Valentí Sanjuan

On Thursday afternoon a guest speaker lead a discussion in Journalism 2.0. His name was Valení San Juan. We had conducted some research before he arrived, watched his videos, heard stories about his fearless escapades from our professor (Pipo Serrano), but nothing could have prepared us when we actually met Mr. San Juan.  Valentí San Juan walked into our classroom, pointed a camera at us, after asking permission, and began his discussion with our class asking us what his job title was, or what exactly he did for a living. I was immidiately intrigued. Blogger? Adventure Specialist? Journalist? T.V personality? I too, along with the rest of the class was stumped. I’d watched his videos, I knew what his work very well, but I couldn’t quite place my finger on what exactly it would be called.

Surprisingly, Google isn’t very helpful with this question either. When you look up Valentí you can see his repitiore of various videos and segments on “Visto Lo Visto (VLV), or his television show “Etiquetats” but nothing really tells you specifically what he does, or more importantly, what it took to get him there.

Valenti’s road to success was not a conventional one, nor was it easy. Some may think because he gets to pretty much work on his own schedule, and do “whatever he wants”, people may think he lives the dream life. And while that may all be true, he had to work much harder than one would imagine. There was a long journey, with many obstacles that lead to his current success. Starting off as a broadcast journalist on Catalunya Ràdio, to many cases of trial and error sampling multiple demographics and other various combinations of audiences, topics, and coworkers, to working alone, to spreading his talent worldwide using just his camera, Valenti’s career path is unlike any one else’s. Sanjuan has a total of four Youtube channels – vistolovistoTV with 135,956 subscribers, ETIQUETAGS with 10,660 subscribers, ValentiEstaLoco with 60,590 subscribers, and Mercè Sanjuan with 7,816 subscribers.When you see each of his videos you can see the true genius that is behind them. You can tell the detail that goes into every segment, the hours of film recorded and not used, the demographic tests, the countless sleepless nights that go into being one of the most successful “Youtube-ers” on the Internet.

Using a television-type-format his show looks just like a high quality program on television with a live audience (200 online viewers per month). He has created a new frontier of what one is capable of or what the internet today is capable of. There are so many career paths like Valenti’s that have not yet been discovered. So many people that are too afraid to take the leaps of faith that Valentí did to get to where he is. So many people told him no, as he explained, but he didn’t listen.

Even after his contract wasn’t renewed for Catalunya Ràdio, he persevered. Rather than broadcasting his show on the radio, he streamed it through the Internet, he knew the product had to change in order to attract financial funding. This was Sanjuan’s first step in joining the worlds of radio and television.
He knew his dream, maybe not in a job title or within the bounds of what is considered “acceptable” in society, but he knew what he was meant to do and he went out and did it.

So many people today have dreams outside the realm of doctor, or lawyer, or other more common professions. What a dream it is to be able to create your own brand, be an “adventurer”, to be able to run thousands of miles in honor of your mother, to complete an Iron Man, to fly to New York to do an ad for Turkish Airlines, to do an ad for Coca-Cola.

 To be able to spread your message to so many people, to be your own boss creating your own site, to truly live your own manifested dream, rather than what someone else envisioned for you. And, more than that, to be able to not just settle for one job title. Valenti gets to have at least seven jobs at once and, according to his website, by combining his various projects, Sanjuan has over 7 million YouTube views each month and nearly 3 million followers on his combined social networks. With such a wide reach and ability to influence that many people, he is an expert at digital marketing any brand, whether his own or another company’s.This knowledge and experience catalyzed the creation of Sanjuan’s own media agency/production company called Gordon Seen. Gordon Seen marries people like Youtuber’s, Bloggers, Instagrammer’s, with companies who want their content produced. It seems as if his work is limitless, like he can do anything he sets his mind to and encourages others to do so too without fear of failure or rejection.That is purely “a part of the journey”, as he so astutely explained in class. He is a true inspiration and example of how lucky we are to be a part of this generation and what we have access to. So often we use just the minimal amount and don’t understand the true impact we can have or people we can reach with one Youtube post or keeping a video diary. Our adventures, like Sanjuan’s, can motivate and inspire so many other people, we have so much more power than we realize and Valenti is a true leader of that concept.

Multimedia and Storytelling

From a ship in the South China Sea, to the cost of health care in the United States, to various company websites, the range of subjects is broad, but the common thread is the form of multimedia storytelling: a somewhat new integration of text, video, photography and graphics.

These features, for the most part created in the hours and days after the events, answer the most basic questions (i.e. what and where and when) but also to demonstrate the scale of the news but in a completely new, more efficient way and make information through websites or blogs easily and efficiently accessible to the public.

The visual explanations come in all forms, including video, motion graphics and hand-drawn metaphors. The images and interactivity in these features are the central elements around which the stories are built. Covering nearly any subject, charts, maps, diagrams and tutorials fit into this grouping of visualization features.

