Calling All Artists!

NewsWrights United, an Associated Program of Shunpike, is soliciting proposals from artists in all visual media for installations/exhibitions for Journalism: a.WAKE.ning?, a fundraiser taking place at the Upstairs Galley above Theatre Off Jackson on November 15, 2010. NewsWrights will select three proposals and award a $100 honorarium to each.

Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? is an event to raise support and awareness for the programs of NewsWrights United, and specifically their February 2011 production of The New News News. NewsWrights United produces the Living Newspaper - local, topical stories pursued with journalistic rigor and presented through the medium of live theatre.

Journalism: a.WAKE.ning? will, through a show preview and panel discussion, as whether journalism in the age of new media is on the verge of rebirth, or is simply dead. Proposed projects should examine issues related to media and journalism, with a specific focus on new media, monetization model and their implications. Installations must require minimum hardware and set-up time. For more information, contact NewsWrights United Managing Producer Jim Jewell at jim@newswrightsunited.org.

Applications will be accepted and evaluated on a rolling basis until October 15, 2010, but may close at any time should three proposals be accepted.

Why This Matters - Dawson Nichols

There are so many reasons, but here is an example with which I am currently working.

Hansen Hosein, the UW’s new media guru, is starting a “Storytelling Uprising,” proudly proclaiming that he “gets lost exploring the future of communication through storytelling and digital media.”

http://www.facebook.com/StorytellerUprising

It’s a great example of how stream-of-consciousness is the mode of communication of the day. It has infected all forms of communication from journalism to personal journaling to social conversation. These days there is no need to organize thought – certainly no need to organize it in different ways for different purposes. If the Director of the Master of Communication in Digital Media program at the UW is happily getting lost in his own communications and regurgitating ideas haphazardly, why shouldn’t we.

Well, we do. And it feels good. And everyone’s doing it, so it feels safe too. Never mind that it’s luring us all into mediating our lives and distancing us from one another. Look at the Twitter ad Hosein extols in the above Facebook blog (Sept. 14 post).

I find this ad distressing in so many ways, but here are a couple of examples:

First, the underlying message of the ad is that an experience is validated by being cataloged or reported through Twitter. The ad is based on a romance, the idea being that Twitter can help with this real-world activity. But the people literally have no faces until they are online. In the real world they are bodies only, and it is not until they embrace this new media that they have individuality and identity. The culmination of the date is getting it documented online. This is one of the great invidious lures of new media. You are anonymous in the real world, but online you have friends – followers even.

Second, the new medium is sold by appealing to the nostalgia of actual sensual experience. The technologies of the actual date are a vinyl record, a book, a bottle of wine, the moon. But these things are referents only – we don’t hear the record, we get no excerpt from the book, the wine is never even opened, the moon is only useful because it can be photographed and placed in a tweet to show that romance was possible. This is the sort of short-handing that has become ubiquitous in storytelling today (don’t get me started about current writers’ use of plot points rather than actual plot), and it can diminish actual experience just as it diminishes stories. The experience becomes nothing more than a useful tool to enrich our online presence. The not-even-close-to-clever self-referential embedding of the ad itself (even Land-O-Lakes was way ahead of you, Twitterheads) within the ad toward the end plays this out. The roulette wheel of other tweets fades to black, suggesting that so many other experiences – as gratifying and enriching as the date – are documented online. So… spend more time online avoiding the actual experiences the bodies you saw documented for you.

Does this seem off-topic for a play about journalism in the new media environment? Well, I’ll turn this into a teaser by saying that if you want to see how it relates you’ll have to actually bring your body along with your brain to see the play in a live theater. Have a sensual experience with other people who are engaged in the same activity.

Of course, we encourage you to tweet and blog about it after.

The Great Upheaval

Here's a great talk about media consumption and theater and where we're all headed.

Cameron is extremely enthusiastic and articulate despite being a bit inaccurate at times - which the comments after the video call out. He is also quite optimistic, but it should be noted that this optimism is the luxury of a person with a steady paycheck. The cultural upheaval he describes is viewed differently by those whose livelihoods are at stake and who must navigate these troubled waters in order to survive. Those people who are leaving the theater because they can't make a living there any more are most likely not so sanguine about the changes.

I like a great deal of what Cameron says here, but the other thing I find troubling is his easy mention of the way in which current technologies are allowing amateurs to act as professionals. When this happens in theater this phenomenon is upsetting because it decreases the number of people who can make a living at the art form. That's upsetting, but it's not threatening. This same phenomenon, applied to journalism, IS threatening. As professional journalists are displaced we have fewer and fewer people who investigate injustice, hold power accountable, etc. Horsey's recent cartoon sums up the problem nicely.

WikiScene Is Live

Announcing -- The New New News WikiScene!

We decided long ago that a play about new media needed to incorporate new media into its creative process. So far, that has been mostly limited to conversations on Facebook that have informed our research and writing process.

Now we're taking it to the next level. You can literally be one of our writers.

