What if Netflix produced news? How to bring a media literate audience to journalism

What if Netflix made news? That was the title of my keynote presentation to TV2 staff at their yearly gathering in Sweden. Over three decades I've launched several stations teaching videojournalism, trained, and taught journallists in China, Russia, India, across Africa, Europe and the United states.

As a recognised global leader in videojournalism in time I sensed a flaw in the social media age. Attention became the new currency, and my research which would earn me a PhD proved how to address attention by seeking to memorable. But how do you achieve that?

It's done my an advanced form of videojournalism called Cinema Journalism. I'd been recommended to speak to several clients including TV2 on Cinema Journalism. But what is cinema journalism (CJ)?

A five-minute trailer )

It comes from a journalist or factual storytellers' creative and artistic intentions in storytelling and addressing the inadequacies of conventional videojournalism. It used to be fringe, but it's now taking off because of its approach at providing audiences with memeorable and thought-provoking content. 

You'll be surprised at the growing, but still small number of journalists in Network television and freelancers creating cinema journalism stories. 

Take one of my Friends like Raul whose work I've followed for 15 years. In 2024, he won an Emmy.

A five-minute trailer of a lengthier piece I have in mind.

I uncovered CJ from a hunch initiated by a feature I made from training the UK's first regional newspapers to become videojournalists. It was a unique program set up working eith the UK Press Association. This is what a participant said. My work with them won the international videojournalism award in Berlin, to which the internaitonal jury described it as like cinema.
The contemporary originators appear to be a group whom in the 1990s were the UK's first videojournalists (VJs). I happened to be one, and re-interviewed and reseached their work. I then researched the work of global VJs showing signs of cinema journalism (watch a trailer here), which audiences would themselves label.

I combined that with my own lived experience, and work across Africa, Europe, in Russia, China, India US and Beirut (auto ethnography), and interviewing near 200 international, mainly British media experts. That became part of my PhD.  

  
Amongst the contributions to this vast study was also the father of cinema verite or Direct Cinema Robert Drew whose interview I played at the Apple Store in London. Drew had inititally considered cinema in journalism, but was rebuffed. It was the French academics who embraced his work as documentary.

A five-minute trailer of a lengthier piece I have in mind.

Traditional videojournalism often relies on established "rules" and formats accrued from television, developed largely from TV News's inception in the 50s and largely via print journalists.

Today, TV journalism for a spectrum of audiences can lack nuance, emotional depth, or a compelling narrative structure. At a meeting with BBC senior execs I presented films which had one executive wipe away tears whilst watching. It's not one system, cinema isn't.

It's a vast universe and the practitioners, many of whom win awards, embrace an emotional intelligence and empathy to engage with an audience to "feel how I (the cinema journalists) feels". That doesn't negate the Western tenants of journalism production.

It collapses multiple disciplines around the storytelling endeavour, encompassing elements of cinemas, data motion graphics, documentary, design, photography, television's innovative language, and radio/podcasting's sonic dramaturgy.

My fascination led me to examine cinemas theories and expressions, such as lens language, shot rate, different narratives and how they were expertly applied to factual content, without fictionalization, to create more engaging and impactful journalism.

And then there was the cognitive science of storytelling, examining how audiences derive meaning from film and how the brain ("cinema brain") responds to different visual and narrative stimuli.

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Two exciting things happened more recently.

Reviving work I did in Africa, one could create cinema journalism aligned to different cultures. Remember there's no universal model of cinema. In Africa, for instance, terms like Ubuntu and Sankofa in storytelling unveil community testaments (deserving attention) that hold similar weight to Western parameters of objectivity and neutrality. Going forward by teaching these methods, we can re-establish cultural ways of journalism.

The next phase is using AI (Retrieval Augmented Generated) ethically. Users can search my research, archives and interviews with experts over thirty years, to come to their own conclusions. I believe RAG and AI Agents will play a crucial role for content producers. This is a piece of work that combines Gen AI and cinema journalism which I presented at the UK Screen Forum.

A five-minutes.

More below on Cinema Journalism

Let me know what you think?