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The front lines of creativity: Journalist and educator Hanson Hosein on AI and solo storytelling
Hanson Hosein outside his backyard studio north of Seattle, where he produces independent films and explores the intersection of storytelling, technology, and leadership. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
This week on the GeekWire Podcast, our guest is Hanson Hosein — an Emmy Award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and communication strategist who has spent his career making sense of the world in times of change.
His world view is summed up in his advice to students and recent grads: 'You've got to start your own company. You've got to figure out, what does AI allow you to do that would not have been possible before — that you can do with one to three people, that gives you global reach and still allows you to pay the bills.'
Hosein lives up to that ethos with his latest project, American Dignity, a short documentary that follows the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement from Seattle to Selma to Washington D.C., across multiple generations of activists.
He started out as an NBC News correspondent, reporting from conflict zones in the Middle East and the Balkans. Later, he founded the Communication Leadership program at the University of Washington and became an early voice for digital storytelling, using technology to find new ways of reaching audiences.
'You constantly have to put yourself on the front lines,' he says.
On a visit this week to his self-contained studio on the former site of a chicken coop north of Seattle, we talked about how he made this film as a one-person operation, and the technologies he used along the way. We also dug into how AI is changing the creative process, and what it takes to tell meaningful stories in this new world.
The conversation also brought the GeekWire Podcast full circle: Hosein was the first guest on the show (in its current incarnation) back in March 2011. (There's more on the podcast's history in our recent 15-year anniversary episode.)
Listen above, and keep reading for highlights.
On agency in storytelling: 'One of the reasons why I was so attracted to becoming a one-person storyteller 25 years ago was because I wanted agency over the story that I wanted to tell. … We have all have, now, this unique facility to tell powerful individual stories without waiting for permission.'
On creative constraints: 'If you do have the possibility of doing anything — whether it's technology facilitating it, or AI, or a new platform — that's the worst thing that could happen. It's like having an unlimited budget for a movie. The worst movies are the ones with the biggest budgets.'
Hanson Hosein inside his self-contained office and studio, where he writes, produces, and edits his independent projects — including the new documentary American Dignity. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
On AI as a creative tool: 'What I could do today, that I couldn't have even done three years ago, is shoot audio and video in really trying circumstances, like in a massive crowd in Washington, D.C., or crossing a really noisy bridge in Selma, Alabama, without having a sound engineer with me — and then coming back to my studio and being able to use AI to clean up audio that would not have been usable otherwise.'
On the new era of media production: 'It's not about perfection, it's not about studio beauty. It's not about HBO excellence. It's about getting the story right, fast, and on your terms. And on your terms means you don't have to wait for an editor or somebody else to do something.'
On leadership in uncertain times: 'The world as we know it is going away, and we're going into a new world that we can't quite see. … What's it going to take for us to come together again, to trust each other and collaborate at scale, to build — not to rebuild — but to build new institutions, new sacred stories, that give us credibility and trust so that we can move forward.'
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