The New New News WikiScene is a collaboratively written "play within a play" inspired by a New York Times article (Update: as published in the Seattle Times) about how multitasking affects your ability to focus. It will be created by an online community and actually performed this February.

Unlike other wikis, we decided to just use a Google Doc, with a nice, familiar word processing interface. That way even a luddite like Paul Mullin can figure it out.

The instructions are simple: Anyone can edit any element of the scene. However, a few elements are non-negotiable:
1: The instructions cannot be edited
2: The scene must tell a story with a beginning, middle and end
3: The characters must learn something about themselves
4: All participating writers must read this article and use it as inspiration: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2012049123_webmultitask07.html

That's it! I should mention that when you contribute to the scene, anything you write becomes the property of NewsWrights United. Nobody's getting rich off of this -- believe me -- but just to be clear so there aren't any hurt feelings.

Click here to help write The New New News WikiScene!

Bonus: use the chat function! The chat bar looks like this:



Click on it, and you'll get a chat window that looks like this:


You can confer with other contributors in real time. Sweet!

Help write The New New News WikiScene!

Why This is Important

We asked each of our creative team members to write a short essay on why this project matters to them. This is the third of five. -Ed.

I’m a marketing & PR guy. It’s not a statement that draws the most positive of responses, but there it is. I got an undergraduate degree in advertising, avoided the agency path, kicked about and fell into theatre. I became show people late in life.

But, I was always about marketing and PR. Artists, I have found, have an inherent distrust of my world. I recall one producer that actually went green when I said a good logo had to “work on an almost subliminal level.” This is seen as some dark magic.

So I wasn’t surprised when I sensed some resistance the first time I introduced the phrase “talking points” at a NewsWright United producers’ meeting. It’s an understandable reaction. These are creative people engaged in the act of creation, and have little desire to be told what it is they are doing. And “talking points” smacks so much of politicians, is maybe too close to “talking heads” (and not the good kind fronted by David Byrne).

But, they were patient and trusting enough to let me ramble and attempt to demystify. I do this more often than you might think, defending some practice of my profession that seems somehow unsavory to the integrity of artists.

It is important that these talking points aren’t meant as a recipe for deception or a menu for spin. They are an attempt to build a commonplace among the diverse voices that make up NewsWrights. There is nothing prescriptive about them. They aren’t a set of directions, but rather the outline of a map, so even though we may each describe it in a different way, we are all talking about the same place.

And there is a spirit of transparency in the talking points, which should be reflected in our use of them. So our talking points are not the internal document talking points so often become, but hopefully another potential point of departure for discussion among ourselves and with our audience.

In form, they answer the question we have to ask ourselves in so many different ways throughout this process: why is this important?

NewsWrights United was formed to produce Living Newspapers, an endeavor we feel is vitally important to the continued health of our democracy and future of American theatre.

Important to the art form:
Theatre is an art form of here and now. We’re exploring and refining the form of the Living Newspaper as a viable theatrical form for topical plays that are accessible and avoid didacticism. Theatre needs this infusion of immediacy and locality to remain relevant.

Important to the community:
While of national significance, the stories of the Living Newspaper are all essentially local. The producers, artists and students are from this community, and are working to advance an emerging model of theatre production that relies on strategic partnerships.

Important to the students:
Participating students get the opportunity to work with professional playwrights and journalists through a script development process, alongside professional actors, both Equity and non-union, and with professional production support.

Important to the discourse:
In an increasingly fragmented and disconnected media environment, the Living Newspaper combines a new media sensibility with the emotional intimacy of theatre to speak with a nuanced, personal voice. We embrace a high-transparency approach that mirrors and validates the role of the citizen journalist.

As media outlets move toward more hyper-local coverage, theatre, with its essential localism and grounding in time/place, is perfectly positioned to join the journalism conversation in a substantive way.

NewsWrights United produces the Living Newspaper in response to the increasing contentious and chaotic nature of the news media, answering the self-validation provided my cloistered interest groups with the shared experience of live performance.

Important to RIGHT NOW:
Civilization vs. chaos; the health of democracy in the information age; reflective vs. reflexive news media consumption; accountability vacuum; individual-empowering technology co-opted by institutional and corporate interests; credibility gap; a time of astonishingly rapid evolution in technology and media, developing well beyond its ability to consider the implications; the need for heart to go with all this head; antidote to screaming head culture.


Jim Jewell
Managing Producer
NewsWrights United

Why This Matters

We asked each of our creative team members to write a short essay on why this project matters to them. Here's the second of five. -Ed.

Fresh theatre is living theatre. I hold this truth to be self-evident. I have held it so for a very long time, but have only argued it publically and formally for about 9 months, since launching my blog Just Wrought, and its first in a series of essays, “Theatre Takes Place: Why Locally Grown Plays Matter”. By itself, the notion is not terribly controversial. The argument comes when we theatre professionals attempt to determine whether you can make something fresh with 10 year-old, 20-year-old, 50-year old and 500-year old ingredients. I say, “Well… sometimes.” My esteemed adversaries in this ongoing argument defiantly avow “Always!”, and then they sink a staggering amount of effort into convincing their audience, and more importantly, themselves that that so long as you have excellently trained and accomplished actors, insightful and renowned directors and designers, plenty of money from donors and an interested public, you can always make the already existing great plays of the canon fresh.

