Talking Journalism Innovation with BBC Pop Up
I recently spoke to Matt Danzico, one of the journalists behind the BBC Pop Up project, about what this experiment is all about. The Q&A ran on PBS MediaShift last week--here's an excerpt from it:
The people behind BBC Pop Up describe it as a journalism “experiment,” during which a small mobile news bureau visits a different U.S. city every month for six months. When the team arrives in a town — so far they’ve visited Boulder, Colorado, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania — they hold a meeting for members of the community to share what they believe are the most important stories to cover. While stationed in each town, the BBC Pop Up team holds classes for students in university journalism programs.
Matt Danzico, the head of the BBC Video Innovation Lab, and Benjamin Zand, a BBC filmmaker, formerly of BBC Trending, are the two primary journalists behind the project. I spoke to Danzico over the phone from the robotics laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh about the goals behind BBC Pop Up, how community suggestions lead to different stories, and the attitudes and expectations of contemporary journalism students.
Q&A
What are the goals of BBC Pop Up and why do you consider it an experiment?
Matt Danzico: A year and a half ago Ben and I were tasked with thinking about the future of video for the company. What happens when the World Wide Web ceases to exist? What does BBC Video become, where does it go? 60 percent of people in the U.S. are using smart phones to use the Internet, and only 14 percent of that is done by mobile browser.
The web is dying, television is long gone, so our job is to figure out where people are going. Internet use is like a billion times more than it was ten years ago. If that’s true, and no one is using the web, then where are they going? The New Yorks, Tokyos, and Mexico Cities of the Internet have been developed and they’re called Reddit, Instagram, and Twitter. We want to create content from within these digital communities in the same way that we create stories from physical locations.
BBC Pop Up is merely one project that the BBC Video Innovation Lab has created, [including] an automated SubReddit, live-streaming Reddit TV channels, Instagram news video accounts, andBBC Trending, a program that covers the whole of the Internet. Of these programs, 50 percent of them fail, and 50 percent succeed. We really embrace our failures because we learn from them. We’re basically an experimental lab that tries out new types of programming to see if audiences like it.
We even tailor the design of our programming based on audiences’ suggestions. For instance, we have an Instagram news channel that has 100,000 users. [The journalist who runs it] took people’s suggestions in the comments section and he constantly is redesigning it around what people want to see.
BBC Pop Up is an experiment at creating the BBC’s first mobile bureau. We wanted to flip the idea of how journalists found stories on its head. We wanted to crowdsource our ideas, and base our stories on people’s suggestions from within the communities we’re visiting. Instead of assuming that I know what’s best for a community when I go in, we’re asking people what they want to tell the world about. We’re trying to act as conduits through which the community can tell their stories.
How are the stories you cover different because you’re intending them for mobile devices?
Danzico: For BBC Pop Up we’ve put aside the idea of creating content just for these digital spaces, but we use social more than BBC ever has. I just tweeted, “We’re filming a story on Saturday at 9 o’clock, why don’t you come out?” We’re using these platforms to physically engage with people. We’re putting other content directly on Twitter, Instagram, also on the web and television.
You ask people what stories to cover, you film the stories, and then you promote the finished product, which is a different role than journalists have traditionally taken. Also, usually when you ask people what they want, they tell you they want substantive stories, but what they actually click on tends to be pictures of Kim Kardashian. It seems like people are giving you substantive ideas—are they then following up and clicking on the content?
Danzico: When we arrive at a location we hold a community meet up and a hundred people from the town come out and tell us what they want to hear a story about. We just held one at Carnegie Mellon University. People recommended, for instance, that we investigate air quality. We’re finding that these stories actually do get clicked on because we’re on the ground generating hype about them. We’re talking to 50 people per day about what we’re doing. We’re doing a whistle stop tour to a certain extent.
Simultaneously, so many people in these towns have interest in the stories that are recommended that people in the geographic regions we’re in are clicking on the story. Because we’re generating hype and we’re doing stories that they want to see, we’re seeing these communities turn toward our content on the BBC.
Beyond that, we want these stories to be relevant to a global audience. We’re still not entirely sure if we hit it every single time, but we want to tell local stories to a global audience. We want these issues to be pertinent to the wider human experience.
Please click through to read the rest on PBS Media Shift!
