Street Journalism: A New Way of Reporting
Moving Experience is a project which proposes new ways of reporting on the arts | Source: Alissa Walker, flickr.com
As part of their USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship program, three Los Angeles-based journalists proposed a new way of reporting arts and culture in a project entitled Moving Experience. Their methodology, as their website suggests, is simple. Instead of bowing down to Los Angeles’s dominant “car culture,” they created an alternative paradigm for art journalism, one which encourages journalists to use other forms of transportation such as buses, bikes and walking by foot to find the heart of every story.
The project, headed by Alissa Walker, and her two teammates Joshua Samuel Brown and Michele Siegel, proposed an interesting question: did the way we arrive at a story change the way we reported it? The project manifesto, much like its methodology, is simple, which states as follows:
We will cover a beat—a physical neighborhood, a cultural community, a single city block.
We will walk, bike or take public transit as we report. We will limit our trips in cars.
We will keep our eyes open, our cameras focused, and our Twitter streams active.
We will be flexible. We realize that getting there is half the story.
We will meet the locals. We will ask them what we should be covering in their neighborhoods.
We will remember that the best story leads come from people, not computers.
We will report stories which acknowledge that art is about place, and culture is about context.
With an established framework in mind, the trio traveled solely by foot and public transport for four days in search for stories, leaving an elaborate digital trail of Flickr images, Twitter updates and YouTube videos in their wake. In Joshua Samuel Brown’s visual journal, he documents his experience biking around a rarely documented part of Los Angeles in a series of videos and enlightening map routes. As Alissa Walker, the project’s brainchild and co-creator of GOOD’s influential Ideas for Cities initiative, explains:
“We rented bikes, we bought Metro passes. We took videos from our helmets and lugged radio equipment on the bus. We tweeted constantly and we never put away our cameras. What I’m most proud of is a massive Google map that we created documenting the distance that each of us traveled that week and the method of transportation we took. We also embedded some of our tweets onto the map, which served as a compendium of our in-the-field realizations.”
Source: Alissa Walker http://www.gelatobaby.com
Over the course of the immersion period, Walker and her team realized that most journalists were missing the stories which mattered most. Transportation, for one, was identified as one the key talking points for many traveling folks. Moving at a slower pace, whether it was by foot or public buses, allowed journalists to discover hidden stories locked away on the seasoned sidewalks or storefronts, many of which go unnoticed if traveling by car. In one of Walker’s walks around The Los Angeles Athletic Club, she blogs her experience, saying:
“It was one of those incredible moments where I saw the true value in taking 15 full minutes to walk 150 feet. It’s not about covering ground; it’s about covering what’s around you. It made me realize two things: It’s not enough for you to be set to noticing-speed. You should always be moving slow enough to let other people approach you and tell you what art they’ve found. And sometimes you’re part of the art.”
And perhaps, the most interesting observation of all was that instead of reporting faster, we needed to report slower. Such a framework of reporting yields numerous benefits. For starters, it keeps stories focused on the people, who essentially make up the cultural fabric of a neigbourhood, a town and a city. It also promotes a more environmentally-friendly way of life, taking public modes of transport, and exercising greater awareness in moving around cities in a sustainable manner. This will in turn help to downsize our ecological footprint, and hopefully eat away at a “car culture” which pervades urban living.
This is pretty darn neat. As a former j-student without a car, I can attest to the (sometimes tiring) advantages of reporting without the luxury of a car. I hope to see this grow.
This looks like great fun but it is such a pretentious concept. A Car gets you from A-B, after that (much like these guys) the rest is done on foot. Nobody uses a car as some kind of mobile observation deck insulated from the 'heart of the story' is delusional, and It is such a platitude to state that real journalism can't be conducted without interacting with a stories' stakeholders. As a journalist myself I find it absurd that the method of transport used to arrive at a location should bestow the narrative with extra gravitas. The fact the findings garnered by this 'alternative paradigm' are so bland just highlights how inconsequential this methodology is to the quality of journalism. Its just another example of how new media encourages people to be verbose, and conflate personal experience with journalism. They are not the same thing.
Hey G.K., I never claimed that the method of transportation should bestow a story's narrative. However, I would like to think that using such a methodology would offer a different perspective to how we approach our subjects. In this instance, taking public transportation, and immersing oneself into the community would probably be a wiser option to traveling by car simply because it would allow for direct interaction with the subjects themselves. There are many aspects that essentially contribute to 'quality' journalism. Methodology is one thing, but essentially execution is what matters most. That being said, I do understand where you are coming from. As journalists, we all have all our own ways of reporting. But thank you for your input - always good to hear different points of view.
May journalists and non-journalists be inspired by this, what a fantastic concept!!
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