Jonah Kessel: New York Times storyteller

Jonah Kessel ,Beijing-based New York Times video journalist, and contributor to a Pulitzer Prize winning series, discusses travel and filmmaking in our latest podcast. Listen to Jonah and Movidiam’s George Olver discuss the transition from print to video journalism and the future of branded storytelling. Check out the images below, too.

Hi I’m George from Movidiam and today we’re joined by video journalist and international documentary filmmaker Jonah Kessel, currently working at the New York Times. Jonah’s won numerous awards in the filmmaking space, and it’s an absolute delight to have him online with us today. Hello and welcome Jonah.

Thanks very much George good to speak to you here.

We actually worked together way back when on a different sort of project — a brand-aligned project for a large corporation wanting to create high quality imagery, create a business film with narrative — a slightly new genre of filmmaking back when we did it and that’s how we originally met.

…And look what’s happened! It’s blown up, right.

So tell us what you’re working on at the moment?

I’m a staff video journalist at the New York Times — that has a different meaning I think now than certainly what it did years ago. Essentially what we do is make short form documentary, and that’s changing a little bit because when you talk about news and what short form means you probably get ten different answers. For a TV person that means a thirty second or one minute piece. Short form, for me, means anywhere from five to twenty minutes, but I’m usually falling in the three to ten minute range. This is non-fictional video — I have had, for my entire career, a really interesting relationship between non-fiction and cinema, actually. It’s a little bit documentary in nature, at least in its origins, but like probably many of the listeners of this podcast, using cinema technology in the nonfiction world, in the real world.

You’ve been totally enabled by the cinematic potential that equipment has given you.

Yeah, I came from a still photography background about ten years when I was finishing university. I wanted to be a photojournalist, and I started shooting still pictures. You know when the DLSR revolution happened I jumped on board because I could shoot video, and it looked good. I wasn’t having to haul around these huge cameras, and the footage looked better. Everyone got into it, you did too at the same time, and what’s happened with technology since then (that was like 5D Mark II era) has just become much more professional and there’s just so many tools. For a long time I was a really big gear geek, I still am, I think you have to be to a certain degree. If you’re not paying attention to what’s happening with technology, you’re probably not taking advantage of the resources available to you, so it’s critically important. But at the same time I’ve had like a, I don’t want to call it an ‘epiphany’, but a self realization in the past two years that you can have an amazing story, and crap technology, and the story will win viewers, and audiences, hearts and memories. People remember great stories they don’t remember the technology that it was made with, and so I’ve been making a really big personal effort the past couple years to spend my time researching and looking at stories — who makes a good story, what makes a good story, and because I do work for a newspaper, looking at what matters, what people in the world should know about? Entertainment has a certain point to it but certainly I try to focus on issues that matter.

Absolutely, this is the one thing that we found with Movidiam. We obviously are a heavily technologically enabled project and idea, but it’s actually the people that make it very human, and the it’s the people that people come to the platform for. We have enabling tools, revision features and a task tool, and these elements but it comes back to the thing that stories make us human, and actually it’s quite exciting with this new technology what is possible, but still at the nub of the issue is; is this going to tug a heartstring, is this going to stand up and make people do something…and I think that’s what’s so fascinating about your particular genre of storytelling; it wants to encourage action.

Right, it’s actually a whole topic in itself: imagery to provoke social change. Journalists have different feelings about that, whether we should be in that role at all, and some, especially documentary photographers, you know who have worked on projects for years, have real goals. We try to be a little bit less biased, but at the same time, I like to focus on human rights stories because if I have some time here and I have this ability or a privilege to tell stories and have a platform with a mass audience, I feel like I should be using that to do something good. And because there’s only one of me and there’s a million stories. I’m happy to focus on things that should provoke social change even though it’s not my job to actually tell people what to think, I do like to put the information in front of them so they can make those choices.

I agree, very interesting. Particularly in your work as well, we’ve seen a lot of travel. Travel is a big part of what you do — is that in searching for the next story? Why is travel so tied with your work?

I think it goes back a long way, I might venture to say it goes back most of my life. I’ve always had this desire to travel…until recently actually, I don’t have the desire in the same way anymore! For decades I wanted to shoot pictures and travel. I guess I wanted to travel before I wanted to take pictures; pictures was the vehicle that let me travel. It gave me a purpose in traveling. Even right now if I have to go on a vacation, I feel kind of odd and weird about it, like tourism is a hard thing for me to grasp, not traveling with a purpose or a driving force. Like, ‘Ok we need to go to this horrible place to talk to these people to see what’s happening so we can tell the world’ — that i can get behind, but going to a beach and sitting there for a week, while it’s lovely and I probably should do it more, I have a hard time getting myself to do it.

It’s interesting, you’re very objective driven and that’s important. I hear this in people from other walks of life as well, the moment you get on the beach you start feeling ill…

That’s true actually, it’s funny. It also, at this point, has to do with my job in that I had that push and that drive for so long and then it put me into this position eventually where I do cover the region, so I work for the New York Times but I live in Hong Kong and mainland China. I’m partly based here and partly based there. I travel for stories, so I cover the Asia region, which is an enormous place. For various reasons, China is the most important piece of that coverage so I’m heavily China focused. But for me now, it doesn’t really matter where I am because almost ninety percent of the time when I go to work, the first thing I do is get on a plane — I live next to an airport now, intentionally.

