Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Generic Types of Interview-Based Features (Examples)

Confessional Interview - here is all-time humdinger (still record audience for factual programme): part one; part two; part three; part four. Imagine you had done this interview (not for TV). Practice by 'writing this up' - in true Sun/Bella style as Diana opens up her heart... Compare with this recent example of a FEATURE INTERVIEW (Gonzo style interview - reporter/interviewer is star, it is all about what Ross is saying, not Cameron - the stories the next day were all about what Ross said.) Of course journalists (and student journalists) love the idea of doing feature interviews - here's another (in print) - Lynn Barber. The ultimate thing would be Lynn Barber interviews Jonathan Ross - imagine that! - or Divinia What'sherface interviews Michael Parkinson - that'll never happen! (Actually I claim IP rights over that - pitch a new TV series - call it Interviewers Interview Interviewers About Interviewing and Stuff - it's a winner. It would be well wiggy for for the viewers to work out who was interviewing who. Maybe they could vote for who they thought was winning. But I digress.

Sometimes students try to reproduce a TV or radio style 'chat show' interview by using a Q and A format for a magazine article. That is just total crap. It just looks very amatuerish (the writer is using TV style in print, which doesn't work). Here's an example - its an intreview with a journalist (confusing I know, but I want to hit two birds with one stone). Its sad because the subject matter is potentially excellent (the interview subject is sometimes called the greatest living journalist). This "Q and A" is very weak and the thing would have been a lot stronger if it had been done as a proper confessional (by 'writing it up' as "my life story...") or if it had been done as a feature interview (complete with gonzo type observations about the interview subject. What this is really is a total cop out - they should have just commissioned Ryzard to write the piece in his own voice. A big shame they didn't.

Both the feature interview and the confessional interview have to be differentiated from the classic PROFILE - or 'living obituary' - which are more the province of the trade press, and the broadsheet. Some profiles: Hugo Chavez, Tim Berners Lee, David Frost, Aki Kaurismaki, Jonathan Ross. The key to features getting a total grip on the formats. Readers/ viewers/ listeners "consume the formats" - not especially the content. Remember: The medium is the massage. Get those formats nice and crisp - don't mix them up, or you'll end up with typical amatuer student journalism sludge.

OK it is trumped for ratings success and commerical value by Panorama Princess of Hearts. But the most effective confessional interview I've ever seen on film is Shoah (It contains answers to single questions which, with gentle prompting, last up to an hour each). The method comes from the clinical practice of psychotherapy.

Interview technique - in confessionals that's mainly a matter of GET THEM TALKING - KEEP THEM TALKING (not like TV style chatshow/ Paxman interviewing. That's a different game). For profiles you don't even interview the subject. You interview people who know them.

OK it is trumped for ratings success and commerical value by Panorama Princess of Hearts. But the most effective confessional interview I've ever seen on film is Shoah (It contains answers to single questions which, with gentle prompting, last up to an hour each). The interview subject is actually given time to think and take his time to remember and answer. Its a kind of exact opposite of the Jonathan Ross approach - and TV/Radio generally - where interviews are mainly a contest of wites between reporter/presenter and subject (eg Paxman) and an entertaining gladitorial contest. All very good. But a different approach. Shoah of course works against the grain of the visual medium in so far as it is not superficial. It take almost ten hours to tell the story. It uses the visual medium to achieve emotional engagement, in the style of a oil painting. It is calm, slow, cold, unsensational, humane, unconstructed, honest, unmanipulated, adult, painful significant... .

Saturday, November 11, 2006

TOM WOLFE ON FN

Below is from Tom Wolfe's essay in 'Hooking Up' - which brought ideas about the internet to a wider audience in 1996. I'm prompted by the fact that I'm discussing feature writing with students, and Tom Wolfe (Boring Old Fart that he is) rules supreme throughout the American speaking world when it comes to that. There's a great peg which its the 10th anniversary of Tom Wolfe's prediction that by 2006 somebody would annouce, pace GOD IS DEAD (that's been the case for 150 years) that THE NEW GOD IS DEAD (that's a really good headline. I claim properitory rights over that). And the new God was the holy duo of EGO and ID. These two dieties have now been killed Wolfe expects by biotechnology (clones, cybernetic brain impants, genetic engineering, 'designer babies') and direct brain/personality manipulation by means of psychoactive drugs, brain implants and neuroscience.

