Session 3: Amateurs, Authorship & Journalism: Self Publishing & The Digital Age

Walter Benjamin, The Film & Liquidisation

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Walter Benjamin has been previously covered when talking about The Author As Producer. This is further highlighted in his work: The Work Of Art In The Age Of Mechanical Reproduction. I feel it pertinent to comment that the book cover shown above is particularly unique and clever, showing the spine of the book itself repeatedly as if on a shelf. This mass media or reproduction is significant in that the audience has greater access which allows themselves to become critics but eliminates it's unique existence. Benjamin mentions a quote in his work in which Abel Gance (1927) states that "Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Beethoven will make films". Benjamin points out the power of film and that it is has:

"a destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidisation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage".

Liquidisation can be seen to mean, dissolved, losing it's structure or to dumb things down. Emphasising that the fine arts then become popular culture. That there is something authentic about an original piece of work but when it is mass produced it spreads it, losing its authenticity and is open to different interpretations. Some may see this as betraying the original but these different translations means you are making it accessible to a whole new audience. For example producing a work as a film will allow people who do not have access to the literature to see it in a different form. Although this has different time constraints to a book it is allowing it to reach an audience who do not necessarily have to be literate. You can know what a book is about without actually having to read it.    

H.P Lovecraft "Amateur Journalism"

H.P Lovecraft published an essay in 1966, written around 1920 titled: Amateur Journalism: Its Possible Needs And Betterment. Lovecraft talks of amateur journalism within his essay and splits it in two sections. In the first section he is worried that work written by amateurs has no body to govern what they produce. He would rather have a "centralised authority capable of exerting a kindly, reliable and more or less invisible guidance in matters aesthetic and artistic". He rather it be managed by a "small group of members representing various phases and ideals" suggesting he is in fact encouraging a democracy rather than a dictatorship, so as to have a group representing diversity. He does suggest censorship which contradicts the idea of a democracy and free speech, It is rather difficult to have a body that undertakes this job, for example if you look at the present day with the likes of Twitter, is it feasible for a governing body to over see everything that is written? With regards to blogs there are certain blogs that have an editorial board so that some form of quality control is put in place. It is impractical to suggest what Lovecraft is advocating, to aim for a standardisation in amateur journalism.

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In the second section Lovecraft talks of technology and the "difficulties of printing", especially financial problems it obtains. He mentions that the printing press is complex and expensive and that the introduction of the mimeograph as a low cost option, where the machine uses ink and stencils. He goes on to talk of distribution channels and the difficulty in circulating papers, and the use of producing a number of carbon copies and passing them through designated routes to try and cover large areas.

Michel Foucault "What Is An Author?"  

Michael Foucault's paper: What Is An Author? addresses the "relationship between text and author and with the manner in which the text points to this figure". It poses a number of questions, for instance is it correct to say that a work always has an author? Is everything an author writes a piece of work? Even if that piece of work is a list? Foucault  proposes that an author's name is a description and that it serves a particular function for example:

"if we proved that Shakespeare did not write those sonnets which pass for his, that would constitute a significant change and affect the manner in which the author's name functions".

The Open University produced a video which captures Foucault's essay in a nutshell. Entitled: The Author - Outside The Book. This video questions whether an author is "a literary stamp of approval". I think it is important to note that Foucault has been talking of the death of the author from around the time of the 1960's and touches on the idea of intentional fallacy, where there was a previous mistaken belief that what an author wrote and what his interpretation was of his work was the final written word on this piece of work. This is no longer the case where you have a number of interpretations of a piece of work. The question raised here is who is the author of this? Is it the original author or the person who produced the interpretation? It is far more than writing, it is also a way of interpreting and classifying works.

Matthew Kirschenbaum "What Is An @uthor?"

In Kirschenbaum's article What Is An @author?, he addresses the issue that in the past you may have read books and essays produced by an author, which would have been a restricted amount of literary materials on that particular book. Nowadays with the use of Twitter and blogs amongst many others it has opened up a vast new area of information regarding a particular book, paving way for almost an information overload on a given book. Social media has also made way for authors to have more of a presence on social media sites sites such as Twitter, This allows them to reach out to their readers or audience in a way never seen before. Readers can interact with authors creating an author reader relationship with use of tweets being replied to in real time, a huge change from the classic book tour where this was perhaps your only chance of meeting your author idol and getting your question answered.

