 Hello everyone. Thank you all for coming here tonight. My name is Seth Manukin. I'm the Associate Director of the Chemical and Engineering Department. No. I'm the Associate Director of the MIT Communications Forum, which is sponsoring this event, although this is one of those lovely events where we actually just have to get out of the way. And William and Sarah really put this whole thing together. So what I'm going to do is introduce William, who will then introduce our four panelists. William Yorukio is a professor of comparative media studies both here and a professor of comparative media history at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He is the principal investigator both of the Open Documentary Lab, which is most relevant to this event, and also to the MIT Game Lab. And in addition to being the principal investigator of the Open Doc Lab, the topic of this forum is something he's particularly interested in. He's been looking at shifts in documentary style and technology from the 1800s to today for quite some time and is right now working on a book on that topic. So this is also one of the delightful communications forums where instead of having a moderator and panelists, we really have four panelists, only one, I mean five panelists. Only one of them also has to serve as the moderator. So without further ado, I give you William. Seth, thanks very much. And I just want to open with a few words of thanks to our host, of course, the communications forum, founded long, long ago by Ithiel DeSola Pool, who some of you may know for his book Technologies of Freedom, and to our sponsors, the John Dee and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It's thanks to them that we're here. And actually, we have a convening tomorrow that a lot of the folks in this room are part of. And a shout out to Kathy Yim, who's been a delight to work with the face of MacArthur that we see most. So the program we're in, CMSW, compared to media studies and writing has been really helpful. And of course, the Open Doc Lab as well. And I just want to mention now, because I'll probably forget by the end, but after this event, there's a reception in the Stata Center fourth floor. And it's not just a reception. There are demos. So a lot of the stuff we're talking about tonight will be demoed there. And you can come in if you haven't seen it before. Have fun with it. I'm just going to try to frame this because I'm not convinced that what we're going to talk about tonight can be taken for granted by everyone. What we're basically engaged in is looking at the crossroads, the intersections, the potential synergies between what's happening in the world of digital journalism and what's been happening in interactive and participatory documentary, also a digital domain. The folks we have here tonight, and I'll introduce them as soon as I sort of blather on a bit. As I wrote to them yesterday, I guess, it's a dream team. If you couldn't talk about this topic with four better people. So it's really a delight to be here. Let me just sketch out a few developments that have been happening over the medium to long haul. Documentary and journalism share a lot of concerns. They share an interest in looking at the world critically and helping us to understand how it works to sort of point out its contradictions and problems, connect us to one another. There's a lot of common ground, and we'll talk about that tonight. But there are also some crucial differences, and those differences sometimes impede communication between both sides. Usually you can see those differences, those tensions when a new medium enters the world. It makes now such an interesting moment as a historian. I'm inclined to look at older media forms. So if I think of when film entered the world, pretty quickly, like by 1907, 1908, newsreels start to appear. And arguably documentaries are around, even before John Greerson baptizes them with that name. But certainly by the mid-1920s, when there's a robust documentary tradition on one side and a newsreel tradition on the other, there's huge disdain from each side for the other. The documentarians look at newsreels and think this stuff is superficial, it's quick, it's ephemeral, it's news at its most reduced. And the news people, the journalists look at documentary and say this stuff is partial, it's reenacted, it's got a point of view, an edge, it's creative in all the wrong ways. And more or less from that time till this, these two worlds have existed in different camps. They inhabit different parts, different sort of professional societies. They inhabit different parts of the academy. They have different rule sets. Journalists have a much more stringent rule set than documentarians. They're even studied in different parts of the university. So that's kind of curious. It seems that humanists spend a lot of time looking at documentaries, but not the news. And people in the mass communications and journalism spend a lot of time looking at news, but rarely documentary. So it's funny that these two worlds that share so much in terms of their intervention, so much in terms of what their agenda is, in some ways kind of pass, at times pass by like ships in the night. So it's time to put this stuff in perspective and we'll take a crack at that tonight. Secondly, over the long haul, the conventions of both of these areas, both journalism and documentary, have changed a lot. We live in a world where we expect our journalists to be factual, we expect a certain kind of distance from the events, a kind of impartiality, maybe even objectivity. It's an elusive category, but there's an expectation of a certain amount of it. And yet if you look back over the last century or so, you can see that the world of journalism is actually undulated with its conventions. There are periods when facticity is not exactly the issue, it's about being more illustrative than precise, where objectivity is not a, there's no pretext about being objective. The changes ebb and flow and they fall together with things like the notion of the audience, but we'll talk about that in a flash. They have to do with things like technique, what kinds of storytelling strategies are employed, what's the use of photography in journalism, print journalism for example. Documentaries had precisely the same evolution, radically different shifts in style, notions of objectivity, is enactment okay, is it not okay? And I would say in documentary those undulations have been more frequent than they have been in journalism. But my point is simply to say that what we take as essences today, the truths that we think are self-evident, in both of these domains are actually quite culturally contingent, historically contingent. And they're even culturally contingent in different settings of the world they play out in different ways. And finally over the long haul, the idea of who's out there in the seats has really shifted a lot. Beginning of the 20th century it's the crowd, the mass that needs to be massaged, shaped, convinced, cajoled. Sometimes it's a citizen, a body of citizens who we need to inform and engage. Consumers to be cultivated and stimulated, eyeballs to be counted, collaborators to be worked with. So these shifts also occur and they have a lot to do with the mode of address that both documentary and journalism have. How they see their mission, who they're connecting to, who is their audience. So this makes it a fairly wobbly terrain and I think we're at a point where lots is changing, the notion of the user is changing, obviously the media platforms are changing, and it's a moment that allows us to sort of reconfigure these two categories. Today both journalism and documentary face common challenges in the form of threats to sustainability, economic sustainability. They both face pretty significant gaps in their demographic coverage, especially younger people. There's a series of disruptive changes that have sort of rippled across the media ecosystem, and legacy journalism and legacy documentary have both been hit hard by some of these changes. If I think of something like journalism, you know, in the good old days, I mean starting from the 1840s onwards, we have wire services, associated press, Reuters, and those wire services fed the news as it happened, kind of straight to the institutions of journalism who then vetted them, who curated them, who contextualized them, who massaged them into a kind of shape and form that we the public could sort of make the most of. Well today that wire comes right to our pockets, and it's too much. So what do we have? We have aggregators and we have apps that help to parse out our interests. We have algorithms that feed us strategically selected news bits as they happen more or less, at least as they reported, without the context, without us really understanding what the editorial view is. So this is pretty, you know, we even have list sickles, I guess they're called the list obsession, that's something like BuzzFeed has, and we're sort of reducing the world to a series of steps. So the question is how these practices fit with established journalistic traditions is a really good question, and one can be critical about them, but there's also ways in which they engage, and might represent something of a next stage that we've got to put our minds to. A paper like The Guardian strikes me as kind of very interesting in this regard, because it is trying to get it every way at once. Or if we look at documentary, it might seem at first glance that documentary audiences are, certainly the space that documentary gets theatrically is not great, is not what it should be, and on television its audiences seem to be missing some demographic sectors. But if you think about the Discovery Communications Inc., this is the home of TLC, and just to give the numbers here, 2.7 billion cumulative subscribers in 220 countries, dozens of networks, these are the folks who bring us reality-based programming from TLC's Honey Boo Boo Discovery Channel's Yukon Men. Is this stuff documentary? Well, that's a session in itself, but I would argue to you that it fits many of the notions of documentary that we have. This stuff is reality-based, it's very much about telling stories about them. The yield is fairly thin, unless one really looks at it as an anthropologist of not so much the people on the screen, but the makers of the product, but it's got a lot of traction. The concern is not so much the representation or misrepresentation of the folks on the other side of the tube, it's that a generation is being trained to understand nonfiction in an incredibly storified, character-driven, sensationalized, but null manner. And that's the concern, that this starts to become the expectation, the frame for the representation of reality. One last data point. A recent, this year, a study in the UK found that in the cohort two years to five years, children between two years and five years old, 29% watched video online daily, and 45% of the 11 to 14-year-old cohort watched video online daily. Now, this is my sector of the world I live in, and I don't object to that at all, but I find it significant in the sense that it's a sign that media behaviors are shifting at a very rapid rate. And in fact, they're shifting much quicker than we've seen media behaviors change in the past. And what that points to are some generational mismatches that many of the folks in the driver's seat of our media organizations are from a very different generation. And what we've got to do is sort out how we're going to come to terms