What's in a Story?

Rahul Srivastava, co-director of PUKAR, Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research, a Mumbai-based research initiative delivered a talk to members of GoCreat on what makes a good story.

Rahul has written on the environment, popular culture and new knowledge practices. He has studied sociology and anthropology in India and the United Kingdom.

Listen to excerpts of Rahul's discourse...

Challenging times for journalists

"Rarely can a single person excel at so many skill sets"
- Steve Herman, South Asia correspondent, Voice of America

Steve Herman, delivering his address at the seminar on Convergence in Media at St Xavier's College, Mapusa, spoke about the perils and challenges that technology has thrown at media houses and journalists.

Does asking a single journalist to work in multiple media simultaneously reduce the quality of the final product? With so many sources of information, can we trust all we see or read on the Internet?

According to Steve, as long as media houses and journalists remain responsible and consumers are able to discern the factual from the fictitious, we are headed for a truly positive media revolution.

Listen to excerpts from Steve Herman's talk (8min 7MB):

Converge for your own good

"Convergence for a journalist today is a fact of life. You have to live with it, you have to train for it, you have to be ready to develop and use the many skills required of you today."
- Prem Panicker, Editor - Rediff.com

Students, j-School lecturers and journalists were given a brief dose of convergence in media and the emergence of the new journalist during Prem's talk at the Convergence seminar at St Xavier's College, Mapusa.

Prem spoke of the need for journalists to equip themselves with new skills required for multimedia story-telling. Skills such as the ability to record good sound and video clips and use of digital cameras. But more importantly, Prem stressed on the need for maintaining the age-old focus on content. Multimedia journalists are not just techies with tools. They need to think about each story they work on. Today it is not just enough to research and write your story. You also need to think about what medium is best to tell that story. More importantly, different aspects of the same story may be told using different media. The ability of a journalist today, to combine various media into a multimedia package is what would make a sought-after journalist.

Using his own experiences as a background for his talk, Prem made his point clear - learn the new skills and improve your story-telling ability in the new media or languish in the old.

Listen to this audio recorded at the seminar (13 min | 12MB):

Freezing in on a Story

The group has had a couple of "coming together" meetings. After brainstorming sessions over tea and "batata wadas" we froze in on the theme "Market"

Within this broad theme, each participant came up with ideas for individual stories. They got to know what makes for a "strong story" while at the same time, being feasible/manageable.

We used the online courses from the BBC Training website (bbctraining.com) and participants learnt how to "Prepare to tell a story"

Key concepts learnt for good storytelling were:
1. A Hook
2. Characters
3. A setting
4. A key question

During the second meet, the documentary "Walmart - High Price of Low Cost" was screened, since the topic we chose was Market.

After deliberations, we narrowed in on the following story ideas:
1. Child's view of the market (an audio slideshow perhaps)
2. Sounds of vendor calls (an audio presentation)
3. A multimedia (still images and video) feature on the remnants of the old economy (traditional vendors selling products prepared by them) struggling to survive in the new world.
4. Personal relationships formed in the marketplace.


More later...

Welcome to GoCreat

GoCreat is an experiment in multimedia story-telling and innovative pedagogy. It seeks to bring together individuals of various backgrounds with a common desire to use new-media as a powerful tool for expressing themselves.
Based in Goa, India, the group comprises of a photojournalist, a lecturer of the Goa University, a newspaper journalist and a bunch of enthusiastic students. By-and-by you will be introduced to this intrepid bunch.
What can you expect on this blog? As the main description goes, it is a work in progress and will document the experiences of the group as we seek to use multimedia tools and techniques to tell stories.