How Digital Storytelling Will Improve Journalism No End, By Way Of a Stand Up Comedian And A Very Pretentious Metaphor

Two years ago at the Edinburgh Festival I went to see a show by comedian Daniel Kitson. At half one in the morning around 200 of us squeezed onto the impossibly uncomfortable bare wooden benches in the venue and on shuffled a shoe-less Kitson and his musical sidekick Gavin Osborn. With almost nothing by way of an introduction, Kitson took out a fairly battered notebook, cleared his throat and began to read, his dulcet Yorkshire tones occasionally sabotaged momentarily by his stammer.

He read for maybe an hour and a half, with a handful of Osborn’s songs breaking up the chapters of the story, a brilliant, moving and utterly original tale of love, loss and a shark attack. Nobody fidgeted. Nobody checked their watch. 200 people sat in that room and were completely absorbed. It almost felt wrong to clap at the end, perhaps if nobody interrupted he might just keep going and going.

Storytelling as an artform has fascinated me since that evening but I had never thought about its possible relationship with journalism until Dr Daniel Meadows’s incredible lecture last week. The evangelical way in which Dr Meadows spoke about digital storytelling really struck a chord, what was new though was the idea that the future of our profession may be bound up with projects like Capture Wales, the BBC’s flagship digital storytelling project that Dr Meadows oversaw.

Perhaps the most interesting, and reassuring, part of the lecture was the insistence that there is no hierarchy of forms in the media, one technological development rarely renders an existing medium obsolete, although it may alter the way in which that existing medium has to work.

I’m a great fan of pretentious metaphors and one that has stuck with me from my undergraduate days was that historians should try to be both the parachutist and the truffle-hunter. So too I believe should the journalist, and digital storytelling strikes me as a fantastic tool through which to live up to the truffle-hunter challenge.

Take a story like the Bridgend suicides. This first article is a good example of the parachutist approach, covering the chronology, the issues raised and the responses in a very traditional way. The parachute opens, we hit the ground and we have this well-written article that includes a great deal of personal, anecdotal opinion from young people living in the town. But still we are not truffle-hunting.

This video from the Capture Wales scheme shows a mother talking about her son’s suicide. Incredibly poignant and almost unnervingly intimate, this lady talks about the last time she danced with her son and the first time she visited his grave on Mother’s Day. The family photos that accompany it, the fact that we appear to be in this lady’s living room all add to feeling that we are inside this story, we are exposed to the raw, overwhelming emotion of it in a way that is rarely possible in a newspaper article, however well-written.

But this isn’t the end for the traditional journalist. Could this video stand alone? No, we need the context provided in the first two articles. Woe betide the truffle-hunter who doesn’t appreciate the lie of the land.

But in terms of adding personality to stories that are often complex and confusing, digital storytelling is incredible. This video is similar, kaleidoscoping the huge, sprawling issue of immigration into three minutes of colour.

Ernest Hemingway was once challenged to write a story in six words. His response: “For Sale; baby shoes, never worn”. The six word story phenomenon has exploded in recent years, with books, websites and even a Flickr group devoted to this most concentrated of storytelling skills. Like Dr Meadows said, everybody has a story inside them, however brief. As journalists it would be a grave dereliction of duty if we didn’t help bring them out.