Multimedia storytelling, as we learned in class, is definitely not the easiest thing to do but it seems most successful websites and most aesthetically pleasing layouts have an aspect of digital storytelling incorporated in some way. Including video, or voice recording largely enhances the way a story is told which is one reason multimedia storytelling is so impactful. It takes journalism to an entirely new level; it is, in my opinion the new frontier for journalism of all kinds.

There are thousands of examples of multimedia storytelling on the internet. We see them every single day and probably don’t even notice. I know I certainly did not before learning about it, now I notice it everywhere. For example, this past February marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and there was no shortage of compelling multimedia to pay tribute to those who died there. Perhaps one of the most innovative was an interactive video developed by BBC News. The presentation includes dramatic footage, compelling narrative and interactive features that allow viewers to choose which parts of the story they want to explore further. It’s worth noting that BBC editors couldn’t have picked a better story for this format because the enhanced interactivity creates a dramatic sense of connectedness, changing video viewing from a passive experience to one of deeper physical and emotional engagement.

Citizen Journalism

In January 2011, a news release from Jamaica’s Constabulary Communication Network (CCN) stated that a man who attacked the police had been shot and killed. It was not long after, however, that a citizen of the country began circulating video footage which told an entirely different story. The footage showed the man who was said to have attacked the police, seemingly writhing in pain, being beaten with a police baton and finally shot and killed while still down and unarmed.

The identity of that citizen who videotaped those images resulting in the arrest of the two policemen was never revealed, despite appeals from law enforcement officials. The action by that Jamaican citizen brought into focus the fact that information and communication tools, such as cell phones and the Internet, are bringing about a level of access to information that is unprecedented in daily life. Blogs, forums, uploading of pictures or videos to the Internet, are now being labelled ‘citizen journalism’ as distinct from raditional, mainstream or professional journalism.

The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional or formal training in journalism have an opportunity to use the tools of modern technology and the seemingly limitless reach of the Internet in order to create certain content that would otherwise not be revealed, because this kind of journalism is able to go far beyond the reach of professional journalism.

By definition, “citizen journalism, or “participatory journalism” as it is also called, is the act of a citizen or group of citizens involved in the process of collecting, reporting, analysing and distributing news and other forms of information.” The objective of this type of journalism is to provide independent, wide-ranging and relevant information that is crucial to informing societies.”

Journalist Peter Dooley suggests that “traditional journalism is the outside looking in. Citizen journalism is the inside looking out. In order to get the complete story, it helps to have both points of view.” Dooley’s argument suggests that there is a place for this emerging phenomenon called citizen journalism, as well as for the profession that has been practised for decades called mainstream or traditional journalism.

Citizen journalism, as we know it now, was popularised in the late 1990s as more and more people, in both the developed and developing worlds, became connected to the Internet. The term is viewed as an umbrella term that covers blogging as well as other institutional practices such as the opportunity mentioned before, provided by one of Jamaica’s three free-to-air television stations, CVM Television. CVM’s “I-Watch Report” segment allows viewers to send in reports of events or activities in their location. Other definitions include any form of user-generated content or contribution to the debate that is taking place in the public. These would include postings on personal websites and social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace.  Nationwide news stations and networks , have made these sites a regular part of their commentary as they solicit views, in forms of videos, or tweets from listeners and incorporate these in their current affairs programs.

Street Art in Paris

Do we reserve the right of free speech? Does our native country defend that right against all odds? What is freedom of speech, of press? How far is too far?

All of the questions above, among millions of others were put to the test when an act of terrorism occurred in Paris last month. From January 7-9th, gun-men (later discovered to be affiliated with Islamist militant groups) opened fire near the offices of the satirical weekly magazine Charlie Hebdo. The gunmen killed a total of 12 people in the attacks and were noted yelling “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” and “God is Great” in Arabic while shouting the individual names of the journalists working for the magazine. It is said that the magazine’s satirical cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad enraged and provoked the attackers that day.

Nearly every country has some limits on freedom of speech and it is still one of the most contested subjects in every single society. Yet, recently after, Paris president Francois Hollande and leaders from Germany, Italy, Turkey, Britain as well as Israel and the Palestinian territories marched among French and other flags defending the honor of entitled freedom of expression and against terrorism.

“No person, no human being should be subjected to violence, still less death for anything that they have said, written or drawn,” Respect MP George Galloway said regarding the attacks.

There is a “fundamental difference”, declared the French prime minister, Manuel Valls, in a speech to parliament on January 13th, between the “freedom of impertinence” and “anti-Semitism, racism, apology for terrorism, Holocaust denial”.

Journalism, among other forms of expression, was the main target in this act of terrorism. Needless to say this posed and continues to pose a tremendous amount of questions such as, How far is too far? Can we really, as journalists, as bloggers, freely and safely express ourselves without serious, even fatal risk?

I had the opportunity to visit Paris two weeks ago and what I saw was completely opposite of what I’d imagined I would find after such a tragedy. Street performers flooded each street we passed, murals of street art, some relating to the recent attacks framed the city. It was as if these attacks only revived the culture rather than hindered it. It was incredible to witness such retaliation in a peaceful, passive way and showed what a profound impact self expression, including street art messages can have on an entire city and culture of people.