Film journalism is a future alternative to television journalism

An Australian reporter reviews his report in the montage room in 1986 before the image disappears on the screen. The photo editor discovers that the tape in the projector has been suddenly damaged. The reporter drops his hand and yells at colleagues in the newsroom for some alternate pictures before he rushes outside to score another pose. In front of the camera under the TV channel building.

He and the photographer chose a background close to some trees to make it look like somewhere else, and within minutes he was running to catch up on the report of the flyer that had already begun.

In the last moments, the report goes live and the situation is saved in the series "TV News Presenter" on the Australian channel "ABC9), which the British network "BBC" (BBC) re-run this year, directed by Australian director Emma Freeman.

The definition of what is cinematographic is not necessarily subject to Hollywood definitions. What the press borrows from cinema may be the pre-screening scenario, so the journalist or reporter goes to the scene of the event with a tight scenario that follows the rules of the cinematic scenario of plot, characters and a unique aesthetic visual novel method

The series satisfied viewers' curiosity in diving into the details of the lives of announcers and news presenters behind and in front of the camera, and made them live in the atmosphere of producing bulletins, reports and air studios in the era of the mid-eighties of the last century, even though it was produced in 2021. It became the most watched series on ABC. Australian, and the second season is scheduled to be shown next year.

The series succeeded in presenting the practical life of the news channels in a way that is close to the cinematic form, away from the documentary or realistic form.

With this, he won several awards.

This hybrid style of presenting the world of journalism and news in a cinematic form has been a hope for a number of academics since Gloriana Davenport wrote;

One of the founders of the "Media Lab" at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States, in 1988 heralds a new era in which what she calls film journalism will develop.

This means that television journalism takes advantage of technical development techniques to approach the aesthetics of cinema in the presentation.

After she showed the signs of the digital age revolution at that time with rapid image archiving systems, she demanded the construction of a new story for television journalism in a rich cinematic language, and that artificial intelligence and computer language processing systems be used to help in this matter.

Davenport did not know that the digital revolution will do the effects with the image, the way it is presented, the speed of recording and archiving at the institutional and even personal level, but this will not be reflected in the mechanisms of visual narration in news stories and reports as she expected;

For this reason, many academics continued to claim to take advantage of cinematic techniques in the way of filming and presenting reports, and even presenting news instead of the current format.

Characteristics of the new cinematic press

Cardiff University professor David Dunkley Gemma is experimenting with several experiments in order to present a cinematic version of the news instead of the current format, arguing in this matter that the effect of the current style of presenting news stories and bulletins is an overly physical one, while in cinema the effect is primarily psychological.

Do people really need more immersion in realism and detail?

Or do the aesthetics and techniques of cinema explain reality better than presenting its raw material depicted with techniques and methods that have not changed since the 1950s?

Dunkley explains that since the fifties until now, the aesthetics and forms of cinema have made wide and varied strides in terms of shot shapes and film styles, while the news report and the newsletter have remained the same for seven decades.

The question arose: Do people want an abstract reality, or do they prefer to see it infused with an aesthetic dose of imagination?

He gives an example of this by editing the style of the news interviews frame from the appearance of the guest's head on the right or left of the screen with the speaker looking at the interlocutor to choose the shape, place and size of the snapshot according to what the story tells us about, just as the film director does when he determines the shape of the clip based on what he wants to convey the meaning;

Perhaps the narrow shot that shows the eyes and part of the face is the best way to express the journalist's message in his report.

Dunkley combines theoretical experience with practical side. He made several attempts with his students to convert a number of television news reports into cinematic form, and put some on YouTube because he invites, writes for newspapers and gives television interviews calling for this transformation.

The definition of what is cinematic is not necessarily subject to Hollywood definitions, he says;

What the press borrows from the cinema may be the pre-screening scenario, so the journalist or reporter goes to the scene of the event with an elaborate scenario in which he follows the rules of the cinematic scenario in terms of plot, characters and a unique aesthetic visual narration method.

Here we are not about the documentary film template, which has its own cinematic patterns. What is meant is to borrow cinematic techniques to develop the way of telling the journalistic story while maintaining the short duration of the report and its nature in providing information, so that the shot speaks for itself in the first place, and the story leads the context of the presentation even if It required the input of the narrator's voice when necessary.

It is noteworthy that this shift towards television journalism is developing continuously in Western and Eastern universities without being accompanied by institutional adoption by the news media until now.

This prompted the National Institute of Journalism and Communication Sciences at the University of Gujarat in India to invite its students to study film journalism, and considered it the future that would replace news journalism in its current form.

The institute dedicates a full page on its website explaining the concept of cinematic journalism, and that new generations prefer to watch cinematic works based on real stories than to see these stories in news bulletins.

The University of Westminster, Britain, has also included film journalism in its Master's degree courses in Digital Media and Interactive Stories.