November 23, 2004, 1.07pm • 14 comments » • 1,314 Views

Debate as spectator sport

Video is the killer app for 3G phones - so why not include video in your coverage of them? BBC News did just that today, running a textual review of third-generation multimedia handsets, accompanied by videos of the reviewers shot using the phones themselves. This illustrates the story perfectly.

It also borrows an idea I’ve been keen on for a long time, since HotWired was running is Brain Tennis features back in the mid-90s.

Two people of opposing views are given side-by-side email columns to argue their point on an issue, accompanied by brief audio (or at least that’s how the earliest Brain Tennis pieces did it).

This is another different, inventive way to present a story - “debate as spectator sport”. TheDay.com ran something similar earlier this month - an email discussion between a diehard, old-time R.E.M. fan and a casual fan.

It’s all about the power of the story as exchange. Stylised and ushered into place by professional news organisations, there’s no reason why such devices can’t tell a great story. Examples might be coaxing politicians of different stripes to argue it out over email, asking a land developer and local opponent to debate via email and more. All of which can be presented just as effectively in print as online - seems to me like a way to introduce some of the personality and adversarialism of broadcast news into text without much apparent intervention from journos.