with the citizens of tomorrow, these kids that are learning to work their way through the net at a pretty early age. So we're here tonight to explore the changes that are taking place in the world of journalism and documentary as our traditions reinvent themselves, holding fast to what works and reimagining the stuff that we have to address, the weak spots, the reach and relevance where they faltered. The once platform-specific operations of print journalism and television or radio journalism and documentary, which was also television and film, have converged on the internet. There's a common platform, and the question is, can we find common cause as these endeavors, these reality-based endeavors, wind up on the same platform? What are the opportunities? What are the implications? Where can we go with this? New production and distribution practices bring with them new affordances. We're seeing this every day if you just track the job market in journalism. Documentary makers are moving to newspapers, journalists from well-established, well-established journalists from well-established papers are jumping off into startups. There's a lot of churn and mobility just on the job sector right now, always an interesting indication of where the action is. But it's a great moment for cross-fertilization in a certain way, although probably devastating to a lot of organizations, especially when job losses are concerned, it's also reassuring in terms of a kind of cross-fertilization across pollination. Digital journalism platforms have proven to be a terrific portal for linear documentaries, and I look at Jason here, but documentaries which are always in need of audiences, they can never get enough audiences, journalism has provided a fantastic new opportunity to bring these products to people who are interested in the world around them. And my suspicion is that some of that has to do with the video form, which is easier to monetize than print in some ways, it's got its own monetization system. But nevertheless, they're there and it's working. So the question is what happens, how can we start to take advantage of what the web can really do? It can serve as a platform to show linear, but the web also allows us to link, it allows us to navigate and move around, it allows us to communicate and connect with one another, it allows people, users to also participate and contribute. So can we imagine a world where those affordances are made better use of in the endeavors, the joint endeavors of journalists and documentarians? And finally, if we have time after all this, it'd be great if we could discuss what some of the new and emerging tools are, the use of wearable technologies, the use of location, the other data sets that just sound an image, what do we do with location data? Is that part of a documentary endeavor? 3D and immersive technologies. So to help us on our way, we'll turn to the experts, and I want to start by really quick round of introductions, and then we'll dig into some questions that'll help to open up who these folks are and take it from there. Next to me here is Kat Sizek, a documentary maker for Canada's National Film Board, and she's known for many things, but probably best known for her multi-year, multi-project, really brilliant high-rise series. She's here fresh from picking up an Emmy for one of the project's latest iterations, Short History of the High-Rise, which was an interactive that featured on the pages of the New York Times, thanks to collaborating with Jason, and also received Peabody and World Press Association Awards. So it's really been a very important project, not just in terms of, I guess really in terms of the people it touches, but also in this kind of discursive way, institutional way, this also brought a lot more attention to this set of interactions. Kat's also a visiting artist here at MIT, and her connection is the open doc lab. Next to Kat is Jason Spigarnkopf, a journalist and a documentary maker, someone that wears two hats. And New York Times' commissioning editor for opinion video. And Jason is also a former night fellow in science journalism here at MIT. And he's, as I mentioned, the person who worked with Kat to make this amazing project come to fruition. Rainie Aronson-Rath is next to Jason, and Rainie is the deputy executive producer of the critically acclaimed public affairs documentary series Frontline. America's really premier documentary series. She's also here with a handful of freshly minted Emmys, and congrats for that. What's interesting with Frontline, and we'll talk a bit about this, is that it's a body of documentary that is, on the one hand, the best of documentary, but adheres to the strictest of journalistic norms. And that puts it in a very interesting position. And we'll pursue that constraint or that joy. Joy, thought so, in a sec. And Rainie is also a fellow here at the open documentary lab. And finally, fresh off the plane from London, Francesca Panetta, special projects editor at The Guardian, which is, if you follow this stuff, The Guardian is probably the paper that right now is setting the trend. For interactive work. Where she's really embarked on an incredibly adventurous exploration of various digital storytelling techniques. Really, every one of them sort of breaks new ground in terms of both technique and technology, sometimes even folding in live feeds, live data feeds. And if you may know some of the projects, things like Firestorm, First World War, the shirt on your back. She's the only one at this table that lacks an MIT affiliation, and we've got to fix that. Okay, let's dig into the questions. So Kat, maybe you could just kick it off by telling us a little more about how you as a documentary maker wound up on the pages of The New York Times. What was that about? How did that happen? Well, it started here at MIT. It was actually the short story is that you had organized an event before you even called it the open documentary lab. And Jason met the producer, my producer at the National Film Board of Canada, Jerry Flajive. And I think then we all met together a few months later in Toronto at the Hot Docs Film Festival, which is the number one, the largest North American documentary festival. And I met Jason and we all sat down and Jason said, New York City, New York Times, High Rises, what do you think? I'm like, yeah, there's something there. And through numerous conversations and really wonderful, we just hit it off right away in terms of the ideas that Jason was bringing in terms of what was possible at The New York Times, along with some earlier ideas that we had at High Rise that we never thought we'd actually get to, which was the history of the High Rise building, Jason quite brilliantly said, well, we have this archive at The New York Times of 8 million undigitized photos and my mouth dropped open and he said, would you like to see it? And that's how it all began. And so I spent a week there and the project grew from that idea. But it was really through, I mean, it can be traced right back to MIT. So when I gave you a hint at this question, you said you'd also started life as a journalist? Yeah, I mean, it was interesting. I was listening to your introduction and I was thinking that I've always struggled because people ask me if I'm a documentary filmmaker and I always say, no, I don't really call myself a filmmaker because most of the work that I do is not film. It has never been film. I worked in video, not in film when I first started, but I also started as a photojournalist behind the barricades at the Oca Crisis, a student photojournalist, which is the wounded knee of Canada, really. It was a very, very important, significant event in First Nations history in Canada. And so I've always kind of gone, I've been, I've done what's called journalism but I've also done what's called documentary. I've done what's called linear film but I've also always been interested in new platforms so I've never sat comfortably in any of the categories so this project feels like almost a wonderful circling back to everything that I've always, always found, the reasons why I do the work that I do, which is photography, history, social justice and mass audiences. So really wonderful project. And Jason, it sounds like you look for, I mean, here's a great example of a project you spotted and reeled in or made happen through conversation. But I also, just looking at the website, you're open for submissions and it seems like you get, I imagine you get a lot of stuff. You've been in business three years and people tend to sort of train, they get a sense of what someone wants by what they're doing. What are you sensing? What's coming in? Do you get a lot of stuff? Any trends out there? What is the public, is there much coming from the public or is it mostly commissioned? Yeah. So the OpDocs section is conceived as an extension of OpEd. And three years ago, we launched this initiative to bring independent filmmakers into the times because we have a large video journalism unit within the company and we're currently producing about 10 videos a day, mainly from the newsroom, with a staff of around 50 people. OpDocs is a section for filmmakers outside the times as part of opinion. So we have some different constraints, I'm sure we can talk about that. As we're teasing out journalism versus documentary, what we do is definitely journalism, but it's opinion journalism, which gives some more freedom. And because it's an extension of OpEd, it is conceived as this platform for the voice of the public. So we look for filmmakers around the world who are covering anything, really, and can use very wide creative latitude from traditional talking head docs, verite, animation, music, or animated storybook rhyming documentary. And in terms of trends, I think the bread and butter is the short form linear doc that's, I think, what we've carved out a nice niche for and a sense that independent filmmakers can find a very wide audience now on the New York Times, and people are most excited about that. There are definitely interactive pitches coming in, but they're so hard to produce that there aren't that many. And what was so great about the work with CAT and the NFB is that we worked on this very early from the concept stage so I could make sure it was appropriate for the Times audience and that we could actually host the project and that it makes sense within our infrastructure and it feels one with the New York Times. There's often work out there that would feel a little bit like we're trying to shoehorn it into the Times. And in a linear doc, that's easier to do because we can have something that's very authored that looks like nothing the Times has ever polished, but once you're getting into a more involved interactive experience, there has to be more of a fit. So, Randy, just to maybe extend a little bit from that and to the point I mentioned earlier, so front line is prolific. It makes wonderful stuff and relatively a lot of stuff compared to what a lot of other makers can do. And you're using footage that's sent in or at least that you find that's not produced per se from your folks when you need to illustrate a story or something's happening when you're not present. That's probably a soft spot in terms of that tension between documentary where a documentary maker could probably make use of it properly framed and the journalistic mission, which is going to be interested in verification, accuracy. So how does that play out in your neck of the woods? It's such a great question. So first of all, I mean, we