Perfect. Just looking at a journalism piece in the traditional newspapers, or seeing significant global brands such as the New York Times — there’s got to have been a degree of adjustment there from the traditional mode of print journalism. I think you were really right at the forefront of the video aspects to the New York Times and how that was coming about. What’s your litmus test, your sensitivity to printed text vs moving image vs still image for journalistic output?

I think it’s been this roller coaster for traditional media, where at first they had it, we had it, and we’re like, ‘ok what do we do with it?’ And then they were like, let’s just copy TV, and then it became a little bit different. This is kind of when I came into it really, where I was like, ‘hold on can we make short films?’ It doesn’t have to be like TV, we’re online, why do we need to be like TV? And then I think there was a big boom, around 2009 to 2014 or 2015 of short form documentary, cinematic docs, and it blew up. I’m sure there’s no one who hasn’t seen that type of storytelling, but now I think there’s another wave coming.

“Change is constant in legacy media at this point, it’s happening at such a great degree, and video was a big part of it…”

…where they were like, ‘ok hold on maybe this is our savior’, because as soon as the real estate section or ads left the paper and then all the classifieds left the paper, and essentially advertising left, we were all, you know, short of money. Journalists were losing jobs. In recent years people are like ‘We need to re-evaluate how we use video now’, because if we use it how we’re doing it maybe it won’t be our savior. I think print media has finally realized that to make good video costs a lot of money and it’s very slow. You know you can do some short pieces that are nice and maybe they don’t cost a lot…

But to make the audience…the audience has been reared on 100 years or hollywood cinema. They respond to a certain amount of production value, and that does cost. You need to find the teams globally that can produce that — it’s a big challenge.

Your point there is extremely important. Not only has the audience been in this hollywood environment for a century, more than that is in the online environment. We’re not competing just against other media we’re competing against Game of Thrones and Netflix and anything else. Someone watching one of my videos also has the choice to click off and go watch Hulu. We’re all kind of in the same space right now — a couple years ago people had this idea that it was ok if our quality wasn’t as good as an HBO doc. But the audience is right, they want good stories, they want good production quality. There are some people out there in the video world, especially in the video journalist world, who are still selling this idea that video journalism doesn’t have to be expensive. Maybe on a local level, you can you can make good, cheap video journalism but I think, moving away from the traditional model of TV journalism, it’s just a bore.

It comes back to your point actually of time and research cost. You’ve got to spend time in the field before you can get the equipment out these days, to really dive deep on your agenda and what you’re trying to do and share.

Earlier someone was asking me about this piece I did. It’s like a teeny little piece, it was a side project, a proximity thing. I did it maybe a week ago or something about this guy who dyes clothes. Someone asked me, ‘how long that piece take to make?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t even know how to figure it out’ because it was one day of shooting, less than twenty four hours, pretty quick edit because there wasn’t that much footage. So maybe a week, and then there’s travel add a day on each side…but then the research — how do you define it? I’m looking at twenty stories, nineteen of them probably will lose access or something won’t work out, or some bit of truth is a little sketchy and I’m like, ‘nah, we’re going to drop it’ if we can’t trust the source. And then finding the character in the first place, then talking to them doing pre-production interviews, ‘what’s your story’, does a story hold up? Is it interesting? What type of video we’re going to make with the story? And then of course if we’re doing this, what is the cost of us doing it? Not necessarily financial, but more, what would I be doing if I wasn’t doing it?

The opportunity cost.

Exactly. And it was a three minute piece and it was in proximity — I happened to be doing a bigger thing in the area. I decided to go talk to this guy who dyes clothes for a day, like I’ll take a day off, so it was quick but even if it was quick it’s still…

…an investment in time and energy. So Jonah, a sideways move from the journalistic work and touching on the advertising piece, and the New York Times — I think there’s an initiative for T Brand Studio, the newspaper commissioning its own content to sit alongside advertisers, how do you see that playing out?

T Brand Studio is actually pretty cool — I haven’t seen tons of stuff yet but stuff I have seen has been really good. So for example, an advertiser wants to advertise with the Times. Instead of going to a production company like they used to do, the Times now has a production company built into the brand. There was a cool thing, or maybe it wasn’t a cool thing I can’t remember the product, but I remember the ad really well. It was either in the UK or in Greenland or Iceland, maybe a watch commercial?

That’s a filmmaker’s recall — you remember the aesthetic but not the product.

I’m going to find it and send you the link. I think it was gorgeous. Just to be clear, it’s [T Brand Studio] completely separate from what I do, but I was like ‘this is really good work, beautiful cinematography’. I can see how that’s not only interesting from a film level but from a brand level. The NYT has a name, a brand. It’s a very known brand and so if they’re going to use that to set up a production company, they already have existing clients. I think the whole idea is how to save the newspaper really — how can we make sure that we can continue to report the news because so many papers are going under, so many papers are trimming their staff. There’s so little publications of great stature left.

