Co-production can be a powerful tool for authentic storytelling – and it needs media organisations and funders to embrace it. On Our Radar’s Director Paul Myles shares more about the experience of co-production in documentary filmmaking. This article is part of the People-Powered Storytelling collaborative series.
On Our Radar is an award-winning production house working with unheard communities across the globe and supporting them in sharing their stories. Their recent productions have included Orwell Prize-winning The Manchester Maze, an interactive web doc told by those navigating the housing system, and the BBC documentary Mayor on the Frontline: Democracy in Crisis. Here, Director Paul Myles shares more about On Our Radar’s experience of co-production in documentary filmmaking, and makes the compelling case for why it could be the new solutions journalism.
How would you describe and define co-production?
I like the word co-production because it hints at a genuine and equal collaboration between two parties, a pairing of skills.
We work on participatory storytelling projects with traditionally marginalised communities and the way co-production takes shape in our work is a bit different every time. People want to be involved in different ways and to different extents, but there are certain commonalities that run through all of our projects.
The way I see the partnership is that the individual or community that we're working with brings access, deep trust with their community, authenticity, or lived experience of a certain subject area. They also bring legitimacy and new ways of looking at a specific topic.
From our side, we bring technical skills, legal and editorial skills, camera or editing skills and the knowledge of how to tell a story and make it work for a certain audience and for maximum impact.
The best co-production projects bring these skills together to create something raw, authentic, surprising and new. I see co-production (or community-led journalism) as a set of tools and approaches that could be in any journalist or producer's locker.
What tools do you think are essential in a co-production approach to journalism and storytelling?
There are a set of methodologies that we use in most of our projects, at different stages of the production process. Stage one starts before we even start production, when we run story dive sessions with communities to surface ideas, themes and angles.
The next part of the process is around setting guiding principles for a project. As part of this, we brainstorm what we think the project should aim to achieve, which myths we might want to debunk, and which stereotypes we might want to try to avoid.
This is really about making sure that everyone's on board with the tone of the project – this can be really important as it can give you a lot more creative licence further down the line to make decisions editorially and creatively, knowing that you’re doing so within a certain framework. It’s a great accountability tool that everyone can refer back to as the project develops.
Some of these steps really help to set the tone for an equal collaboration.
You can read more about our tools and methodologies by downloading our toolkits here.
How has this shown up in On Our Radar’s work? What has the impact been?
We don't just want to do ‘fair trade journalism’ – nice, fluffy stories that feel inclusive but don't quite have that cut through.
We want to work on stories that can compete with the best, can win awards and have a tangible impact – stories that are marked by being somehow different, unique and raw.
For example, we worked on the award-winning documentary My Stolen Childhood, which explored ritual slavery in West Africa. That’s someone's life story, it's going to be the number one result when they search their name on Google for the rest of their life, and the one time they tell that story so publicly.
Working on a story like that in a collaborative way, using co-production methodologies, helps to ensure that the trust is fully there, that they feel completely comfortable to share their story in an open and honest way.
One very ‘pure’ example of co-production was the Manchester Maze, a recent project we worked on with a group of people with direct lived experience of homelessness.
I say pure in that it started off with a completely blank slate. We kicked off with a reporting sprint where we trained people with that lived experience to go away and capture stories and to report on what was happening to them and their community.
Through that reporting sprint, we dug up lots of interesting and surprising topics that we hadn't really maybe thought of before. We then ran a series of creative co-design workshops with the group to generate ideas, and that's where the idea of the Maze came from.
It ended up being an interactive, choose-your-own-experience style web-doc, where the viewer was invited to make decisions about what they would do if they were in the shoes of a homeless person. All these decisions were choices that the reporting network had faced themselves.
The group wanted to expose the web of bureaucratic traps that people fall into when they have nowhere else to turn.
At the outset, we really didn't have any sense of what we were going to make – and so I think it was really testament to the creativity of the group and the importance of staying open to all ideas that are put onto the table.