Journalism: An Insiders Prespective

An interesting insight into the world of newspaper journalism was presented in a talk conducted by Eliza Anyangwe, a freelance editor from The Guardian. The prospect of the end of "fortress journalism" was presented as a move from print to digital to mobile. Does this mean the end of the newspaper as we know it? No, not exactly. The traditional newspaper can still co-exist with digital forms. What has clearly changed however is how these different news stories on different platforms are published. Open journalism is a phrase that comes to mind as the biggest change, a detailed definition is given below:

http://www.wan-ifra.org/system/files/field_article_file/OpenJournalism_ExecutiveSummary.pdf

Previously if a journalist publishes an article and it is printed and made available to the reader, the reader can decide if they like it or not and if they did not like the publication then they would not buy it again. However, with open journalism as newspapers have gone digital, the journalist is no longer the expert as fans are able to contribute and some of which may be experts in the topic that the journalist has written an article about, more so than the journalist themselves. Open journalism is seen as a business model, reaching out to a wider community. There are still differences between the different newspapers using different models. The Times adopting a paid subscription service where as The Guardian have not.

The success of the new move to the digital medium has brought about a change in this model. These are as follows:

Generation 1: Sponsors and members to keep them there - engagement and jobs advertising.

Generation 2: Traffic, get people to read content, sponsors, members - engagement, which has changed with the online community. 

This engagement online now poses the question of quality, you have to weigh up what value does the engagement have, should newspapers be allowing comments to be open. Or does this open up the way for more trolls or extreme views to be aired. Should extremist views allowed to be aired? The question of free speech is brought into the equation and whether this should just be left to Twitter and Facebook and not brought onto the newspaper's network. 

Open Journalism Positives & Negatives

Open journalism is user generated, and therefore can be seen to be diverse in nature as opinions are from across the spectrum. From a source that is governed, we can ask the question of how diverse can it be? It reflects the views most common to it's editors and owners who all may have biases in some form, cultures and backgrounds have to be considered when reporting on stories.

Open journalism does come with it's downsides, as it is user generated a lot of what is produced may be good however a vast number of it is no good. Your digital footprint also must be considered, once you produce something and post to the web, once it is seen it cannot be unseen and if it has been re produced there is no way of taking it down or erasing it. This also poses the question of archiving. What do we archive and who should be in charge of archiving? For example if WordPress no longer existed what would happen to all blog posts?

The Golden Age: Self Publishing & Social Media

There is no doubt that the introduction of social media sites such as Twitter & Facebook have changed the way in which we receive our news and also the way in which news is published. No longer are people solely going to the big national newspapers, whether it be print or digital, but people are relying heavily on receiving news on social media sites. This allows news to be received much quicker than waiting on a published article. People of course are using apps such as Sky News to gain up to date, real time news as and when it happens. However these articles tend not to be complete as it is a way of just getting news to the reader as fast as possible.  

Twitter is a prime example of this self publishing journalism that we are now finding as everyday folk like ourselves are turning into journalists and reporting on the news. Daniel Wickham, an LSE student, tweeting about the Charlie Hebdo story himself highlighting facts about each leader that attended the march with added links to back up his stories. Where traditional journalists were telling a different story Daniel was taking a different angle and proved to be credible as he backed up his story with facts. In this way he became a journalistic asset. 

The use of digital tools for example camera and video footage means that everyday people have the ability to report on stories that the national newspapers also rely on for eye witness video accounts as opposed to or as well as their own video reporters.  

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The podcast: The Year Of Engagement: Looking Back At 2014, is an insightful listen to the digital media trends of the past year. There is mention of social media over taking search engines in how readers find news and mobile over taking desktop as to how we read and share our news. There is reference to Facebook as being a giant, and not just a social media outlet but a news outlet, in which people find content. There is also a reference to the fact that newspaper sales are falling and the two different models adopted by the two news giants The Guardian and The Times, although two different business models in modern journalism they are both based on the concept of community. 

Contributoria: "Community Funding, Collaborative Journalism"

Journalism is changing, there are citizen journalists and bloggers who are writing for free, how do trained journalists and free lancers compete with this? One response to citizen journalists working for free is: Contributoria, an independent journalism community. It encourages teamwork, writers and journalists collaborate in editing and publishing an article. It is a 3 month process from pitching an idea to it being published. Journalists are able to state a price they want for their article and then the article appearing amongst others in monthly online issues.  

This model of crowd funding journalism however has not proved itself, one site in particular Spot.us had to be shut down for a number of reasons. A few of these being because many of the projects were funded by friends and family as opposed to the community and people only tended to fund the once.

The Last Call & The Last Word

The Last Call, by Clay Shirky (2014) talks of the end of the printed newspaper and the three things newspaper journalists should be doing to ensure job safety:

1. Get good at understanding and presenting data.
2. Understand how social media can work as a newsroom tool.
3. To get newsroom experience, working in teams and launching new things.

The media is still doing what it always has done, it is just doing so in different forms, mediums and in different ways. It is ultimately about connecting people to stories. But open journalism has allowed for faster access, reaching a wider audience and the open dialogue that opens the communication channel for comments on these stories. Everyday people have become more than just the readers of news, they now in fact contribute to the news.