Editorial Remixes

Don Duncan

Today, the study of broadcast journalism brings with it inevitable discussions and considerations around notions concerning the meaning and stability of representations of truth; the feasibility of objectivity; and the usefulness of some of the rigid, persisting formal conventions of journalism. In my teaching lab at Queen’s University Belfast—a lab which is designed to resemble and operate like a newsroom—I aim to train my students in the core skills that will make them the journalists of tomorrow. I also seek to teach them to be critically aware, so that they can think through their practice, critically analyse their profession and thereby be innovators and levers of change in the journalism sector as it continues to evolve and adapt. It is for this latter part—the triggering and cultivating of criticality among my students—that I have developed a technique I call “Editorial Remix” and integrated it into my teaching lab environment.

Journalism is fast-paced and budgets are increasingly squeezed. As a result, once a journalist has filed a story, they typically move swiftly and directly onto the next story, without pausing much for deeper and larger reflection on what they have just produced and why they have produced it in that particular way. Little time is devoted for reflection and deep criticality on the process of producing jocularism itself. Editorial Remix, as a lab technique, inserts a pause in that process which enables the learner of journalism to reflect, deconstruct, analyse, and reconstruct the work they have just produced. Its roots can be traced to the music industry, specifically from Jamaica in the 1960s, where versions and “dub-plates” of songs were ordered by music labels to create buzz on the dance floors around the new release.1 Remixing as it exists today, as per Borschke, is a “digital media practice and expression made by copying, editing and recombining pre-existing digital media.”2 By remixing audio-visual culture—such as, in this current case, news reports and news bulletins—we can recreate culture and thereby “change how we think about [that] culture,”3 underscoring the notion that “no one version is correct.”4 Underpinning the growth in remixing, says Lessig, is the advent development of digital technology, which brough about a profound paradigm shift in the substance of published culture which, he argues, has moved from the “read only” nature of analogue technologies to the “read/write” nature of digital technology.5

I draw on this “Read/write” capability in my teaching lab, where I employ various modalities of Editorial Remix, each with certain restrictions on the scope of media students can use when remixing. The most restricted and most common modality I use is one where students are required to remix a TV journalism package that they have just produced themselves and are restricted to using only the video material contained in that package. This same modality can be applied to remixing a package produced by another student or indeed one that has been broadcast by a reputable news organisation. In other modalities, students can use material shot in the production of the story but not included in the final cut. In an even less restricted modality, students are allowed to “sample” news footage from broadcasters and remix that material into their own remixed package. Each of these modalities carries its own set of challenges and results in a variety of learning outcomes and critical reflections.

In each of the above remix modalities, students can be required to apply a number of focuses so as to home in on a particular aspect of journalism and affect a particular learning outcome or set of learning outcomes. Here are a few examples of specific focuses I have applied to remix assignments in teaching labs I have run:

• Occasioning a shift in the editorial focus of a journalism package so that what was a secondary editorial concern in the original package is made the primary concern in the remix. This helps students explore how the meaning and power of the package changes when editorial focus is shifted.
• Meaningfully changing the chronological order in which people who have been interviewed speak in the package. This work helps students reflect on placement and vocal power and how the sequential positioning of a voice has knock-on along gender, ethnic and age lines.
• Reordering shots and sequences in the package. This work enables students to consider non-verbal information and how changes in the visual syntax affect the overall impact and message of the package.
• Alterations in the soundtrack and interventions on the sound design of the package help students understand better the very subtle and powerful emotional effect that non-verbal sound has on the audience.

Editorial remixes of this kind enable students—once they have fully completed a journalistic package in compliance with the numerous and rigid formal and ethical mandates of journalism—to decouple from that paradigm, deconstruct the work and put it back together with a view to gaining insight and deeper critical understanding of why journalism is made in the way it is made. The remix process draws on processes of détournement to Situationists like Guy Debord and textual deterritorialization and reterritorialization as conceptualised by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.6 The defamiliarization (détournement), deconstruction (deterritorialization) and reconstruction (reterritorialization) that are an integral part of Editorial Remix,7 leads students to deeper conviction in the craft but they can also lead to ideas for how to innovate, improve and evolve the craft.

Of course, the technique of Editorial Remix need not be restricted to the journalism lab. I have adapted and used this technique in the teaching of documentary and can see it having pedagogical value in the teaching of film production, also.

As a technique, Editorial Remix enables my students to become journalists who not only have a deep critical awareness of their practice but who are also able to analyse and propose innovations for the numerous challenges journalism currently faces and will continue to face in the future.

Don Duncan is a lecturer in Broadcast Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. He is a scholar-maker whose practice and research interests include voice (both verbal and non-verbal) and vocal power in media practice; memory and nostalgia; folklore and mythology; genre studies; colonialism, postcolonialism and subaltern studies; as well as multilingualism and the Irish language. He is drawn to how knowledge about the above areas of interest can be deepened through the creation of media in audio, video, textual, animated and hybrid forms. In addition to his work as an academic, he is also a journalist and documentarian. www.donduncan.net.