Field Notes: Journalism 360 Unconference

Journalism 360 Unconference

At the Journalism 360 Unconference this summer, participants seemed to have more questions than answers:

How do you make futuristic technologies accessible to a mainstream audience?
Do you experiment in public — and risk turning potential audiences off?
How do you draw needed investment dollars when investors need big audience numbers up front?

The gathering took place at CUNY in New York City, where journalists and makers working in emerging media met to problem-solve some of the field’s now-familiar dilemmas. Organized by the Online News Association (ONA), Knight Foundation, and Google News Initiative in conjunction with VR World, the event gave insiders a chance to network, talk shop, and share best practices in a loosely structured setting.

In keeping with the “unconference” format, here is one interloper’s take on an “un-report,” highlighting a few key issues and discussions from the variety of panels and table talks.

Experimenting

Some producers are more willing to experiment with new media than others. Unfortunately, private media makers and distributors— broadcast networks, corporations, and other for-profits — don’t share much about their audience findings, so what is known stays private. A panel on audiences had little to offer on specifics, despite valiant efforts by the Knight Foundation’s Paul Cheung to deep dive.

One key point? Learn from game developers, learn from game developers, learn from game developers. Journalists hoping to do more interactive media need to study the masters. With clear revenue streams and more substantial resources, game developers are the pioneers here, and their best practices for design, editing, production, and audience engagement need to be better understood by all kinds of makers, even documentarians.

Ethics

A couple of discussions on ethics focused on questions of “truth” that would be familiar to old-media documentary photographers and filmmakers. Should you livestream a hostage situation? Hm, that could make people uncomfortable…. But a cat rescue? Absolutely! Is it okay to add things into a frame to make the scene feel more real? General consensus: No. But it’s much easier to recreate objects and scenery using computer-illustration tools (in other words, CGI) than to rely on photogrammetry. Photographing or video-recording images for streets or other surfaces is labor- and cost-intensive because all of those images then have to be stitched together—and therein lies the bind.

“We always try to rely on existing footage as much as we can, even when using a texture,” said Alexey Furman, co-founder of of New Cave Media, a 360°/VR company, on an ethics panel. “We minimize the use of CGI to the greatest extent possible but it’s simply not feasible to do away with it entirely.”

Furman said that his team makes a point of having ethics conversations from the beginning of every project, before doing photogrammetry. In terms of having these conversations, he added, “We found it easier to build a staff team than to work with a lot of freelancers.” In other words, it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page at every level.

Accessibility

One conversation I didn’t hear come up: How do we avoid repeating a cycle of centering media on the perspectives of affluent white audiences? The overwhelming majority of participants at the unconference were white professionals or students.

And yet How do we grow an audience for this stuff? remains a key question for 360° video, VR, and AR. There aren’t easy answers. One thing is clear: the onboarding in a VR or AR experience needs to happen within the experience. In other words, the design needs to be intuitive for users. No one under 50 bothers to read the video game manual; players just dive right in.

Producers of VR offered a couple of general rules of thumb: When designing for smartphones, don’t forget that most users don’t have a headset handy. Instead, they’ll check content out in Magic Window mode, which translates 360˚ and 3D content to a small, flat screen. Designers need to keep this in mind and design with Magic Window in mind from the get-go.

More broadly: It’s crucial to consider the content at hand and to carefully question which media will work best.

“If you can do it better on TV, don’t do it [in VR], is the mantra I’ve adopted,” said Zillah Watson, BBC Commissioning Editor for Virtual Reality, on a keynote panel, titled “The state of immersive storytelling in journalism.” The content “has to be good enough to justify all of the friction points.” If you are going to make a user put on a headset, is it going to be worth it?

Media Content

What kind of content is “worth it”? What kind of content makes audiences willing to don a headset (other than video games and porn)?

Veda Shastri, a video journalist for the New York Times, said her team often looks to 360 to depict scale. A closeup photo of two people holding signs and be very affecting, she observed, but what 360 offers is a view of whether there are two people or a hundred: “If there are only 30 protesters on a street corner, that’s not strong enough.”

“It’s very hard to do breaking news in 360,” said Washington Post’s Jeremy Gilbert, on the keynote panel.” The intense resources required don’t pay off. “With immersive stories, we need a longer tail, stories that will hold appeal over time.”

One arguably under-appreciated storytelling form is animation. In VR, said Gilbert, “ It’s much more ‘natural’ to use animation than to try to record a live scene.”

In a table talk on barriers to entry, one participant pointed to Google’s Storyliving: An Ethnographic Experience VR and What That Means for Journalists as essential. Many of the observations raised in various 360 conversations appeared in one form or another in this report. According to these developing best practices, 360 and VR are ideally suited for a couple types of content in particular:

Places and things that people can’t usually see, including inaccessible, distant, or dangerous locations: War zones, extreme weather events, ocean depths, outer space.
Conveying a sense of scale: Large protests, festivals, or other events.

You can and should read the full report here.

It’s enough to make you wonder: living in extremely chaotic times, with democracy getting pummeled by forces of xenophobia, autocracy, censorship, could it be that 360 is precisely the right media for the times? TV brought the war in Vietnam home to America and led to its end. Could media with an uncanny knack for portraying protests and other human gatherings be exactly what we need at this moment?

Immerse is an initiative of the MIT Open DocLab and The Fledgling Fund, and is fiscally sponsored by IFP. Learn more about our vision for the project here.