Anders Pollas

Jon Lund points to DR’s lat­est, Fanstastiske fortællinger, a kind of geo blog with fan­tas­tic sto­ries, com­plete tag­ging, com­ments — and a host (Isabella Miehe-Renard) known from tra­di­tional media. The site (works a lot bet­ter in Fire­fox than in Safari) also includes a fancy map.

It’s an inter­est­ing move, putting DR (again) in the same user-participation group as a few other media com­pa­nies, includ­ing Fyens Stifti­dende (xtra­blog) and Urban (which we’re work­ing with as I write this).

I like their approach, as they’re not just let­ting peo­ple write what­ever, but has tried to pro­vide a theme they think will work well with this kind of inter­ac­tion and mate­r­ial. Blog­ging and what have we isn’t the magic pill, but it pro­vides an alter­na­tive to the tra­di­tional way of work­ing and used appro­pri­ately, you can ben­e­fit a lot — just as your audience.

But it’s based on the fact, that tra­di­tional media and the way the peo­ple behind usu­ally under­stand them­selves, is chang­ing; no more ‘con­tent’ in silos, no more “we — and only we are the media”, “no more take it or leave it”, no more “the way we work is a law of nature not up for discussion”.

I had (another) taste of it yes­ter­day when I, as part of Videoblog­ging Week 2006, wanted to do a vlog story on a friend being inter­viewed for national tv. There was a nice meta aspect to the story (indie media doing a story about the same length as the story national tv wanted to do — about their story) and a more impor­tant point to be made of the fact that, as the tv story was one of those ‘just before the weather report we always do some­thing a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent and less chal­leng­ing’, this will change when every­one and his mother can do just as funny sto­ries in a frac­tion of the time.

I’ll post notes on the inter­view later (when I get time to edit the video I shot — and decide on my final angle), but I think it’s fair to say, that while the jour­nal­ist and the cam­era­man were decent peo­ple doing a story that by no means can cause any uproar, they weren’t too pleased with meet­ing two peo­ple that not only recorded it all but also asked ques­tions back, showed an inter­est in the reporter’s work, their meth­ods and omnibus media in general.

Fol­low­ing the inter­view (that went just as planned — just as we expected; despite a prior agree­ment, the angle the reporter has decided on from the begin­ning took over) we had a close-to-heated exchange of views, not because we actu­ally dis­agreed about our indi­vid­ual roles, but because of dif­fer­ent opin­ions about the ini­tial agree­ment, that I could tape the ses­sion. The reporter, I was told, would like to check my video before post­ing as she in a way rep­re­sented the net­work she worked for. She didn’t feel she had said any­thing com­pro­mis­ing (and she didn’t) but she wasn’t used to being taped working.

And here’s the point. When you use peo­ple for mak­ing sto­ries, they just might feel they rep­re­sent their line of busi­ness, them­selves as indi­vid­u­als and their blog/vlog what­ever just as much. This not to say that the clas­sic “I feel I wasn’t por­trayed loy­ally ’cause I’m incred­i­bly vain”, that we’ve all felt at some point after being inter­viewed, should be taken out on this par­tic­u­lar jour­nal­ist, but that

1) Blogs and video blogs do play a part in pro­vid­ing back­ground infor­ma­tion that could be use­ful when doing more ‘impor­tant’ sto­ries.
2) You might want to recon­sider par­tic­i­pat­ing in vox pop-style things at all; if you got some­thing quick to say, say it your­self.
3) Tra­di­tional media being the only one with license to ask is so yes­ter­day. We open up, they open up. What­ever they don’t want you to know and pub­lish, they shouldn’t say.

We are the media. Get used to it.