always have producers or directors who work on the projects with us. So we never really take user-generated footage that comes from outside and just simply put it out, either digitally or in our films. I would say the biggest change for front line has been journalistic more than, I would say even user-generated by the fact of YouTube and the fact that so many local people now are filming their own situations and atrocities that we just would never have access to before. And we have a great relationship with a couple of local journalists in other countries, especially Syria and Iraq, where we've been able to just get incredible scenes from them, citizens basically filming what's happening in their own towns. I would say that the early reporting that we did on ISIS, which was one of the first films that came out with footage of what ISIS was doing last spring, was only because we were able to curate the footage that we were finding on YouTube of these towns being overtaken by ISIS. This is all people with their iPhones or phones just simply loading it onto YouTube. And we worked with a local fixer who could then, and this is the critical part for front line, take that user-generated footage, the actual camera footage and verify it with three or four other people who are at the scene at the time. The other thing that we tend to do is make sure that we don't just have one citizen shooting an incident, especially in atrocity. We make sure we have three or four different people shooting the same thing, which is usually what happens. So if a town's been overtaken by ISIS, for example, and these are in the early days before we even understood what ISIS was, we had to verify that, yes, in fact, three or four other people shot this from different angles so that it wasn't staged. We had a situation in Nigeria which William knows about and probably prompted this question in which we were looking at the Nigerian military's hunt for Boko Haram, and we started to receive 120 at the end videos from people who were claiming that the Nigerian military was basically doing the most horrible acts, and that goes from slashing people's throats to just mass murder in the streets in the name of searching for Boko Haram. The video was some of the most visceral and most realistic video I've ever seen. You look at it and there's just no way it could be staged. You think, and it's very emotional. We actually then worked again with two local reporters who are really our lifeblood. I have to say the local reporters in these places are the people that we rely on the most. We were able to verify four of the incidents, but three or four of the incidents that were fed to us, we found were actually Boko Haram actually pretending as if they were the Nigerian military. Our struggle is that there's so much media out there and it's amazing and it's visceral and it's powerful. Our responsibility really is journalists first and filmmakers too, but journalists is we still feel this huge responsibility to verify. In this case we took on the Nigerian military. It was great and I think it was righteous and they in fact then had the ambassador said that they were going to finally investigate these atrocities. So that's the other word about journalism. When you verify it and you do the hard work of actually getting the goods, it can have an impact that you just can't determine. But it's so much better than just putting stuff out in the world in my humble opinion that isn't verified because then it won't have the same kind of impact. We can't call a government to task when they're doing something of that sort. So this is really our ethos and it's complicated but it's awesome, I mean come on, it's great stuff. It's better than ever. Francesca to follow, so you're based in the UK and what always strikes me when I speak over there or go to meetings over there is that the configuration of the overlap between journalism and documentary is a clear overlap, everyone at this table is an example of that overlap to some extent. But in Britain it's a far greater overlap. They even have met people from whom the words are more or less synonymous and that's intriguing. But you work over there and I wonder if you could just say a bit about how that plays out. Yeah, I think in terms of writing, the long form writing in The Guardian is feature writing. It's not that different from film documentary. When I was making the Firestorm project I got the writing from the journalist and I read it and I thought well do I voice this up as a film? It's a documentary script because this is how it's written. It sounds like a documentary already. We've got that tradition of kind of long form feature writing and of film and of radio. I mean documentary comes in all the mediums and in the newspaper in The Guardian we have film documentary, we have audio pieces and they all sit quite happily together in terms of kind of long form media which gives a particular take on the subject. I mean I guess that's where I see the role of The Guardian is not just news, it's not just reporting and it hasn't been for a really long time. It sees whether it's a written piece or an interactive or a film as bringing a particular angle to it. So The Guardian's mantra for like 100 years has been comment is free but the facts are sacred so it has to be, it needs to be absolutely accurate and verified reporting but being able to provide some kind of commentary on it some kind of angle means that it's not just agency news and so I don't see that as being all that different from what documentary is doing. And once reassuring about that in some way there's some members of one of my classes in this room but we used a text by Michael Shudson earlier this week and he was talking about Turn of the Century journalism in the US and he pointed out that around I think between 1890 and 1910 or so that the Sunday newspaper outsells the daily three to one and the price is about it's 300% more expensive than the daily. And it's interesting when you think today of the ways in which the news market has kind of been eroded by whatever can shoot it into your pocket the fastest but that role for context and for sort of deep diving for long form investigative is bigger than ever in a sense it's expensive and as the hatchet falls and a lot of news organizations it's alas the first thing to go but that's the space where it strikes me that these where documentary can actually the documentary tradition can actually be quite useful. It has to I mean I think that you know people providing news for free so there is there's no way that people are going to buy that whether it's in a paper or you know funding a film documentary it needs to be needs to provide more than than what you can get for free out there. So the guard at the moment is redefining the whole newsroom and its structure into what it sees as live and long form. And you know short like short form is not just daily it's you know it's minute by minute reporting so live blogs or you know stuff that is that is very short very raw very rough and then very long form either whether it's investigative journalism or crafted interactives and it just sees you know the space in the middle it doesn't see at any place the guardian for that because there's so much of that already out there. So I'd really love to get your opinions on interactivity in this context. So interactivity seems to be a terrific affordance it's something a lot of people are growing up they're growing up interactive they navigate the web they find their own stuff there's a sort of taken for grantedness for that the anecdotal evidence you get from teachers in the lower high school and grade school is the challenge of long form linear work but if it's a project based thing or a thing where students have to sniff around and find it they're pretty good at it. Clearly interactive documentary speaks to that space you can take a deep dive where you're interested or you can move on if you're not high rise was great that way you could really stop and dwell on the photos or you could just sort of slide across the narrative. But one hears back as a sort of advocates of long form linear we'll push back on that and say well but then different people have different experiences. You know if the point is to develop a citizenship with common knowledge one of the great dangers of interactive is that four of us look at this five of us look at the same text and we come out with five different texts that we haven't come out with a common base. Some of us have taken the deep dive some haven't. Do you see that as a problem or an opportunity? With newspapers most people just read you know read the first few paragraphs and the summary at the end anyway. I think that the idea that we have you know dedicated absolute time to watching things and taking everything in its entirety that you've read you've bought the Sunday paper and read it from beginning to end is a little bit of a myth. I mean I think that we've we've browsed through things through history and made our own narratives through that consumption. So I think it's so interesting. I think some things should actually still be linear films are just made for it. We have this one film that just came in that is an amazing film and I just watched it and I thought well there's no way I really want to break this one up and insert articles and have this an interactive around it because it actually authentically works as a film and I bet people will watch it because it's that good. I mean even younger people because it's a cool film and they'll be interested in the territory but I think a lot of times what we're finding at Frontline which is really where the opportunity is a lot of times the territory that we take on isn't actually suited that well for a film. It's really restricted to be in a linear format it would be much better and honestly like that's why the interactive space is so exciting to me as some of what we do is quite intense and dense and having to actually boil it down into a film and have to create that linear narrative is really tough and it doesn't give enough credit to the body of work around it. So a couple of the projects we've done that are interactive that I thought were the most successful have to do with that was the form they should be in. So I keep thinking like it's almost like there's the right form for every story you want to tell. If you're flexible enough and you're good enough as a storyteller you're going to know this one really needs to be an interactive because you need that flexibility but this one is the potential of being a beautiful film that would captivate you on television on your iPad or in the theater. You know I just feel like it's like having that flexibility is the key and that's hugely expansive for Frontline. So the flexibility is really key. The question is how to make that judgment. Scott Osterweil who's sitting in the back makes a distinction that I find a very useful summation of the debate and he says storytelling great storytellers have always been with us and it's the pleasures of listening to a wonderful story are not going to disappear. But play is also part of our lives and we kind of maybe get that disciplined out of us pretty early but play is another way to engage in narrative is another way to engage in an experience that's quite different open-ended whatever. Those two strike me as the poles and wisdom is understanding which is appropriate when how does one know that? We have to apply the same standards to any form and it doesn't matter if it's interactive or animated