fauna corporation

The New York Times LENS Blog is a constant joy for me (even when it presents heartbreaking content) due to its focus on photograph-heavy narratives.

This morning I watched a piece by David Gonzalez, who revisits photographs of the Bronx neighbourhood he grew up in, 30 years after the photos were taken.

The audio slideshow is very simple, but very moving because of Gonzalez’s personal connection to the people in his photos and neighbourhood he left. It is also a good example of how our collective narrative is sometimes found simply in documenting our lives, then revisiting the documents (be it writing, photography, film, etc.) with the advantage of hindsight.

It is, at its essence, why cave painting is still so compelling for us after all these centuries: it speaks to something - a need to document our lives, perhaps - very deep in our consciousness.

View the slideshow here.

Last week, I was able to get access to the Fan Photo area of the 67th World Science Fiction Convention’s Masquerade, here in Montreal. Most importantly for this freelance writer, I got access without having to pay the full one-day membership of $95 (nor the $275 full-convention membership) in order to take the photos you see in the audio slideshow below.

I guess Sci-Fi Convention Masquerades are fairly mainstream now, but despite my life-long love of science fiction, this was the first one I had visited.

I found it to be a fascinating combination of small community homeyness (ie: everyone knowing each others’ first names) and large-scale operation (ie: professional photographers, stage managers and security personnel controlling the action).

Also fascinating was the fact I was asked the same question four times:

“Um…Are you supposed to be here?”

There wasn’t any audio from the event that I felt was compelling enough to add to the slideshow. So instead, I wrote a simple musical piece that I hope implies Sci-Fi, and you can hear that looping in the piece below.

Also, the term “Pocket Universe” is a Sci-Fi term I thought was appropriate for my experience at the event:

“A universe or reality completely separate from ours which is much smaller, may have different natural laws, and may be artificially created.”

I really enjoyed shooting these photos and being present behind the scenes of the 67th World Science Fiction Convention. My apologies in advance to the obviously talented costumed participants who are unnamed in my piece: there was no way to keep track of who wore what, with the program I was given.

I hope the following quick and dirty audio slideshow offers you a sense of the experience (remember to turn on your speakers!).

Let me know your thoughts.

My recent visit to the Montreal Guitar Show inspired me to think more about how guitars are mass-produced and where the craft of luthiership differs.

Because of this, I met up with Mike Kennedy and Jeremy Clark of Mile End Guitars, who each craft guitars by hand under their own company names (Indian Hill Guitars and 52 Instrument Company, respectively).

The guys at Mile End Guitars were good enough to talk to me about luthiership and to take me through the process of how guitars are made - when guitars are made from scratch. I created the following Audio Slideshow to share the experience with you. Remember to turn your speakers on!

Note: If the slideshow images seem a little small, I suggest watching it in full-screen mode (click the box with four outward-facing arrows on the lower right of the player).

Let me know what you think.

will blue skies emerge for the journalism industry?

The Future of Journalism - it’s a phrase that should come with onomatopoeic sound effects (preferably something like “Whooosh!” rather than “Plop!”), as it implies a bold future full of cutting edge techniques and narratives.

The reality is that despite the concerted efforts of experts, schools, industry leaders and journalists no one really knows what the future of journalism will be. I respect these people: I’m in the mix, too, of trying to predict (or is it decide?) what the future looks like.

Given that the jury is still out on the future of the music and film industries - two fields that have suffered through shifting business models for a longer period than journalism - I suspect it will be awhile before journalism finds its next true path. Rest assured the future of journalism will in some way be tied to the revenue models of whatever formats emerge.

In my reading, I’ve found several different models that all claim to show the future of journalism. Each has potential, in my opinion, but I’m not certain that any can truly and uniquely claim to be the future of the craft, at least at this nascent stage.

Either way, here is a sometimes baffling, sometimes inspiring, often contradictory list of potential ways forward for the journalism industry.

• Community Funded Reporting: As represented by Spot.Us, the public can commission investigative pieces by journalists, which can then be re-purposed by other (ie: larger, mainstream) outlets. The community members make donations that, with reporter fund-raising, offset the costs of the investigative pieces. If pieces are purchased by larger outlets, the community payments are reimbursed, and if not they exists for wider distribution under a Creative Commons license. The public benefits from having topics of concern looked into, the journalists benefit by having the high cost of their investigations covered (ideally), and mainstream news outlets benefit by picking up pieces from a wide pool of proven freelancers.