Wolfe writes:

"Which brings us to the second most famous statement in all of modern philosophy: Nietzsche's "God is dead." The year was 1882. (The book was Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft [ The Gay Science ].) Nietzsche said this was not a declaration of atheism, although he was in fact an atheist, but simply the news of an event. He called the death of God a "tremendous event," the greatest event of modern history. The news was that educated people no longer believed in God, as a result of the rise of rationalism and scientific thought, including Darwinism, over the preceding 250 years. But before you atheists run up your flags of triumph, he said, think of the implications. "The story I have to tell," wrote Nietzsche, "is the history of the next two centuries." He predicted (in Ecce Homo ) that the twentieth century would be a century of "wars such as have never happened on earth," wars catastrophic beyond all imagining. And why? Because human beings would no longer have a god to turn to, to absolve them of their guilt; but they would still be racked by guilt, since guilt is an impulse instilled in children when they are very young, before the age of reason. As a result, people would loathe not only one another but themselves. The blind and reassuring faith they formerly poured into their belief in God, said Nietzsche, they would now pour into a belief in barbaric nationalistic brotherhoods: "If the doctrines...of the lack of any cardinal distinction between man and animal, doctrines I consider true but deadly"--he says in an allusion to Darwinism in Untimely Meditations --"are hurled into the people for another generation...then nobody should be surprised when...brotherhoods with the aim of the robbery and exploitation of the non-brothers...will appear in the arena of the future."

Nietzsche's view of guilt, incidentally, is also that of neuro-scientists a century later. They regard guilt as one of those tendencies imprinted in the brain at birth. In some people the genetic work is not complete, and they engage in criminal behavior without a twinge of remorse--thereby intriguing criminologists, who then want to create Violence Initiatives and hold conferences on the subject.

Nietzsche said that mankind would limp on through the twentieth century "on the mere pittance" of the old decaying God-based moral codes. But then, in the twenty-first, would come a period more dreadful than the great wars, a time of "the total eclipse of all values" (in The Will to Power ). This would also be a frantic period of "revaluation," in which people would try to find new systems of values to replace the osteoporotic skeletons of the old. But you will fail, he warned, because you cannot believe in moral codes without simultaneously believing in a god who points at you with his fearsome forefinger and says "Thou shalt" or "Thou shalt not."

Why should we bother ourselves with a dire prediction that seems so far-fetched as "the total eclipse of all values"? Because of man's track record, I should think. After all, in Europe, in the peaceful decade of the 1880s, it must have seemed even more far-fetched to predict the world wars of the twentieth century and the barbaric brotherhoods of Nazism and Communism. Ecce vates! Ecce vates! Behold the prophet! How much more proof can one demand of a man's powers of prediction?

A hundred years ago those who worried about the death of God could console one another with the fact that they still had their own bright selves and their own inviolable souls for moral ballast and the marvels of modern science to chart the way. But what if, as seems likely, the greatest marvel of modern science turns out to be brain imaging? And what if, ten years from now, brain imaging has proved, beyond any doubt, that not only Edward O. Wilson but also the young generation are, in fact, correct?

The elders, such as Wilson himself and Daniel C. Dennett, the author of Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life , and Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker , insist that there is nothing to fear from the truth, from the ultimate extension of Darwin's dangerous idea. They present elegant arguments as to why neuroscience should in no way diminish the richness of life, the magic of art, or the righteousness of political causes, including, if one need edit, political correctness at Harvard or Tufts, where Dennett is Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, or Oxford, where Dawkins is something called Professor of Public Understanding of Science. (Dennett and Dawkins, every bit as much as Wilson, are earnestly, feverishly, politically correct.) Despite their best efforts, however, neuroscience is not rippling out into the public on waves of scholarly reassurance. But rippling out it is, rapidly. The conclusion people out beyond the laboratory walls are drawing is: The fix is in! We're all hardwired! That, and: Don't blame me! I'm wired wrong!

Sunday, October 29, 2006

Saturday, October 14, 2006

I am not using this blog much because I use the course site messageboard so heavily. But...

The facts on the UK's 'Trident' nuclear missle submarines, since this came up in the lecture and seems to have created a lot of jaw-dropped amazement when it was mentioned as an aside, are that each boat can carry 16 missiles, with a minimum of three and a maxium of 10 independently targeted warheads. Each of the warheads is big enough to destroy a large city or, perhaps, a region - though many may be targetted at military bases as well.

The missles have in effect unlimited range, though they may depend on US communications and targeting satellites and therefore could not be used against the USA (who supplied the technology) and, possibly, can't be fired without US permission in the form of a 'dual key' control (this is a secret - Trident is in theory an 'independent' force under the non-proliferation treaty and so it could in theory be used against the USA, but nobody beleives that could ever happen).

