Get out of the traffic jam!
In this post, Matt explains how NTW has developed Citizen Journalism and its benefit to the organisation.
Citizen Journalism at the heart of ‘The Passion’
At National Theatre Wales everybody is a Citizen Journalist in one form or another. Creating content and the sharing of experience is at the very heart of the organization. Our online community existed from our conception, before we had an official website or even a programme.
This platform gives our staff team, creatives, actors, writers and audience members a voice and a place for us to listen. It allows them to have a supportive space to share their news and stories, post comments, add videos or images, write blogs and start debates.
Momentum gathered during our first year and we now have over 3000 members in our community, with some members working like journalists, but fully independent of traditional news outlets. These are the voices of individuals who are trusted sources of information. They have built trust within their own network of readers; they are members with ‘klout’.
This year we gave two of our TEAM members and budding citizen journalists, Brent and Amelia, the opportunity to go to The Edinburgh Festival and document their experience in their own voice. For the four days they were at the festival they watched and reviewed shows, met and interviewed artists, and documented their journey by creating videos and blogs from their own personal viewpoint. We wanted to let those voices shine through and we did this by giving them full access to our social media channels and showcasing their blogs at the forefront of our community.
Brent Michael Drew Morgan – Blogs
Case study: The Passion #NTW13
Last year I started to ponder how we could embed citizen journalism into a production and what that might look like.
Our final show of the year The Passion felt like the perfect time to experiment. I knew I wanted to document and tell the story of the event live and in real time over the duration of the event. It was around the time of the ‘Arab Spring’ and I was researching hyperlocal websites that aimed to change the cultural landscape, such as The People’s Republic of Stokes Croft. At this point I wasn’t expecting the enthusiasm and dedication of the creative directors Michael Sheen and Bill Mitchell (WildWorks) to embed the idea into the narrative of the production. They were especially excited about the possibilities of creating an online world which blurred reality with fiction and mirrored the events happening within the story.
We created a fake hyperlocal website port-talbot.com. This website formed the narrative of the world in the lead up to the production and, during the event, became the one place you could watch the story unfold, aggregating content created by a team of ‘citizen journalists’ local to Port Talbot.
The team were volunteers who attended a series of workshops on how we would deliver the content. They learned new skills about video making, blogging and how to share the content online. You can find out more about the team here:
We thought about the timeline and created a campaign which pulled the community into our world. It involved the creation of fake news reports, missing person posters on the streets, camera phone sightings, stenciled resistance graffiti and answer-phone messages with clues to what was to come.
This was a truly multi-channel campaign with each element reliant on the others. We used Port Talbot as our playground and its media channels to deliver our message.
The website went live 40 days and 40 nights before the show with an image of a piece of bespoke graffiti saying ‘It Has Begun’ painted on a derelict cinema. Our citizen journalists began to comment underneath and the rest of the story played out from there.
We even managed to bring the local radio station XSFM onboard to report on our missing man story, enhancing the relationship of the story that was being reported online to the real world.
Our team of citizen journalists really was at the heart of the production. We set up a media hub at the Princess Royal Theatre which had super sonic Wi-Fi and was also the dedicated ‘Press Area’ for the official Industry press.
Over the weekend we witnessed really exciting moments when the citizen journalists were running back to the hub to get their videos edited and reports of the story up online as the event happened. All this was happening while the official press and photographers sat at the end of the room uploading their own reviews and images. Our team really did feel like the resistance, telling the story to the masses through un-official channels as it happened, pre-empting the media getting their images and story out first.
Our live portrayal of the story played out for an international online audience over the weekend and for the audience in Port Talbot it allowed them to piece elements of the story together at the end of each day, bridging the gaps in the narrative. By working with citizen journalists we were truly delivering a transmedia production.
The other aspect of citizen journalism that prevailed during The Passion was of the ‘unofficial’ citizen journalists who were part of the audience of the show. They were watching the performance take place across Port Talbot and tweeting, filming, photographing and blogging away on their own platforms.
Of course, National Theatre Wales are not the only organization to have used this sort of method to engage citizen journalists and their networks. National Theatre of Scotland has held a ‘Social Media Call’, with a similar set-up to press calls, at the start of some of their recent productions. They have invited bloggers and social media users to come along, meet some of the cast and creative team, watch a few scenes and document the experience across their own channels.
Across the pond similar events are taking place. The Broadway musical Memphis recently invited citizen journalists and social media users to film and photograph excerpts from the show at a ‘sneak preview’ event with a new cast member.
Although citizen journalists are creating and publishing content in a similar way to traditional press they are often not of the same mindset. It is a careful balance which must be struck to maintain the support of citizen journalists without ‘using’ them and potentially losing their trust. Nurturing relationships and building enthusiastic communities is what will ultimately produce the results of high engagement and visibility for our work.
Matt Lawton, National Theatre Wales
@Matt_ntw
Comments