or an interview and I think when you talk about journalism like as these institutions these are very old institutions I mean Frontline in terms of the history of PBS is very old. It's probably been around since the early days of PBS certainly the Guardian Old enough. Old enough. Older than five years old. The Times is something like 150 years old but I think the most important thing is to approach any of these projects with the same rigor and kind of intellectual and journalistic approach and not to be overly enamored by the technology because the technology is always changing. It's a little bit like if I was fixated on the camera it's shot with. I don't care what camera it's shot with. I care about the story and the rigor and the reporting and the accuracy and the creativity and in an interactive piece with cats we put it to the same fact checking process that we would put any piece of journalism through and the transparency issues were the same as any piece of journalism and I think the formal aspects are incredibly exciting and expansive but it doesn't change the way we approach anything. I just want to jump in. Thoughts from High Rise which is in fact the longest time that I've ever committed to a subject area it's almost been seven years so I consider that a really large documentary gesture from our part but in the end when you look at the units of the things that I make they're sometimes 45 seconds, three minutes long so I like to challenge the idea that just because the pieces are short doesn't mean that the idea can't be big in the sense of an epic poem or I think of Manas in Kyrgyzstan the epic story that's told a little bit every night for I don't know how many nights and it's the pieces that all add up in the congregation in the viewer's experience that I find really fascinating and really challenging in the High Rise universe. I think that cats' pieces are incredibly successful because they have that kind of rigor and discipline in them not only of in terms of content editorial content but also in terms of what goes in because it's very alluring just to throw all this content in because you can because it's this ever expanding pot and film has to be this length or newspaper has to be this length and you can be very sloppy about just not editing something tight or just pouring in extra links and extra photos because you can and so you need discipline in terms of editorial and journalistic rigor but also creative rigor as well you're not making something so sprawling and unmanageable just because the interactive form can be like that. You know all the crossroads of documentary and journalism certainly have to do with among other things engaging citizenly activity informing people, encouraging a kind of yeah a kind of civic sense a sense of what's going on in the world around you enabling people to make decisions and navigate that world and there are a lot of probably a lot of techniques to do that and we have, I think we have there's fairly decent evidence that suggests that when people participate in an endeavor they're more engaged in it now your projects have often had a participatory dimension I noticed just even the Times print has digital anyway has a lot more space for reader comments than they did, the guardians are I must say I spend at least as much time reading reader comments as I do the articles themselves it's a wonderful way to sort of gauge how what piece of the story people think have been left out or what they think the cast of the story is I mean it's really quite useful what's your sense of the place of that you know from with Rainey it's about Jason too it's about making sure it's vetted properly but is opinion vettable should that, is there a way to yeah, yes I am here to champion opinion journalism and commentary I think we're aligned with this it's interesting that the guardian has a comment section as well where you specifically say comment comment is part of our work no I meant within the paper that you do have a section oh we have a comment section and it's just expanded comment meaning I think that's what we'd call it opinion commentary but there there is no contradiction between journalism and opinion I mean that's the position of the section which has been around since I think 1970 the op-ed has been around since 1970 and the editorial page has been around for much longer than that because we have these old framed examples of them from maybe a hundred years ago but I think that the point is and you were speaking about it before it's more your kind of tagline is more eloquent than what I've heard which is you're entitled to your own opinion but not your own facts which is just a rephrasing yeah and um we will allow people to say any interesting perspective as long as it can be backed up and also they have to acknowledge the other point of view and we don't allow propaganda I think there's a difference between propaganda and opinion um but I don't like this but if anyone tries to set up some binary opposition between journalism and opinion I don't think that's valid but where it surfaces is user generated content where I mean Rainie you're saying you have to scrutinize it in much the same way that you would anything you're full shot it's tougher than ever to verify but yeah it's richer than ever too so it's just out of layers and maybe it's domain specific in your case when people are uploading out my window through my window that's there's material that people have uploaded there right not in the main site but we do have a participation site and the fourth part of the New York Times piece short history of high rise was thanks to Lexi mainland who will be here as well who's the social media editor at the New York Times had the idea to make a fourth piece of a surprise of reader submissions of life in high rises around the world and so the fourth piece was made of that material but that's not exactly vetable stuff is it? well I mean I think it's vetable yeah we would ask for email addresses and names and often when we were using material I think the team went and verified the accounts and there's stuff beyond the photo there are stories there are many elements to vet and fact check and copy edit and on the archives as well we had to go through these very old photographs and figure out who shot it and who owns the rights to them well even cut lines I mean when you go into Merlin which is the photo system that is used by most major newspapers around the world to manage huge digitize archives I used extensively with Jason and you can't just take the cut line that's written in there and publish it that all has to be vetted and it was incredible how many errors there are in that data input system where photographers are just quickly writing in their captions those are not verified facts and so there's that whole process too of verifying your own systems of managing all this data I'm going to ask another but I'm going to open it up we'll open it up to the audience on each side so please use the mic and it's a question about new technologies or new techniques this is a fast changing domain I know some of you have been looking at 3D systems location based being able to append stories to the places where they happened is really a wonderful way to think about the morgue also to put that morgue to use and take those old stories and put them up where they happened any thoughts on that domain moving beyond where we are now in terms of technique and technology something that we've all hinted on in various respects which is that tension between interactivity and becoming immersed in a story so when do you just let the story take over and you become a passive recipient to a story that's unfolding at a pace of the storyteller or the musician have you what is the pacing of where you jump in and have to make a choice that breaks that fluidity and that's a big question in the immersive, experiential stuff like Oculus Rift or documentaries that move into the gaming space where worlds are created but then how do you tell a story within that space how do you spatialize storytelling and how do you storify spaces that's a very, very big question for documentarians and journalists to like I think it's a huge point that's actually the only reason I'm a fellow is to figure that out honestly because I think that's the question is how do you use this amazing technology to help actually actually engage ourselves but also younger people in the most important stories of our time how do we capture their imagination but how do we stay true to what we believe in which is some form of truth telling and that is storytelling so it's important it's hard but it's important to figure that out it's changing stuff that's process based will really benefit let's say from a game if you're trying to the game as a simulation say if you want to understand the economy like there's probably no better way you can describe it I think explanatory work is really there's a huge upside you see that like I have a 5 year old and an 8 year old and the games that they play are explanatory and they learn so much from them and I've been really studying how they learn because I think it's fascinating and I think a lot of that could be applied to what we do if our goal is to really actually engage and educate a citizenry we got to look at this technology because the way that they can get you to understand what it is that you're trying to explain is pretty provocative and it's difficult for some of us who want to really control our universe but I think it's key it's key to unlocking this especially for a younger generation and I think from a documentary perspective how do you make the interactivity poetic I mean I think that's the big question and that's, I mean I keep thinking about Michael Moore he was at TIFF in Toronto just a few weeks ago and he put out a manifesto about the documentary and he disowned the word documentary and he said that what he makes is films not documentaries and I think that's the other side of documentary that we struggle with as documentarians is this tension between nonfiction and entertainment and the feature length film and how documentarians are really just on their way to making fiction like when are you going to grow up and make fiction films isn't a question I used to often get and so there's that side of it too is the poetics and how do you how do you elevate this to poetry and to cinematic artistry I would just add a lot of what happens with great filmmaking and artistry is the emotional experience and in theory through interactivity you can deepen an emotional experience and through immersion I imagine at a certain point what scares me a little with Oculus Rift is how all consuming and how effective it can be emotionally and some of our responsibility in the nonfiction realm is to temper emotion with reality and be careful about being overly manipulative because it's so easy to manipulate the viewer and force them into certain feelings that's a good caution so I think as we think about propaganda versus documentary I think you could do some immersive propaganda piece be very easy to do well they have done it the US military has made a very successful game to recruit yeah it's amazing I've seen that the other thing about technology is it's quite boring but it dates and your very expensive and beautiful projects just aren't accessible after two years because flash doesn't exist anymore or it's not supported on that particular phone and it's quite dull but it's extremely important when you're making things specifically for technology