Here Is What Journalism Should Sound Like

Eric Whitacre is a 39 year old avant-garde composer and music conductor.

He is also a man who has provided us with a model of how journalism in the 21st Century can work.

Without meaning to.

The piece posted above, is a performance of his Virtual Choir, a rendition of Lux Arumuque.

Whitacre created the piece by engaging with 100 singers from 12 different countries, all recording their parts (alto, soprano, bass, tenor) separately and alone.

Each one contributed but a small yet coherent section to the final work.

They were given a guide – a video of Whitacre conducting the finished work in silence, so that they could follow his direction.

He than assembled the master work, which you see above.

Whitacre says,

When I saw the finished video for the first time I actually teared up. The intimacy of all the faces, the sound of the singing, the obvious poetic symbolism about our shared humanity and our need to connect; all of it completely overwhelmed me.

Me too.

But what I saw in Whitacres piece was a roadmap for journalism for the 21st Century.

One which could create much more powerful ‘works’ of journalism, using almost the same technique, but with stories and reportage instead of music.

Up until now, the world of journalism has been filled with soloists.

Single voices singing a single line. Sometimes quite well, but all alone.

But if we can ‘conduct’ those voices, from all over the world, produced disparately – if we can focus them, we can create journalistic symphonies instead of solo pieces.

Image a ‘chorus’ of 100 journalists, all assigned the basic bones of a story – with a variety of elements and approaches (the tenors and the sopranos), reporting from all over the world, yet conducted and then assembled in one place for all the world to see.

It will require a rethink of how journalism works.

It will require producers to become conductors, in a way, to think out in far greater detail the stories they wish to tell.

And it is not for every story, every time.

Then again, symphonies are not for every piece of music.

We are, newspapers in particular, are fixated on the notion of ‘multi-media’.  But we are approaching the richness of the digital world all wrong.  We are asking one player to play the piccolo, the trombone and the violin.  The digital revolution has provided us with an army of content providers, but now we must re-think how we deploy them to create beautiful music.

We can do this.

We can.