The maximum number of cities which could in theory be destroyed by the Trident force is 640 and (unlike the putative N. Korean force) these missiles can hit everywhere on the planet. Experts estimate the UK in practice maintains 'only' 200 warheads which are ready to fire at any one time. Obviously in the run up to some sort of war, production could be increased towards capacity.

(My feeling is that dictators like having a few nuclear bombs and really big old fashioned missiles (the ones with tail fins and everything) because they look really great as the central attraction in the annual jack-boot military parade. Saddam used to have dozens of these riddiculous Jules Vernes rockets (Soviet Army Surplus Scuds) on display - look where they got him.)

I can only find statistics for the largest 300 cities in the world. The 300th largest is Detroit, with just under 1 million. The total population of these 300 cities is about 600 million people (but this includes many cities in the US and its NATO allies and SEATO allies, including the UK. The next 300 cities might have smaller populations than this.

It is reasonable to conclude that the UK Trident force alone could destroy every single town or settlement in a medium-sized country like Iran, for example, if it were used in this way. Even if Korea or Iran were able to manufacture hundreds of nuclear bombs, they would not have a weapons system (like Trident) to launch them in any great numbers. It is no good having a nuclear hand grenade. What counts are the missiles and the satellites to guide them. Only the Americans (and to a lesser extent now the Chinese and Indians - the Russians are falling way behind) have these. The Koreans would have to use crude rockets with internal guidance (like the clumsy Scuds used by Saddam in Gulf War One) these would land just anywhere and the effect would be more like a very bad nuclear accident than an effective military strike. Such a thing might kill a few million and be an attrocity of massive proportions, but it wouldn't knock the country out of the war. The whole thing about nuclear weapons is that the people you fire them at are really going to be very, very angry so you have to be very sure you are going to knock them out completely before hitting the button.

Getting back to the UK's Trident boats... I would guestimate the maximum number of people who could theorectically be killed instantly by the British nuclear force used to maxium effect would be about 1000,000,000 people - old, young, people in hospitals, refugees - all without discrimination - or about a quarter of the entire world population.

Of course many more would die later (including many in the UK itself) of radiation sickeness, disease, economic collapse, climate change (nuclear winter) stavation, preadation and infrastructure collapse. But Britain's nuclear bombs (which do exist) are not 'weapons of mass destruction'. Those are the facts, pretty much.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Blogging the magazine session

Hi everyone - please log in to this

Saturday, October 07, 2006

This is an excellent commentary about the role of news on television, by a great American artist.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snmllnY7-jI

Friday, October 06, 2006

People have been emailing and phoning me about the tabloids. I've not set myself up particularly as the world's greatest expert on this subject, but I previously did what amounts to a blog on tabloids for BBC news online. It was called Amazing Tales from Planet Tabloid. You can see it at this link:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/1061181.stm

I used to plough through a great pile of newspapers and get these mad stories. I love this sort of stuff, which reminds me of 18th century journalism - something that Jonathan Swift might have written about, or generic Tall Tales From Ye Guienas and Ye New Worlde - mermaids, one-legged giants, cities paved with gold, ships wreck by gigantic squids, etc, etc.

An e-mailer ask whether I think tabloids are a 'good thing'. My answer is 'yes' and 'no'. Perhaps they are bad in good way; or good in a bad way. I'm not sure. Also my opnion, which is not really worth that much, on this subject changes from moment to moment.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Re: persecuted journalists (previous lecture). Sudanese Al Jezeera journalist held in Guantanamo bay accused without evidence or trial of being 'Osama Bin Laden's cameraman'. Fascinating and sickening radio documentary.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/np79a/?focuswin

Re: Hunter S Thompson. Tuesday evening's Front Row (Radio Four) had an interview with Ralph Steadman about Hunt's suicide last year: "He just could not stand the idea of living in Bush's America". And Hunter was a redneck conservative gun-nut libertarian republican. Very depressing...

You can hear the interview on the BBC radio four Play Again facility - navigate to Front Row (Tuesday).

Changing Journalism

I've created this blog on google mainly so I can access and post comments on other google blogs.

I've been blogging for seven years at Westminster Journalism (http://www.westminsterjournalism.co.uk) which is a fairly hefty website with a blog-like message board at its core.

I lecture and write about journalism (amongst other things) and I am going to use this blog to bring things to the attention of students and readers alike.