Independent journalist blazes a trail from Afghanistan

DO you know how to upload, video text and audio? Vaughan Smith is showing how it can be done, by filing compelling reports from Afghanistan, using a combination of the latest social media tools.

Vaughan is part of the Frontline Club, and says freelance colleague and media consultant, Graham Holliday, his experience of blogging, tweeting and posting videos on YouTube is a fine example to aspiring journalists.

Graham says: "Wannabe journalists could certainly learn a lot from this. Writing on a blog is more immediate than writing for a print outlet and there aren't the worries over word counts and the like.

"Whereas Vaughan has a combination of writing and film making skills - not things you can just pick up overnight - the tools used to deliver the text and the film certainly can be learned by anyone within a few hours and that's across text, video, photos and audio. Any serious aspiring journalist should know how to upload video, text and audio and publish them to a blog in an integrated manner."

So will embracing all these new ways of getting his message mean Vaughan will get noticed?

Graham says: "Maybe, but I'm not sure this is the point. A lot of what Vaughan is doing is likely background stuff for longer features including interviews and suchlike. I think he'll be putting that together when he gets back to London, making a longer feature or features."

And what about his audience? Will people who don't follow mainstream media be more likely to tune into what Vaughan is doing?

"Again possibly, " answers Graham.

"But it's an interesting by product not necessarily the main aim. Anyone who is a relatively sophisticated internet user and is looking for niche reporting from Afghanistan will no doubt find Vaughan's reporting. The backing of the Frontline Club website helps that, as do the use of tags to categorize all media output, the blog and inbound links from other sources."

I'm interested in how big Vaughan's audience will be, and how can he make it bigger.

Graham says: "Is size important? Well, I guess all journalists want people to read, watch and listen to their stories, but you have to be realistic.

"The kind of stuff Vaughan is doing, and the way he's doing it, will only ever appeal to a small audience. How big is that small audience? I don't know, so long as they're involved in what you're doing and hold what you do in high regard. Any feature documentaries Vaughan puts together after his time in Afghanistan may have a wider appeal. This style of reporting, as Ben Hammersley no doubt found out with his BBC experiment in Turkey, is aimed at other journalists, at your peers."

And he stresses that this is just the beginning of more to come from the Frontline Club.

"What you see up there today, how you see it being done is not necessarily the way we'll be doing it in a year's time. However, the tools are all there - and they're mostly free - for anyone to use. Basically, it's lo-fi reporting. Anyone can do this. That is really the main point."