and we don't really like to think about it that much because we like to make these things to be beautiful and use the latest technology but it's the kind of life of these things is probably something we should consider sustainability is a really big issue and I know we're kind of at a transition point and we're watching technology is changing faster than we can keep up with it but watching it play out in these forms is it's a rich period it's very much like the first, to me the first five to ten years of cinema where like a million and one ideas were tried and it shook down on a certain point to four or five mainstream approaches but the trick here and it goes to Kat's point about poetry if you want the mode of interaction to sort of work with what your topic is if you want a wholeness like engagement it's much harder to work with off-the-shelf stuff it sort of means you need programmers and you need designers which means expense and it's harder to sort of say well here's a choice of five or six systems take one and run with it that's where you start to lose the the haiku of any questions from the audience please if you just speak through the mic behind you well I just wanted to follow up I guess Jason began talking about here's how I interpreted it anyhow if you have material you become emotionally involved with it it has an effect on you but you all work in organizations that have a particular project, a particular ethos you know it has a you represent a certain value system so how do you work that remove yourself you begin to feel passionate about something and know that you have to reform it into a certain way that might be more in other words you are all in a group process but individually you push for certain things that are very able to really affect you how does that work in an organization particularly you have long-form reigning Francesca you have new media so to speak Katarina I'll definitely look up your work I'm sorry I didn't see it it depends like who you are as a person so I'll just speak for myself that you know I firmly believe in fair journalism so I don't believe in objective journalism so I never believe that like A equals B that was never why I went into it I really went into journalism because I believe that especially investigative work was crucial to our democracy it was sort of like my religion if I could say right what that means is you may believe something but what I really believe is the most interesting work happens when you really report against yourself and report against your assumptions so I happen to love that intellectual process some people hate it and some of our reporters hate it when I'm like how good is that source how many sources do you have are you sure the toughest questions of yourself because my belief is and this then tracks with front lines that if you ask yourself the toughest of questions right about your belief system you'll get closer to the truth you don't ever get the truth I mean what is truth anyway but you can get closer and closer and closer to understanding the problem that you're trying to uncover and so I mean I think that's why our work can sometimes really resonate is because we're trying to take an honest path through really difficult subjects that people have really diametrically opposed points of view on but if you do that carefully enough you can get somewhere so I don't have any conflict with that because I like that I would build on that by saying it's also in terms of story selection that at least in my section we encourage all types of viewpoints on issues so it's important to also include viewpoints you may disagree with and viewpoints that are just interesting I think that's often what we're looking for what's a really interesting take on a subject and that will help it also rise above all the kind of noise that's out there so it doesn't matter whether I agree with it or not but that's a very interesting argument and it should not all be kind of liberal progressive viewpoints we don't sit around thinking how can we find more stories to advance our own pet causes that does not happen it's more here's an important issue in the world we've heard a lot of that argument let's now put forward some other arguments and then the truth may come about through some of that it doesn't really matter whether it's interactive or film or I mean it's how do you be a good journalist and how do you stay within the editorial line of the particular organisation you're in as well as having your own ethical values and I would say part of that is training when I was at the BBC you go through this course after course of what the BBC line is the Guardian it's not quite so kind of militant as that but still from working in an organisation for a while you get a very good sense of what those editorial values are you bring your own values to that as well it really doesn't matter whether it's for what form it ends up in it's just that's how you train as a journalist I'd say the difference the only difference in new media is the kind of check so when I started at the Guardian eight years ago having come from the BBC I was suddenly able to make I came into the podcasting team because I was a radio producer and nobody asked me what I was making pieces on no one listened to them I made them I uploaded them then they were out I didn't have an editor I didn't have anyone and so suddenly from having these really quite strict process they have for the writers going through subs and editors and commissioning editors I had none of that so I think and I was a little but still no one checks me I commission my own pieces and make them and put them out and I'm just a mix of many now but yeah no it's because these are new kind of slightly wild west areas of one of the wonderful things about working for somewhere like the Guardian I'm not sure just like at New York Times is you have this kind of huge established organization which has got wonderful resources in it but because it's a new area it is quite wild west like you've got this incredible flexibility and freedom as well so you need to be quite careful of having strong journalistic kind of standards there but I would just say that your question is really just quite a general one about journalism in my opinion if you could go up to the mic and then yeah my question is for Rainie but by no means restricted to you you gave a really interesting example of working with user generated content and that's something that I've done a lot of and I'm really interested in and I was curious to ask you a little bit more about how in situations where you're working with users potentially in extremely risky environments do you talk to them about things like personal safety how do some of those conversations take place and how do you handle some of those very sticky issues that's a really really great question both in the ISIS story and also in the Boko Haram story we actually track down the people who have given the footage usually to an intermediary so we find the actual people who filmed it before we put anything out on front line and we go through the same consenting process that we would with an interview in most of those cases we did obscure identities so we made sure that anybody who is identifiable as either the citizen themselves or somebody in the shot that we thought was inadvertently going to be accused of anything we would certainly and we did a lot of it blur a lot of people especially in the Boko Haram story but we have this same process we care a lot about we care as much about the people filming themselves on their own iPhones as we do our own producers and reporters in fact they're much more vulnerable than our journalists because we can get our journalists out usually not all the time as you guys have seen lately but I do think that we take it very seriously I think a lot of them are not educated about the risks they're taking so we go above and beyond and we have been really fortunate knock on wood with that process but I think it's really important yeah that's great thank you sure Jim please yeah Jim Parity compared to media studies I'm very interested in how you all think about audience because obviously audiences are the great unknown they change they shift and so forth and I'm very curious about how audience comes into the picture as you think about your work and the crafting of the work so that's the first part of the question second part of the question is with interactivity how does that formula or whatever if you have a formula or if you have a practice how does that shift so I'll just keep that simple an audience we have a very unusual audience and I think everybody has a different audience this year so I think everybody will answer but for frontline we still have a very vital broadcast and a lot of people still watch us millions every week come to front line on television they watch us in real time that's kind of amazing to me because I never do anything in real time anymore but what's remarkable is that's our sort of core audience and they come every single time we have a fresh film what's been really amazing for us is digitally our audience is going through the roof like the numbers are incredible and that audience is much younger they tend to be in their 20s and 30s and early 40s and they come to us and they do all sorts of different things in our television audience we have a lot of people who are very well because we don't fundraise off of them and they love to interact with us online which I find to be the most incredible thing that all of a sudden we have a very active community so that's our growing community so we think about them all the time and that means we do different things actually we put things in shorter form but I think we should do that anyway so it's not like we're just serving the audience but we're just waiting for a big film to come out and we notice that this audience also loves our longer form films so they come they watch for an incredible length of time but like you said there's a myth that people watch the whole thing even on television right? We don't know what people are doing in their living rooms they could be going and getting a coke or coffee or whatever but you can tell when people are watching online a little bit better and they stay for a while so it's pretty it's a pretty optimistic trend of watching how our audience is growing online. I can say the same for the National Film Board of Canada we sort of did two very large digitizing projects at the same time one was begin creating work specifically for the digital space beyond high rise there's two other studios there's an English digital studio and a French digital studio that produced specifically digital work but the other thing that the NFB has done is gone into its 75 year history and pulled out over I think 4,000 films now and streamed them online and that's a mammoth project in terms of rights and clearing everything and getting it up and running but we find our audiences very similar to yours that the completion rates are phenomenal people watch long form for a long time online we don't have any problems with that at all and then the other part of our the interactive work that we've created the documentaries specifically made for the digital space usually our first audience we have multiple we call them ripple effect audiences so our first audiences tend to be early adopters so people that are interested in the technology so for example I made the first WebGL documentary several years ago called One Millionth Tower it was featured on wire.com for 