrepreneurs, The Guild of Entrepreneurs, and powerful figures from industry like Michael Min (Star Wars Tech Director), Illico Elia from (Deloitte), Konstantinos Antonopoulos ( Al Jazeera) we disrupted MAs learning.
They might have been in a lecture room, but it was in essence an agency challenging cohorts to create difficult epic stories in any field, with themes and subjects they probably would not touch on a traditional journalism courses by account of they’re amazon forest ideas — perceived as too big. And the structure of journalism courses can be constrained to, journalism, rather than storytelling.
Behavioural science, design thinking, the broader art of storytelling in what I call cinema journalism, creative resilience… They were pushed, and at times found it challenging. They did industry death marches, worked through live business plans and have, now 9 months later, been praised by industry.
Nick Pollard, a former head of Sky News, my former editor, Ofcom and chair of the RTS said in this article about the course.
After spending nearly fifty years in the media industry I found it fascinating to see the incredible variety of approaches that were adopted by the students. For me, the eye-opening thing was that they were able to combine new ways of looking at journalism with genuine creativity and user immersion
Some of their stories are indeed breathtaking — from fleeing Syria through mobile video games, Russian elite women, Binural podcasting, China-UK property mobile app stories, and what happens when it goes wrong in elite sports turned into instagram stories.
In the coming days, we’ll be profiling their work and that of their mentors, if you’d like access to their work, to profile, with accompany photos, do get in touch. Coming up Motif Agency and its work with Nasma Aljizawi.
We think this is a model for getting the most extraordinary output from our LAB cohorts by building resilience and creative entrepreneur skills. I’m still dreaming.