I disagree.

In reality you need actual fresh content to keep plays fresh, and theatre alive; and fresh content only comes from creating new plays. And thus, as much as the ascendancy of "The Director" in the 19th Century, and "The Artistic Director" in the 20th, seemed to herald the demise of the playwright, the playwright remains a necessary component— perhaps the necessary component—of ensuring theatre remains a living—and not merely a museum-- art form.

We at NewsWrights United believe that employing the theatrical form of the living newspaper to cover local news is one of the best ways of injecting fresh, locally compelling, material into the theatrical canon. That alone, however, is not enough to answer why this project matters. Happily, when we produced our first edition It’s Not in the P-I: A Living Newspaper about a Dying Newspaper, we noticed an added bonus. The people that came—and we sold out nearly every night—came not to see excellent theatre adeptly presented by trained professionals but rather stories about a local newspaper that they loved (or hated) that had died recently. In other words, they came to see themselves.


When theatre offers the new and the relevant, it matters and lives. When it offers only the polished and perfect-- plays we all already know-- it dies a museum death.

We are doing this project because journalism matters. We are also doing it because theatre matters. When blended they achieve an almost explosive synergy. Why? It’s simple. Audiences matter. Stories matter. The rest is icing. Sometimes icing is delightful, but it will not keep you alive in the long run.

Twitter Archeology

The amazing thing about Twitter, and its user-created hashtags, is that it lets everyone see what the hot topic is right now, this very instant, and maybe the instant right after this one. But how good is it at archiving those conversations so we can examine the hot topic at some later date?

As part of the writing process for The New New News, Paul Mullin asked me to find “all the tweets about Maurice Clemmons.” So, just like Indy, I donned my Stetson hat, clipped my whip to my waistband and went out adventurin'.

First thing I did was log in to Twitter and type “Maurice Clemmons” and the associated hashtag #WAShooting into the search bar. No results. Next, acting on a tip from Paul, I scoped out the Library of Congress, who has a deal with Twitter to archive all of the tweets, ever. You can't search this archive online. I emailed the LOC help desk and they said that they can't search the archive, either. Because the archive isn't actually in their building yet.

Then I did other things for about three weeks.

Paul wondered what had happened, so he emailed me, and I dusted myself off and journeyed into Google. You can now get tweets in your search results, and they backlog them as far as they can.

Unfortunately for this project, the Google search results don't go back in time far enough to capture the moment, and they aren't comprehensive. So then I searched for #WAShooting.


"Was hooting." I didn't get it at first.

I scrolled a little further down the results page...


And I was led to a site called Twapper Keeper, which, as it turns out, does exactly what I need: it archives tweets, sorts by hashtags, and creates archive files that export as .csv. Perfect! But the only reason I found it is because @kenrufo was on the same archeological expedition, just a few days before me. If I had taken this trip in June, I would have come up empty-handed.

I now have 5,700 tweets containing #WAShooting. I'm guessing there's more out there, and certainly many thousands with the phrase “Maurice Clemmons.” This will have to do for now. Sort of interesting that this obscure little site did for me what the Library of Congress couldn't.

Why This Matters

We asked each of our creative team members to write a short essay on why this project matters to them. Here's the first of five. -Ed.

We are plunging headlong into a great epistemological frontier. For generations, Westerners have turned to journalistic news sources to learn what happens and why. Now that these institutions are disintegrating, it isn't clear where objective information is supposed to come from. It's not even clear what the word “objective” even means any more.

Every person with an internet connection can gather information, on events both current and historical, through an established ideological filter. This filter can be set up deliberately or it can arise organically through social networks, email, and repeat patronage of selected news sources. We can customize, personalize and pre-editorialize not just our opinions, but our facts, too. Inconvenient facts therefore need not exist. This can all be accomplished without reducing the quantity of knowledge whatsoever, creating an alternate but seemingly complete reality, unique to each person.

The gates to understanding are falling away. We are left without a general consensus on what happens—yet alone a consensus on why.

What is the human cost?

This project matters to me because theatre is uniquely equipped to examine this epistemological frontier from a humanist perspective. Or, to be less college-boy about it, what happens when we don't know what we do and don't know? How would a group of people react to the very idea of knowledge changing?

I realize that to an extent this is a resurrection of ancient debates. But it still matters. Our society has a lot of decisions to make and we can't even agree on the facts that we're basing these decisions on. And if we fail to make these decisions wisely, it won't be because of this or that politician, or some particular special interest group, or any given faction of people. The failure will be within our own minds, because before power comes from guns or from money, it comes from ideas.