48 hours because of the technology we used but the tweet that really represents how our audiences reacted to the work is that somebody said I came for the technology stayed for the story and so then once once people kind of interested people that are really into technology they oh WebGL so cool and they're like oh wait a second this is about city renewal and urban planning and citizenship and they got really into it and linked it to their own ideas about technology and then you get the educators and then you get the five we've had tweets from five year olds talking about spending you know 40 minutes on out my window so it really ripples out but definitely in our experience usually it's the people that are really interested in technology because those are the people that are on the net looking for new stuff so that's a bit of an explanation of ours I would add two quick things a huge buzz word around our office these days is audience development where we have a new masthead position which is like one of the most senior editors staffing up a whole group now in trying to find new ways of reaching people with New York Times content so this is like a really big idea that we're exploring but the other thing is how do you give kind of pleasure and satisfaction to your audience not just reaching more people but how do you kind of satisfy them and challenge them and I think that's the most fun thing to kind of test their interests and broaden the sense of of what you can publish because like I have the I feel fortunate to be able to experiment and do things where people say wow I never expected the New York Times to do that well the rhyming couplet is a really good example the rhyming couplet yes who would have expected a rhyming some people hated that in terms of the audience about half our comments are how much they hate rhyming and why is the New York Times doing a rhyming storybook but that's okay I don't come to the front pages of the New York Times to get you know rhymes but then that's an interesting example of how who comments you know who are your commenters on a site those aren't necessarily the general audience if you went to Twitter we didn't see that kind of commentary because on Twitter you're probably seeing new audiences talking about a New York Times piece whereas commenters were more likely the hardcore New York Times readers who found this out of the ordinary so to kind of gauge who you're listening to and where they're coming from as well that's a really good point I mean different groups are all I mean definitely the Twitter audience is very different than those who comment on our website are different from our Facebook audience or different from the people who comment on YouTube I mean it's a totally different the YouTube comments are really interesting they're really supportive of our extreme journalism in the field they love it like when you know when it's more I suppose I don't like to say vice like because we're frontline but actually I love vice and I watch vice but the point is they love that kind of work when it's really visceral they're much less interested when we have talking heads in our films and they just tell us you know this is boring they're not into it alright we hear you so thank you thanks for letting me stay in my chair so I had two questions Randy was very eloquent about having flexibility and choice about regular kind of linear storytelling versus interactive and she said what kind of in a way what kind of piece was good for linear I was wondering from any of you what kind of a story is most is best treated as an interactive story so that was my first question for any of you and the second is none of you really talked about platform and how your audiences are interacting with your material devices what you know and does that matter in terms of how you are producing what you're doing go ahead for a story shall I talk about platform because you know something that we're really obsessed by the Guardian because everyone is now moving on to mobile I mean that's the general trend anyway but you know people for news are checking their phones several times a day on mobile and it's a huge challenge when we want to make these really beautiful fantasy interactives and what does that look like on a really tiny screen so you know we're being really encouraged to think about making trying to make some projects next year that maybe you know come from a mobile point of view I mean I think for us kind of wearable technology and things like that are going to be exciting but really mobile is the key for us at the moment I would say the tablet for Frontline is the most friendly right now in the form that we are most which is the linear dock and so it's just because people are leaning back and experiencing the films and those numbers of like skyrocketed and I think on smaller phones and mobile people are watching for longer than you would think and we have the same challenge on interactive and we have the same project where we're looking at shorter form interactive but I would say journalistically why I like interactive so much is especially when we're doing collaborations with our partners at the New York Times and other places I'm finding a very comfortable home in the interactive space to do truly collaborative work with our text partners and still photographers and people so that we can combine our mediums that's where I'm the most excited is when we're working with like the pro-publicas and those folks where we're trying to think about how can we crack our own forms together when the reporting is really deep and when I feel like the linear documentary can restrict it is really just amazing like what the potential is with our partners that's where I'm most excited well in terms of platform some of our work is around half mobile half the audiences on mobile so it's not a theoretical question at all we are dealing it with this week looking at the desktop experience and the mobile experience and it's very challenging as you're designing because you want to have cross-platform pieces and you want to serve up the full experience on mobile without what you can't do is put up a black card that says go to your laptop computer to watch this video you have to give them something well I did that two years ago for a project and I just got hauled in and said you can never do that again you can't make a guardian project that does not work on mobile it's not allowed because you lose half of the audience and thinking about gesture and maybe you could talk about how you thought about tablet with high rise yeah the concept for the high rise the short history of high rise was inspired by the story books, the children's books that have been developed for tablets and so that was kind of the tactile inspiration for it and Jackie who is the phenomenal designer and developer at the New York Times with whom I had the pleasure of working we worked out a way in which we could do that in browser so that you don't have to download an app or it's all right there and there was real limitations even in the it was beautifully coded and beautifully designed but technologically it wasn't actually that complex but even still there were some really big constrictions especially on audio you can't do any crossfades on mobile you have to trigger every video there's just all these things that really limit the rich experience in the mobile environment that we're just really waiting for the WebGL and for the power of the mobile to kind of catch up to the kinds of things that we're able to do on desktop so that's a huge limitation for me as an artist working in the mobile world but gesture you're able to use gesture in an interesting way but we have to the technology has to catch up because everybody's on mobile so we're waiting we're almost waiting you know it's so interesting as people are just in droves going to mobile in smaller format it's just then if the technology catches up with our creative visions that would be that will happen that's where we're at MIT right exactly my question is the audience perception and the ethical issues that you just said when macro mode he claims what he made is not documentary that's just film but the audience won't think so they will think oh you are a documentary filmmaker and you are one of the best and if macro mode stage something there will be a big disaster and the same applies to other fields like for the games if you make a game with documentary you will say oh it's just a game it's nothing serious and for the like the radio is the same for the radio drama the war of the wars first came the people don't think that's a drama it's just thinking about the Martians are invading our world so what do you think about this are you thinking about educating the audience or interacting with them can we say both sure I mean the one idea I would put forward is this very basic journalistic concept of transparency where you can kind of do anything as long as you tell the audience what you are doing and it's a very simple idea but it's actually hard to do in practice and certain projects become very difficult to tell the audience what's going on here like if there's a real mash up between fiction and how are you going to explain to people what's real and what's not and some pieces we can't work with because they're just too complicated other pieces you come up with a very creative solution like we did this musical mash up piece where there were real lines spoken by Mitt Romney turned into a musical song and we wound up having an online article that went with it with all the lyrics and links to every line of video clips to source it yeah sometimes there are creative solutions but I think we have a lot of responsibility but it does beg the question I mean so one of the problems if you look at the market erosion that the BuzzFeeds Vices Vox's have had it's because they're working with niche audiences in a sense where they kind of know what the literacy level is technologically as well as aesthetically even in ways where I think all of you here are working with probably broader audiences that are more broadly conceived the audience that you've had the true viewers of frontline as well as those who you can do something different for the online folks because they're probably different but how how niche can you be and still do the work you're doing in terms of your imagination of the audience your conception of the audience there's only a few of us making bigger decisions about what we do and one of the interesting things is coming to frontline it is 30 years old so it is old it's people would be like well frontline doesn't do that and I would look around and say well where's frontline wait aren't we frontline and so this really opened up a whole dialogue about what are we who are we which may be a little bit different if you have a huge institution where you have so many different departments but for us it was freeing up the conversation about what we could do and that was the crucial turning point and you know also the other big difference is that frontlines always streamed it's film very early so you know David Fanning has always believed in being digital first so there's never been a sort of restriction on that front but I do think that we still maintain some very strong journalistic rules especially we could talk about some of this tomorrow it's really interesting provocative moments that we've been faced with where we've had to like Jason said just say sorry we can't do that you know it's not going to work for us