• Hyperlocal and Nichepaper sites: To offset the crazy glut of information that we are all drowning in, Hyperlocal and Nichepaper sites suggest a radical reduction in the amount of news received, through very deliberate filtering. Hyperlocal sites (such as EveryBlock, or Placeblogger) carry or aggregate the news of extremely specific locations, such as certain districts, neighbourhoods, or even street corners; Nichepaper sites (such as TalkingPointsMemo, the now-defunct Pharmalot, or even Huffington Post) create and filter content specific to certain topics, such as politics, entertainment, etc., and allow a more profitable advertising margin for parent companies due to targeting a more dedicated audience.

• Online Only News Sources: As obvious as it may seem, the move to online-only news sources seems to be a relatively new model for news delivery (at least in terms of professional journalism goes). This could be a result of traditional (print, broadcast) media outlets not knowing how to heavily monetize the ‘net, or not trusting the web as news source without being complemented by more traditional delivery models. Online News Sources such as Global Post, the recently-shifted Seattle Post-Intelligencer, or Ground Report represent examples under this model.

• Foundation-Funded News Sources: ProPublica comes up as an example of the newer breed of foundation-funded media outlets. Courtesy of the Sandler Foundation (and, to borrow a phrase, “viewers like you”) ProPublica uses its funding to focus on investigative journalism, which is usually the most respected but least funded area of any news outlet. Other outlets (such as Grist) are funded by a combination of foundation funds, advertising and donations - it is a similar model to PBS and NPR in the US.

• Please Ignore the Dinosaurs: Sites such as Open Salon, NowPublic, and a great many others, bypass the top-down traditional media model entirely by carrying content written by the laymen (note: some of these laymen are actually experienced journalists). The model is gaining momentum, despite the obvious concerns about the veracity of information, sources and formal training, and could offer a way forward - especially if this flat business model is hybridized with other models, such as the hyperlocal example above or page-count-based model below.

• Please Feed the Dinosaurs: This model suggests that citizen journalists feed stories into the more traditional news outlets, who can then run with the story. At its best, this model offers a hybrid of trained journalism and the immediacy of on-the-ground footage and opinion (an example being NewAssignment). This model offers hope for the future because it is based on the engagement of readers and (again, at its best) a conversation between a news outlet and its committed readership - an arrangement of interest to many advertisers, with potential for value-add branding opportunities - that also benefits from the standards of professional journalist involvement. (NOTE: Before everyone gets their hackles up about me calling print-based newspapers dinosaurs, rest assured that I am both a fan and subscriber to the old, flat trees.)

• Page-Count-Based Journalism: A model that pulls straight from web analytics tracks the popularity of a journo’s piece and generates revenue for the writer based on the amount of advertising the page brings. Sites such as Newsvine even offers a leaderboard where you can see how popular contributors’ pieces are.

• Underwritten Journalism: Finally, a model representing the Ol Skool (as in, the ol skool patronage of the Medici family) sees writers receive funding from companies for the content they write. One example would be Xconony, whose writers are not specifically journalists (rather, writers are presented as “experts” in their field), or Stephenville Dreams, where the corporate sponsor expects no specific mention of their products in the site they helped originate, fund, host and benefit from. Clearly there are some gray areas in these models that raise concerns about conflicts of interest (or the payola models of mainstream radio), but perhaps there are ways to operate inside these models with transparency.

The above is only a short list of ways that the journalism field is trying to revolutionize its business model. Each of these examples is in use now, and we’ll be able to assess the effectiveness of each one in the coming months and years, as more information becomes known and more writers experiment with different revenue structures.

As well, new models will emerge as technology changes and new tools become so widespread as to become ubiquitous - a recurring theme in the news media.

If you know of other models that I’ve overlooked, or have thoughts on the above, please leave a comment.

This morning I thought I would post about some audio slideshows from the International mission in Afghanistan.

For Canadians, this conflict is our largest since World War Two. For other nations, such as the US and UK, Afghanistan often receives less coverage than the bloodier and (arguably) more tangled mission in Iraq.

Because of that, I’ve decided to highlight three audio slideshows - two from the New York Times and the one from the Guardian - that give a sense of the daily routine of the conflict and its ultimate cost.

