Convergent Journalism Reflection

Rusty Douglas is my stage name, I just don't have a stage.

My name is Rowan Dalgleish and I've been studying journalism for a year and a half part time at the University of Wollongong.

I've done some work in radio and print but never really engaged with the world of blogs. This, for instance, is my first post on my own blog ever...

I remember the first lesson of Convergent Journalism. I was fairly confident I knew what I was doing with computers and the web, had a decent concept of online journalism but had never actually engaged in it myself.

Turns out, I knew very little.

The early weeks of the course were fairly straightforward. My experience in doing a radio course last year held me in good stead in terms of recording audio for presentation. I felt more confident than before in recording interviews due to my sheer luck in winning a Radio National competition late last year which provided me with the chance to do a doco for their "360" program. I've learned a lot about mic technique with this and my first assignment went pretty well though wasn't perfectly mixed.

I love to use music to create emotion underneath an interview. It never fails to amaze me the way you can take a fairly mundane interview, throw some deep sounding tunes behind it and suddenly it sounds like a Barack Obama inauguration speech...

The next element of the course was photography and I was really keen to dive into photojournalism. I believe photos are an amazing medium for capturing the emotion of a moment. Looking through the photography magazines and some historically significant images I was filled with these big ideas of getting into the thick of a protest or a war and capturing, in a single shot, the horror or ecstasy, of the scene.

I never knew how much there was to taking a good photo. In the age of digital cameras an awful lot is taken for granted by your average holiday snapper. 30 different modes on my mums camera provided a world of baffling combinations of flash, shutter speed, auto focus, manual focus, series' of shots, red eye options which boggled my mind (especially as for my first assignment I was taking photos of a green bus).

The idea to do a photo essay on the new Wollongong Shuttle bus was a late decision. Whilst spending plenty of time waiting for a war or protest to breakout in downtown Mangerton, I realised to really capture something that profound would require me to get immersed in some dangerous, distant situation.

While thinking about all this danger I'd need to embrace I was nearly cleaned up by a bus. A green Wollongong shuttle bus. I realised the new bus WAS newsworthy, it was always popular (except with the local cabbies) and would be a reasonable topic for my photo essay assignment. Not a war, but then thats Mangerton.

Chasing the bus through peak hour Wollongong traffic was fun. I almost felt like I was in a war sometimes, dodging bullets of bad driving and the landmines of local potholes.

Jumping on the bus I discovered the difficulties a photo journalist must face in all situations. People hate having their photos taken. I spoke to a number of travelers who were more than happy to bleet on about how great the bus was, how it changed their lives, how it was about time such public transport arrived in the 'Gong. As soon as I asked for their photo however they treated me like a local leper, jumping from bus to bus with a camera of disease trying to infect them with my amateur photography. I know its bad, but its not that bad!

Without the human face of the gong shuttle, I wasn't happy with my assignment. The human face has the power to tell a thousand stories - a wrinkle here, a broken smile, a scarred face. A bus tells the story of a bus - thats about it. Where the bus is can be a little more interesting but basically its still just a bus on the street. Without people the story was hollow and static.

For the final assignment I had grand ideas. I've always been interested in buskers. I've done it myself once for a story and found it truly daunting - a few beers help. The final assignment, combining audio with photo stills was almost perfectly suited to documenting local buskers, some of whom I'd run into before.

One group of Indigenous buskers were particularly cool. They busk at night, at the bottom of the Crown street mall. Their customers are the drunk middle-class kids of the Glass House, Cooneys, Castros and other disreputable local drinking holes. They made a fortune playing their version of current pop songs. But where are they NOW!?! The last two weeks of seemingly constant drizzle may have driven them away- that or the law. I went out night after night over the past two weeks searching for these guys but to no avail, slowly getting more and more desperate as the nights wore on.

I learnt a great lesson during those cold lonely nights surrounded by drunk kids. You can't rely on other people to do your story for you. I lamented all those nights when I'd sat with these busking guys listening to their tunes without ever considering getting a contact number or address. I had no way of contacting them and the story was completely reliant on them choosing, of their own volition, to head out that night.

As the deadline for the assignment neared I realised I'd have to give up on my original busking hope and settle for someone (anyone) else. I met two young blokes who were about to start their 'set'. They were great, full of energy and happy to help out. They wouldn't busk at night as they were wary of the violence and abuse that would undoubtedly come their way from people their age frustrated or intimidated by their peers industriousness. They played me some tunes, gave me an upbeat interview with plenty of stories and I walked on - looking for someone with a little more edge.

Finn definitely had edge. What made it till the final cut was what he let me make the cut. He didn't want his face in any photos, he spoke of drugs and crime, his betrayal by other drugged up musos...to be fair I'm not even convinced his name was Finn. He was erratic too - swinging from being my best mate to wanting to rip my head off. He had a Karate shirt on and I wasn't really keen to push him to see if it was all show. He was drinking and smoking heavily and his stories about his musical prowess were becoming more and more far fetched. When he eventually played me something it was the dodgy version of Stairway to Heaven in the cut. He swore that he only liked playing originals and that he was a professional who'd just fallen on hard times and was busking out of necessity. I don't know whether I believe him or not- but he definitely gave me some colour!

Putting the project together was quite simple using SoundSlides. It brought home to me the ease with which anyone can create a professional looking piece with free software. Journalists are in no way a rare breed - everyones a pro these days, they just need the link to the software.

I think its an exciting, challenging time to go into journalism. The traditional mediums are being rapidly superseded by new media frontiers. Newspapers are going out of business, "professional" journos are getting lazy and the citizen journo is coming to the fore. News is 24/7 which means it is often fleeting in its detail and heavily reliant on multimedia techniques.

Programs like SoundSlides I believe will be the savior of journalism. As people stop reading detailed investigative articles in newspapers and come to expect image and sound to keep their attention, user friendly programs like SoundSlides need to fill that void. The deterioration of professional print journalists is running in parallel with the explosion of citizen journalists with the ability to create professional pieces. Democracy is well served by this as the media giants' grip on the voices that are heard will be loosened and more perspectives will emerge.

What a time to be alive...

Buskers in Wollongong