So what’s next, what are you working on at the moment and what’s in the pipeline?

There’s some big changes going on in our department, in our unit. There’s a push in a couple different directions and we’re looking to up our game. We’ve been essentially in this one-man-band world for a long time, and I think that’s changing now. If we want to make real documentaries it’s not going to be one guy with a backpack running around the world — we’re making teams, more like documentary teams without getting too big like TV or cinema crews. What we do is like the medium length of short form — we’re trying to push to both sides, to put more time and more energy in — we want every one of our docs to be something that people remember. When you’re making a doc you think, ‘if someone sees this are they going to share it ten times?’ There’s a point where we need to do service journalism where we’re going to make things that we know aren’t going to be popular, but they’re important to make. It’s a bit of a philosophy shift. A couple years ago they wanted to throw video at everything, so if there’s a big feature, ‘what video are we going to do?’ But now it’s more like, ‘ok, what does video want to do?’ — it’s giving it much more of its own identity.

What’s your process of working? Do you or your colleagues get a brief, do you discover something of interest? How do you bring a story from a region in China onto the NYT and your various channels?

I mean it starts with research. Everything’s about research. One thing I really dislike about old school video journalism is where you’d see a character, and then some loosely cut b-roll put over that character in an interview. I mean like, interview, then b-roll, then interview…That, I try to avoid. When I’m looking for projects now, I’m like, ‘what can I see in real time? What’s going to actually happen?’ We have to be creative to get around that, but if there’s a project where I don’t see any live action, where I won’t see a character in his real environment, then maybe that project’s not for me. What I want is real conversations, real dialogue, pop quotes of people talking to each other, real events, action. The first thing is characters. Who are the characters, what access do we have? These are all the critical questions to me.

That’s interesting. So how is it being an American with a big camera in China, investigating these characters? I guess that hasn’t been plain sailing all the time.

No, far from it. I work throughout the region and I’ve probably worked in, I don’t know 15, 20 different countries in Asia. China, I feel pretty comfortable saying, is the hardest. It has become much more difficult the past couple of years. People getting access is really difficult because no-one wants to be on film unless they have something to gain from it. They’re too scared of me. The amount of propaganda going on, not only against Americans and Western ideology, but propaganda against the NYT, and personally against me. There’s editorials in newspapers denouncing things I do and these are newspapers that are printed millions of times across the country and so all of a sudden, I’m doing something lighter and I need to film this noodle shop, and the noodle guy is like ‘no way’. At the other end of the spectrum, it’s become this kind of political state at the moment. It’s very sensitive, people are losing their liberty quite frequently. Civil rights in China have taken a big hit in the past couple of years and so when i’m doing films now it’s like, ‘is the character going to be safe after we film? What risk are we putting him in? Does he understand that risk?’ I made this doc last year about this Tibetan guy and before we started his big qualm was about language preservation. Tibetans talking to the NYT, you’re definitely putting yourself at risk. He understood this but said, ‘If I don’t do this no one else will.’ But it still was a very difficult thing. And we made the film, and it went out, and now he’s in jail he’s looking at fifteen years. It’s terrifying, it’s sad it’s horrible, but at the same time, he got his message out. Was it worth it? Hard to say.

It’s quite hard hitting when you hear from all angles like that.

First of all, I’m a Jewish American I mean I clearly do not look Chinese. So I stick out like crazy, then you give me a camera. I’m not using huge cameras but like an FS7 or FS5, and these are small rigs on these cameras, nothing too extravagant. When you call to get access, people are kind of suspicious of you because they don’t want to get put in a position where they could be put in jail or have trouble with the authorities. There’s been times I’m walking down the street and people see me coming and literally run away.

That’s makes it does make it quite a challenging environment, indeed. Wrapping up now, I mean with Movidiam, what we’re trying to do is ultimately…You’ve outlined a number of situations where you know you’ve got to get feedback, speak to people in New York, work with other team members, and what we’re trying to do is build a feature set that streamlines that. People come together to create remarkable stories — how do you get the feedback you need or get the approval for sign off? Can you see Movidiam as a concept being able to streamline the process?

Certainly, I mean i’m a filmmaker, which gives me very little say in the institutional stuff like that, but if it was up to me we would totally use this. It would make my life personally much easier because right now we are using ten different things — we have like multiple proprietary software, Google docs, Facebook, things go missing all the time. Ideally you know you’d want it streamlined in one place, like, ‘here’s the project, everyone involved in it, what we’re doing’ — and everyone has access to that in a transparent method. What you have is something that I wish the company would adopt at this point. But like I said, it’s a little above my pay grade…

Jonah I’m going to work on that for you! It’s been fantastic chatting to Jonah, really admire the work that’s coming out of Asia and for the NYT. I highly recommend you check him out online. Thanks so much for taking the time.

Thanks George.

Find Jonah online: Movidiam / Website / Blog / New York Times