Freelance Media Discussion

Hello all -

(Mods please move this post if not in the proper spot).

This post is for those who work in the freelance media world and I wanted to start a discussion on where people see the technology going. The differences in USA vs Europe and elsewhere, and what jobs are changing as a result of the explosion in potential better ways to do things.

If you are from this world, please say hi!

a reply to: mrperplexed

Hi, I've been a media person, from stringer to producer since 2000. With the advent of 4k phones and streaming, everyone is a media person. Technology has changed every thing.

a reply to: mrperplexed

I don't work in that world, but I am going to chip in anyway.

The ability to provide context to a situation, by shooting video, taking pictures, or making a report from a scene, is no longer the sole territory of the professional journalist. For some time now, it has been possible, indeed common, for the most candid, on scene reportage and visual information on an event, from a protest march to a natural disaster, to come not from a news crew or official journalist, or from a professional photographer or videographer, but from an ordinary person with a common, every day item on their person, who happens to be on the scene and able to contribute information to a news network, like the BBC, ITN, CNN, Fox or whomever. All too often in fact, its Facebook that breaks stories first, social media beating the professionals to the punch has become pretty standard, since nothing beats a distributed system with nearly globe spanning reach, at getting data shuffled around from the very moment a thing starts to happen.

More and more people get their news exclusively from the social media platforms and the internet places that they frequent, rather than watching the news on the television, more people than ever before in fact. Anyone out there in the streets can make a report to the social media community. And its not just on the spot coverage of things that are happening now, that makes some professional journalism appear to be slow off the mark (it isn't, but we will get to that). We have had discussions right here on this site over the years, where conclusions were reached based on available evidence, ten years prior to the news media even SUGGESTING a word of anything similar, leave alone proving it or having the proof necessary to make a story feasible.

Look at the situation with mass surveillance. Snowden's selfless sacrifice of his peace and freedom to live unmolested by the forces of tyranny, by releasing data about the mass surveillance architecture in the United States, proved what we here on this website, had been discussing in some detail, for a very long time, discussions started based on things like the behaviour of adware, the nature of the development of traffic monitoring systems used in the internet by companies, and some strange "coincidences", coming together in the minds of members together and independently, to form an awareness in their minds, that it was probable that the NSA was running some kind of mass surveillance system. These conclusions were being reached WELL before any published concerns on the part of the news media ever came up, and it was not until YEARS after I first heard the term mass surveillance used on these very discussion boards, that Mr Snowden came forward and showed the world that there is at least one American who understands that sacrificing anything for security makes the life you live afterward damned sight less than free.

The thing that slows down actual journalists of course, is that unlike opinion providers, they have to prove their work and be able to ensure their stories pass some ethical tests, some tests of truth, and that there is no legal impediment to their publication, something which is important to the companies they work on behalf of, owing to the costly nature of defamation cases and the like.

Technology has, and will continue to change the way we get and distribute information. Wearables, not just smart watches and fitbits, but practical wearables, clothing with communications equipment built into it, and built to last, will be coming around the corner in the next ten to fifteen years in a more comprehensive fashion than we have so far seen, meaning that it will not even be necessary to have your phone out to gather and distribute data from the world around you. Just activate a part of the clothing you were already wearing, and presto, the camera built into your collar or pocket, or your hat, will record what you see, displaying it on your sleeve for you to watch while you record.

Things are moving on, and the sorts of genie we have been letting out of the bottle of late, are the sort who never return from whence they came. AI though, that is going to be a game changer. Imagine a system that uses all existing data in every digital format, to predict when and where events that need recording for the future might occur, and deploys drones to record events as they happen, drones that arrive at the scene of a happening, before the people around whom the events in question revolve. The news is going to become the olds much faster as time goes on, with one piece of reportage becoming obsolete the very second it is uploaded to the network, one upped by the video someone or something else is shooting, somewhere else, or from a better vantage point.

Journalism will eventually become a purely investigative thing, I think, where the only actual people reporting anything, are those who are interested in events from many moons ago, and getting to the bottom of what actually happened and who was responsible for a given event, as opposed to heaping piles of on scene reportage and boatloads of accompanying propagandism.

Things are going to be interesting in a lot of ways, not too long from now, for journalism and journalists, and for everyone else too. Everything is changing, from tech to philosophies. Despite the backward steps of the immediately recent years, the trend is for progress in all things, and some of the routes that appears to be taking things down, are paths with fascinating destinations.

Anyway, sorry to blather on. I know I am not the preferred respondent to a thread like this, but thats my two pence either way.