I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about if any of you have kind of encountered resistance within your organizations particularly around kind of some of the more experimental interactive work and particularly at times when it's you know kind of costly like how how are you kind of weighing the sort of cost benefit and the sort of balance between the traditional work that you've done whether it's print journalism or long form video and you know some of these forms that are a little bit more kind of untested and aren't always guaranteed to reach audiences or the audiences that you might expect well generally there's a kind of confusion about what these are so when I work with a journalist or an editor or they want to first thing they want to know is what it's going to be and what they need to do and you say well we're still working on the concept and I'm not entirely sure what it's going to be yet that's really confusing for journalists because they're so used to having very clear brief so I was working with a journalist on a Bangladesh project earlier this year and he just wanted to know you know how many words literally and what I roughly wanted them to say so he delivered I think about he delivers about 10,000 words to me in the end which I used about 3,000 words of and he was you know quite upset about that but when he saw the piece at the end and it all came together he understood that you know the writing had formed the whole structure of the piece and the data and the graphics that went in all came from his writing but it's quite confusing for journalists to understand the process that it's going to take 6 months to make and what you need from them and how they're going to fit into it I see there's less resistance about lots of people I find at the Guardian anyway everyone wants to get involved in making these things because they they see them as being kind of shiny and sparkly and yeah we want to be part of making one of these but they just don't kind of understand really what they are and also I think that you know the new media is you know when I started working in multimedia in the Guardian I was being asked kind of you know how why they funding these radio studios and TV studios that they're building in the Guardian why this is very expensive actually investigative journalism is expensive and in a way why do we need to justify this different part of journalism when there's a huge amount of costs for the Guardian how it exists and I think that that is now being seen as you know that all of these different elements are part of the way that we tell stories and report and that we don't need to justify ourselves just because we're a new addition we do not need to justify ourselves one of the things I've really been I've liked a lot in the Guardian is the way that it offers links to readers so an article will I mean it's usually your own articles or it might be an interactive data set but the way in which you're able to sort of remind your morganism stuff that's that popped up two or three weeks ago but it will still get linked up as a subhead that you can go to about the story turning even ordinary print stories into a more interactive as in hyperlinked within the text when we've absolutely been encouraged to do that since we went online because it's seen as a hugely important part of telling that story it makes great use of your other resources allows users to sort of deepen their knowledge of the story you put a link in yesterday to a Guardian article and there were competitors for the best article so my question is somewhat related to the earlier question which is well I feel like I'm one of the early adopters that Kat talked about, I'm a software developer so you know when I go and check out this story that NFB put up I'm really excited about the technology and I'm wondering how do organizations decide the impact of these new media pieces and I know people understand intuitively that the audience is changing and we're moving away from just text and younger people want to see more but how do we really know that and what are the metrics are there any standard metrics that organizations are coming up with to measure the effectiveness and the impact of new media stories or we know how many people click on them sometimes we know how long they spend on them I'd say that success for a project isn't always just how many hits there are because if we put up a panda photo gallery it is going to get a lot more hits than an interactive about the Bangladesh clothing industry that I've spent six months on and the Guardian knows that if it wants lots of hits it needs to put kitten galleries will do it and I think it does have a lot of integrity as an organization that's not we don't only measure success through hits so these specific interactives have seen their successes also on how it's kind of regarded within these circles kind of peer reviewed but most importantly just internally whether we think they tell stories well and that's incredibly subjective but in the end of the day the Guardian is looking around at different ways of telling stories whether it's through Twitter whether it's through live blogs whether it's through interactives and it's looking at them going do we think that works or not and if it doesn't then it will throw it out of the way it became digital trying loads of stuff in a kind of haphazard chaotic way seeing what sticks onto the wall and the rest kind of falls off and I guess we look at these projects and go does this tell this story well and if so we'll try and do more of them and we'll try and do them better so yeah for the Guardian that's probably my answer I would say we judge everything the same way we judge our films and our traditional filmmaking it's the same thing it's similar in the sense that you do know how many people come to it but most journalistic news organizations don't just base everything on the numbers or we would do Pandas but you do care about the form and I think that's another reason to be an MIT is to really sort of crack the code on what's the right form for a news organization like Frontline there's going to be a special sort of storytelling that we do that's going to be different and the other thing I would say is that a lot of the most recent work that is interactive that I've appreciated the most is when it is cross platform with other news organizations and that's when I've seen the biggest impact is frankly when we're working with two or three other news organizations and then you just see not just the numbers but the engagement go through the roof because we're presenting it so many different ways and that's where I get really excited and that's crucial I know that at the National Film Board of Canada our mandate isn't just to reach wide audiences it's an important part of what we do but it's also to try and understand the social impact beyond what you can measure at the keyboard and I know that you at MIT are doing a project on measuring how organizations are measuring impacts so it's really important work being done here in collaboration with TFI about how to measure beyond quantitative numbers and look at broader deeper social impact social policy impact impact on sensitivity trading or education all those very difficult things to tangibly measure impact is tough to report on that's one of the biggest challenges is what is impact and that's very subjective too so what we think is impactful will be very different than another news organization or even a citizen what they think is impactful that will be your challenge Philip Napoli was here a couple of weeks ago I don't see him, he'll be here tomorrow in any case and he made a really good point that the very fact of a journalistic organization the fact that a community has a newspaper whether it's read or not the fact that it exists is already deterrent to all kinds of egregious behavior for fear that it might show up it's not about reading the story it's about the fact that there could be the expose that has people so what they've been doing is looking at communities with papers communities without to sort of give this some substance but it's an interesting, again one of those things we don't usually think about with impact the fact that there's a newspaper there that was one of my first print experiences we started a newspaper in the James Bay Cree region in the nine Cree communities and before then a newspaper an ink covering the news in that area it was always radio journalism and within three years I think all the leadership and all the communities had fallen because of the impact of the newspaper Wow, that's great Hi, I'm the digital editor at Le Monde in Paris and I'm a Neiman fellow and we struggle with the same thing as you guys and I was following up on the question about data but don't you have ways to monitor data inside interactive filters to see how people choose or click on stuff not only the figures how much people click on stuff and not only how long they stay on the page but what they do and then my question is what kind of lessons do you have from this? Do you decide when you say we put a lot of stuff on the web and we see what sticks on the wall we do exactly the same thing but then we have a hard time determining if something sticks on the wall can we deploy something from this, can we like have an industrialized way to do this stuff again and again because it works well with the audience and most of the time it doesn't so I was wondering if you had any experiences of this time I do know that Knight came in to fund us on one of our big new efforts and they're actually saying that we need to actually answer that question in part they want to know how long you learn about what users are doing with what they're experiencing so I think that that's like a whole new wild west of really understanding what people do once they're experiencing something beyond how long they stay and how many people come and it is the impact question it comes down to that again and now there's a couple of these audience development groups that are actually specializing in helping us figure that out so I think it's really rich territory to understand that the key to what we believe as journalists though which is the interesting corollary is we still have to do work regardless of what we think the audience wants I mean not as simple as do we put a panda bear up who's so cute but there are often times that we come we're doing journalism that we don't really know that the public would even know about we know they're not going to watch it in droves but we think it's important so I think that's like one of the things I hope when you're in deer is we learn more and more about audience usage is that tradition of journalism the earnest side I think whoever maybe it's from the open doc lab but whoever could carve out a niche in understanding this would have a great job and that every news organization will need somebody like I would love to have this like consultant on hand every morning I go in and say show me the boards and they put up you know well they are starting to do that well it's hard well we have these analytics groups and I can request reports and they're really cool with like pie charts and stuff what percentage of people are coming from social and mobile and with countries but what's often hard to understand is why people how do you interpret the data you can understand how long people are on a site and stuff like that but why are they making certain decisions I'm trying to find out a comment in question why aren't there more comments there's