Addressing the Directors of RFE/RL
This week we are in Prague, running an intensive video bootcamp for the journalists at Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty.
This is the third year we have come here to run bootcamps, and the directors and staff of RFE/RL are delighted with both the training and ther results of the first two classes already in the field reporting.
You can see the results of their video reporting here.
On Monday, I was asked to address the Board of Directors of RFE/RL to talk about the ‘future of journalism’.
This is always a difficult question, but I think that you have to deal with Directors are adults and that they can stand to hear the truth, so I told it to them, straight up.
In the old days, we used to have massive arguments about the VJ concept. This is so commonly accepted now that no one argues the point. Thei only questions asked are ‘where can I get the training’.
But to look at where journalism is going, and RFE/RL is very much a journalism-driven organization, it’s necessary to look at the technology.
We are the children of technology. As Andy Grove, the former Chairman of Intel said, ‘Listen to the technology, the technology will tell you where to go’.
The technology of the web, plus new instruments like the iPhone (Can the iPhone4 Shoot News?) means that soon millions of people will have the capacity to not only shoot HD with their phones (which they keep with them all the time) but also to edit on the phones (it has iMovie) and to upload immediately with the touch of a button.
This is a radical change, not only in the hardware that journalists can use to produce video, but also in the ‘democratization’ of news. Now anyone can produce HD video for nothing.
There are 4.6 billion mobile phones in the world.
And we can safely, I think, predict that in the next few years, most of them will have this capability.
Where we once thought of journalism as the idea of sending a single reporter to a country to ‘report’, now journalism can mean something very different.
For RFE/RL, whose mission to to cover places that generally don’t have free presses, they could become the nexus of this democratization.
They could change their mission from one of sending journalists to one of educating, empowering, editing, curating and publishing the work of the millions of people from those places who are going to come online with video and stories to tell.
It’s a different model for journalism, but one that, I think, is both consonant with where the technology is taking us, and resonant with the mission and goals of organizations like RFE/RL.