The first and most recent, Scenes from a Raid, gives a first-hand experience of the night-time raids that NATO soldiers engage in, in an effort to discover Taliban fighters, weapons caches and mobile phones. The photos (taken at night) are not the highlight of this piece - instead, I was struck by the sound design and how it brings the viewer into the chaos of the experience. This piece was produced by Michael Kamber, James Dao, Amy O’Leary and Jeff Delviscio.

The second piece (credited only to “the Guardian.co.uk”), interviews a British mother whose son was killed in Afghanistan, and gives a sense of the human toll this conflict has taken on the families of NATO soldiers, who are left only with boxes of memories and medals.

The final piece, Kabul in Transition, is by NY Times’ photojournalist Tyler Hicks. It documents the changing face of one Afghan city as a symbol of the addiction, destruction, unemployment and power struggles of the Afghan people since the “fall” of the Taliban. While this piece is a little older (originally carried in 2008), it offers a view of the Afghan mission I’ve seldom found in other audio slideshows - one that shows the on-the-ground experience of the Afghan people by someone who’s seen the changes since the conflict began.

There is little doubt that one of the least-recognized tragedies of war is that it offers compelling narrative for journalists. My hope in posting about these three pieces is not to glorify the NATO mission, but simply to try and highlight the full cost of the conflict as shown through these artful, multimedia pieces.

is the answer for journalists simply lying in the weeds?

An interesting article by Katharine Mieszkowski for the Future of Journalism blog on Open Salon ponders what would happen if the top journalists for the New York Times left to form their own news outfit.

The idea is spawned by the idea that these writers carry niche / brand cachet that would translate to a credible value-add for related advertisers: advertise your product here and get access to a proven, committed audience (and, indeed, the NYT’s experiments with pay-walls suggests that they too recognize the potential profitability in these writers).

In a related move, many sites are commenting on AOL’s latest activities, which include hiring up journos from across the US (to the tune of 500 full-time and 1,000 freelance staffers) to staff an emerging journalism uber-pipeline.

Although it is unclear what AOL has to gain from doing this, given the market declines in the journalism industry as a whole, the move seems to be based on the Google-buys-YouTube or Yahoo-buys-Flickr models, which is: something, somehow, is going to happen with this industry and we want to be there when it does. In general, it seems the mega-companies are content to operate at a loss for several years on speculation that they’ll eventually corner a specific media market.

And in this, AOL may not be wrong. Despite the crushing defeats of traditional (print-based) media, the ubiquitous nature of the web and the growth of nifty little content delivery tools has brought a renaissance of sorts to journalism.

However, this growth is not just Citizen Journalism specific - since 2000 Journalism Programs have experienced a 4% annual growth at the undergrad level and a 5% annual growth at the graduate level despite the gloomy picture painted for the industry as a whole.

It seems that while publishers and prognosticators are wringing their hands about the future of the field (and, I would argue, rightly so), students, citizenry and major media outlets think there is enough potential in the emerging models to invest their effort, time and money.

While all this may not necessarily assuage the fears of full-time journalists (or dry the sweat from the brow of freelancers), it should offer some level of reassurance.

After all, given the difficulties journalists face in this shifting economy, even the most jaded journalists must feel that journalism is still something to believe in.

These recent developments suggest that others still believe in journalism, too.

Readers who are close to the management at Fauna Corp know that we’ve been through the process of letting go and struggling through loss recently. A much-needed jaunt to the countryside has allowed my Accomplice and I to gain a bit of distance on things, and return to the city a little more sure-footed.

It seems appropriate, therefore, to post about an Audio Slideshow that I stumbled across about a week ago, posted up on duckrabbit. The piece, Zen and the Art of Sandcastles, is an effective and engaging meditation on the nature of impermanence and cyclical nature of loss.

The Audio Slideshow is the result of one of duckrabbit’s training sessions, where students were asked to go out and find a story in a single day, and then produce the slideshow the next. The results are far more than a simple student exercise, and well worth checking out.

Watch: Zen and the Art of Sandcastles.

Once again, I am struck by the number of multimedia / web journalism training opportunities that exist in the UK compared to Canada, and by how newer media is more seamlessly integrated into traditional journalism outlets over there.

In a way it is exciting to know this training exists and to see media convergence taking place, but it is frustrating to not have these same resources available to those of us in “the colonies”. Perhaps we could travel to the UK with boatloads of fish, timber and furs and barter an exchange with the Crown…