got to be more comments is it a design issue, a technology issue do people just really not have much to say about this issue I thought they had a lot to say but it's hard maybe we need focus groups rather than analytics old school I mean it's a classic paradigm battle between the quantitative qualitative approach one's really easy to generalize but it's kind of thin and the other is terrifically deep but what do you do with it we just talked about the UX lab this is before rather than after launching but this is a huge thing for the Guardian to actually care that much about how people are going to interact with these things not just interact with the whole website which kind of tracks the eye movement and what people are doing with their mouse and where they're moving on the screen so they test out various parts of the football side for instance they've just done this huge case study on where people are moving the mouse and if they design the home page in different ways what happens so they are kind of moving in that direction but it's quite expensive and specialist as you know and takes quite a lot of investment as well I was wondering if any of you had any insight on kind of future of where we're going to get financing for these projects especially once they start getting more complicated with Oculus Rift and if there's maybe kind of a fee for accessing these kind of documentaries or short form projects once they do start costing a lot more so that's my question I think that's actually a great question that's come up amongst the fellows a lot in the open doc lab that I think in William and I've talked about this that one of the things we've seen in documentary in general is that the costs have been going down right so production has just been less and less expensive as cameras have gotten smaller and one person can shoot and produce so this is the opposite direction and so if I were you I would identify the news organizations or the small centers of innovation that are starting to pop up practically everywhere and start pitching but pitch with a really good idea what's been interesting for us is that we get huge amounts of pitches on for films just linear films we get pitched all day long every single day but on the interactive side the stories and I think it may have to do with something that you you were talking about which is it's so hard to describe these projects that you build them that I would just counsel people who want to start making interactive films or whatever you want to call them to be able to describe them at least a little especially to somebody like me that would be awesome and I really have had these amazing circular discussions sorry about that in which I haven't really understood what it is that the person wanted to do enough to even understand if we could potentially fund them and that's a big challenge I know before you built it and you would speak to that more eloquently than I could but I do think that would be helpful and a few pictures too like just a few little hand-drawn sketches and wire frames just that would help to really help when you're pitching a visual pitch helps in these cases really really truly Andrew I just want to go back to a comment that Jason made just a few minutes talking about why aren't there enough comments or more comments I thought about a few research study data came out a couple weeks ago talking about how social media is really creating Twitter, Facebook is creating these echo chambers in so much they become empty chambers that's why maybe potentially there's a lack of comments so I'm wondering if the idea of trying to and the result I mean the study from that talked about how maybe with the result of feeling like they're uncomfortable to say something in their own opinion because in Facebook and Twitter we're allowed to surround ourselves with like minds right so we're not we don't want to be challenged by opposing views I'm wondering if folks in the panel or even folks in the room if there are research or other studies that's happening to really find a way to get the conversation happening between polarizing issues you know how can we get Fox news audience to watch CNN and CNN to watch Fox and so forth to really have a real debate someone just wondering if if there's any work on that space I think if people trust the organization like like with the times when we have published OpDocs on immigration issues filmmakers have often been surprised at the number of conservative comments they were maybe thinking they'd be in a kind of home team crowd but in fact you know some very passionate sometimes well argued commentary kind of slamming probably the position of the filmmaker I think that's a healthy sign that what we're doing has enough integrity that it's a safe space for opposing arguments but that's what I see that pure research was really provocative it's hard to see that happening but I do think there's you know especially with younger people they don't even really identify with a news organization so I imagine that these forums are going to happen apart from us to a large degree where you know multi- opinion formats and forums are going to start to pop up because curious young people are going to want to create them I mean that's another way to look at it because I hope those types of forums are created The Guardian seems to get some amount of those debates that span political stances and I think it's because in part it's a British thing but it's also time of day like you can sort of see when the Americans are awake and they come into the debate I mean they usually often self if it's a hot enough topic they'll self describe as and then they'll get British response it's a robust debate and it's interesting because the The Guardian Reader is such a stereotype and yet online it seems to have got a much wider audience which I think it's been very pleased to see that what we're all trying to do is widen our audience and that it is possible That's true for Frontline too So a question about data visualization and interactive data visualization We've got the tools, we've got the data that's certainly a growth area What kind of uses are you finding Are those helpful developments or are those just ways to parse what's easily available I think our challenge as interactive documentary makers is to make them kind of emotional and meaningful because there's some amazing data visualizations out there but because they don't have narrative and the kind of time element to them they can feel very dry and very cold and I actually think that's probably the next step for all of us is how to bring narrative and emotion into data which I think is such huge potential there for us but there hasn't been that much done I don't think that really grabs you and pulls you in Yeah, right now it mostly seems to be framing strategies to sort of make you understand why the data is relevant There was one that you guys showed about gun control that was so emotional I wish we had it up here Sarah, do you remember maybe you can shoot it around to people or Sean It was unbelievable If you all take a look at this you'll see what you're talking about the potential of having data is actually touch you What is it called? Periscopic It's really worth looking at It was really quite something It's on our moments of innovation website, there's the data from the mid 19th century Menard's visualization of French troops going into Russia and coming back and it's sort of beige and robust marching in and it's a timeline as well as a terrain map that goes in really huge comes out as a trickle It's a tear joker There aren't that many data visualizations that bring tears to your eyes and this is one that does the trick with you Okay It's really short but it's really quite something It'll trouble you I just stepped out so maybe somebody asked the question I was going to ask We've been talking about technologies but primarily interactivity Lots of other things have happened to journalism in the last 20 years and visualization is one the ways in which mapping and so forth and representation of content through visual delivery There's so many different things that have happened so I'm just wondering what maybe two or three other major areas of change and shift through technologies and innovations are on your minds I like to give a really crude example just because it's a really nice counter to what I do which is journalism by Twitter One of our journalists, John Henley, who actually wrote the beautiful text for Firestorm also did a whole load of reporting using Twitter, getting people to send him to different places to do the reporting and actually during the London riots as well another one of our reporters did that and was basically being fielded and by people using Twitter and I think that technology in really cheap and quite crude ways be really powerful in terms of where it's driving journalism Did you mean additional technologies that are impacting journalism or just different? Yeah, technologies have changed the way journalists There was an article in the Globe Sunday I won't remember the title of it but it was just about reporting in the Middle East so reports are coming in from people who don't even consider themselves journalists who are putting together information from a variety of sources and how their information is better than anybody else's but the problem is is checking it and getting it accurate because it's a professional element isn't there but there are these changes these organic changes that are taking place in this terrain and so I'm just curious about the thing I would mention is drones Drone footage is amazing I'm working with this filmmaker who's in China with this incredible footage that I thought was like stock footage, this aerial footage he's like where did you license that footage he's like oh no I shot that footage with a drone I got the best drone operator it's like wow that's impressive, really? Security though all the drone, that's the other thing we've got to rename those things something else exactly and journalists are I know The Times has been thinking about how to use them for news coverage for a lot of interesting things you could do in terms of measuring sizes of crowds or all sorts of news gathering applications but the laws are iffy there, domestic drones are not permitted in a lot of situations and I would just argue that the push in technology and these new technologies that are challenging us in so many ways in our daily lives and in our professional and working lives beyond the technology I think what's really important to remember is how it's shifting our entire methodology as a documentary and I think what the new media has afforded just like you say is citizen journalism participatory methods that really challenge some of the troublesome and troubling elements of our practice the exploitative ways in which we have told stories the way in which certain voices have been shut out of stories all those really deep questions that these technologies are making us face is really important and also breaking down the boundaries and the silos between journalism and documentary and even fiction and I would argue going beyond that looking at how for me documentary can work with theater and can work with performance in really deep and profound ways that renew some old traditions and create new ones in the way that we search for meaning and justice. Those are like eloquent closing words for this session, I mean really that's great that hits the nail on the head thanks. Hey, want to thank the panel and