1,000 Flipcams in Newark

Bathed in the sense of the place…

Let’s give 1,000 flipcams to 1,000 people in Newark, New Jersey.

Let’s teach them how to shoot and cut and tell their own stories.

Then, let’s create a gigantic video wall in a public space where we will show those videos, 100 at a time, simultaneously, while editing the sound to move your attention from square to square.

This is the proposal I put before the Knight Foundation a day ago.

For regular readers of this blog, you’ll notice the similarity to the Gaza Proposal I am trying to fund and get started.  There we are proposing 100 flip cams in Gaza. Here we are proposing 1,000 in Newark.

Both ideas, however, stem from the same concept: an attempt to change the shape and architecture of journalism for the 21st century.

Up until now, access to equipment, whether it was video cameras or printing presses was so expensive that almost no one, except the very rich and powerful could do it. As HL Mencken said, ‘freedom of the press is limited to those who own a press’.

Today, with the Internet anyone can ‘own’ a press. And with flipcams anyone can ‘own’ a broadcasting network.  It is a new world.

Our way of capturing and delivering the news, however, is still very much a product of that old world. One person, with a story or a camera, making one linear piece, whether in print or in video, and seeking a platform for delivery.

I am thinking about a totally different approach.  One that is far more reflective of the way our online digital world actually operates.

Consider Iran.  During the elections there, our news about Iran didn’t come to us from Dan Rather deliver the story from Teheran.  No. Rather it came in a hundred thousand small snippets, from twitter, from iPhone videos, from the web, from blogs.  Instead of getting an authoritative ‘truth’ from one reporter, we instead were bathed, in a sense, in a continual rain of small bits of information that together created a mosaic of what was happening.

That mosaic of information, I think, was far closer to the ‘truth’ than one single report, no matter how good and true the reporters intentions. The mosaic encompassed many voices, and many extremes, but overall gave a very good picture of what was happening, and why.

The web, in a greater sense, does the same thing.  We have fractionalized our news and information sources to the point where the old institutions are dying.  What will replace them?

Now, we come to art, which is the second part of the concept.

The video wall I wish to construct, is both journalism and it is art.

This is no crime.  Great journalism has, throughout history, been also great art – from the renaissance paintings that documented the story of Christ to great reporting from Home to DeFoe which was both journalism and literature.

We have, in the past few decades, dessicated journalism. We have removed the art from it.  It has, from time to time, tried to sneak back, in the form of great photography, for example. But we have failed to embrace the art side of journalism, much to our detriment.

Thus the video wall is both journalism and art.  

It is a kind of, in my mind, impressionism brought to video.  Instead of getting one linear video story, we are going to deliver an impressionism, a pointalism of video, if you will, in which the viewer of the work will be bathed in the ‘sense’ of what Newark is really like.

Empowered citizenship, expanded reach of story telling and a new art form.

I like it

If you are intrigued, please take a look at the proposal. You can find it here.

If you are so inclined, please vote for it and/or leave a comment.

If you are interested in working on this if it gets funded, please don’t hesitate to let me know.