inFUZE – cross platform journalism training

inFUZE rolled out of the starting blocks this morning with a great bunch of creative people. Matt Foster, Programme Manager, BBC at MediaCityUK kicked off formal proceedings with colleague Moira Kean. inFUZE, hosted by Sandbox (www.sandbox.uclan.ac.uk) is the latest initiative from the UCLan’s School of Journalism, Media and Communication.

Essentially it’s a cross platform training programme for professional journalists in the North West developed by the School in Partnership with the BBC. This morning the groups preconceptions of ‘audience’ were challenged as they met people they thought they knew and discovered the people formerly known as the audience are considerably more diverse and interesting than traditional media statistics might indicate. For those of us living in the real world that won’t come as any great shock but it’s a little surprising that mainstream media still treats audiences generically, as consumers of their vision. Meanwhile the audience is off doing something more interesting, like making their own content.

Ironically, in a shared media space much of the new content consumed on blogs, watched on You Tube or ‘tweeted’ on Twitter is user generated.

This is often a difficult lesson for traditional media much of which still operate on the ‘build it and they will come’ principle, only to find that their audience isn’t there once the media spectacle they’ve crafted is complete.

A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is driven by the audience as part of a conversation.

According to Clay Shirky (2008) ‘Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a community setting, and a community isn’t just a small audience; it has a social density, a pattern of users talking to one another,that audiences lack. An audience isn’t just a big community either; it’s more anonymous, with many fewer ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through the phone, it all comes in over the internet’.

And that changes the relationship wit the audience. They expect a level of interaction. An opportunity to contribute. To feedback or enrich a story by offering new angles and providing different sources.

This doesn’t negate journalism. It does however fundamentally change the role of the journalist – and that’s what inFUZE is about.

inFUZE is funded by the Skillset TV Freelance Fund and the Digital and Media Skills Programme, delivered by Northwest Vision and Media in partnership with Skillset, and supported by the North West Development Agency.

Tags: cross platform, Journalism, shirky, Skillset