We ended up coming up with something that we would have never imagined at the beginning and won the Orwell Prize for reporting homelessness. The judges valued the level of authenticity that shone through the storytelling, and the uniqueness of the approach.
What do you think some of the misperceptions or knowledge gaps around co-production are?
I think that some people slightly misunderstand collaborating and sharing power with somehow giving away editorial control. We often have to say to communities working with us that, if the BBC is ultimately going to put this piece out, they do retain final editorial control, they have the final say, and there's not much we can do about that.
But there's a huge amount of collaboration, compromise and negotiation to be had before we get to the point of ceding editorial control. I think production is already a very collaborative game, whether it's between a reporter and a director, or between the producer and camera operator. There are always decisions that are being made, with different skill sets being brought in at different points.
For certain stories, it's a case of extending that collaborative spirit to the contributors that we're working with, and as seen with some of our work, it can make for richer, more authentic storytelling.
The other main misconception is the idea that we're advocating to do participatory, community-led storytelling for every piece.
I think for certain pieces, it's absolutely not appropriate. If you're investigating a corrupt cop or a dodgy politician, or you have access to a powerful institution – essentially, when you’re punching up – editorial independence is totally vital.
But, on the other hand, when you're working with communities that have been traditionally misrepresented, or historically marginalised, working in a more collaborative way can help to build trust that can give that community a chance to address some of the misconceptions and stereotypes that may have historically been associated with them. It’s an opportunity to think collaboratively about how a story can be told through a different lens.
So I think that's a key takeaway - that co-production is not something that a journalist or a producer has to do all the time. And it can be done to different degrees, in different parts of a project. For example, you might one day use participatory techniques with a group of women who are survivors of domestic abuse, but it wouldn’t be appropriate to use the same techniques the next day if you’re trying to hold the police unit who have been handling domestic abuse cases to account. .
Solutions journalism as a way of approaching stories has become much more embedded within the industry in recent years. Do you see similarities with co-production, and the potential for this approach to also be used more widely?
I'd love for community-led storytelling, as a movement, to learn from the way solutions journalism has grown in recent years. I think what solutions journalism has done really well is to create an ethos, a strong mission and vision, and a clear set of tools that can be used to bring solutions journalism into people’s work.
On top of that, it's created a network of ambassadors and of trainers who can help to spread that methodology. And it doesn't mean that people doing it are ‘solutions journalists’ one hundred percent of the time, just as with co-production in our work as I’ve outlined. While some might use solutions journalism techniques all of the time, many others just bring elements of solutions journalism into their pieces every now and then when they feel like the topic is relevant.
And how do funders fit into the picture here? What resourcing is needed to make co-production as a widespread method a reality?
We need funding to be able to create a similar movement, growing out all of the amazing work that’s happening in the UK around co-production and community-led storytelling. As with the Solutions Journalism Network, we also need ambassadors, trainers, and a clear and unified set of guidelines that would allow journalists to learn to work in a more participatory way, in deeper collaboration with the communities that they are reporting on.
There is already a network of organisations doing great work within this space - but to scale the impact of these methodologies, more funding is desperately needed so that we can provide training, tools and support to journalists who want to be more community-led in their approach.
If outlets and institutions could build a more community-led approach into their work, we'd not only see more diverse voices in the mainstream, but we’d also see these organisations build deeper trust within communities that have been historically marginalised. And I believe that it would help to surface a different set of perspectives and more unique stories.
Paul Myles is a documentary filmmaker and Director at On Our Radar. Having previously worked as an investigative reporter for Channel 4 Dispatches, he joined On Our Radar to lead on their journalism projects, working with historically marginalised groups to find ways of amplifying their stories.
This article is part of People-Powered Storytelling, a new collaborative series showcasing the transformative impact of community-centred media initiatives in the UK. Read more about the series, and the other contributions that are part of it, here.
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