A few days ago The Guardian newspaper dropped the fantastically produced advert (which you can see above) by BBH for their new Open Journalism campaign. It’s fantastic play on the fairy tale of the Three Little Pigs and it shows the way that the general public now reacts to breaking news. It’s been a little while for the ‘old’ media to realise but Twitter could be their best friend for sourcing news and opinion.
The Guardian as well as the Daily Mail (the latter of which is now the top online newspaper in the world having overtaking the New York Times) have both taken to the web in spectacular form with both reporting massive increases in readership online nearly securing a life after print. Like it says in the press release for the film “The newspaper is moving beyond a newspaper” Old media has to embrace new media with open arms otherwise they will likely die out soon.
That said though, this Open Journalism campaign is very bold move for the Guardian as they will be sourcing their news from Social Media sites as well as their own reporters to gain what they call ‘the whole picture’. Good examples of this in action as said by Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger would be when the UK government released 400,000 documents in the wake of the MP Expenses scandal, the Guardian built a widget on their site and let more than 20,000 of their readers scan through the documents to see if they could find anything news worthy.
The campaign is built on the idea that no single newspaper can be the sole bringer of truth and news in this day and age and opening it up to the general public can only be good right?
Well we’ll see, it seems to work with the Guardian and has been for a while now but comment sections on big websites can be notoriously… unforgiving. BBC’s Have Your Say section and comments under pretty much any video on YouTube turning into all out war with insults being thrown about left right and centre.
It’s a shift of focus that is evident in the graphic at the end with ‘web’ coming before ‘print’.
The video itself was masterfully directed by TV Commercial director Ringan Ledwidge of Rattling Stick and edited by Rich Orrick of Work. It plays and feels exactly like a montage sequence from a feature film and with it’s original twist on a well known fairy tale is very engaging.