A Reply to Brendon Brooks

This is NOT Brendan Brooks (as far as I know)…

Yesterday I posted a blog drawing a comparison between the arrival and impact of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain ato the arrival of small digital cameras and cheap editing software in, well, the whole world.

Brendan Brooks posted the following response:

I’ve always thought comparing pre-industrial revolution products such as stockings to online videos was a bit odd. One product is tangible the other intangible.

So why the comparison? A pair of stockings is 10 times more useful than any video I’ve seen online lately.

About 18 months ago the station in which I work for fired all the editors and made all the reporters and anchors MMJs (multi-media journalist a.k.a. VJ) Has the quality improved? Nope. Do the reporters tell better stories now that they have more control over them? Sometimes, but for every one reporter that gets it right, there are 5 or 6 that simply “mail it home”.

This was not done to make to improve our on-air product. This was just another cost-cutting measure. Big deal. I get it.

As far as making money in this field is concerned, either one will make a VJ salary at 30k or less or the big bucks like Nino and crew. As a PA/Chyron Operator/TD (button pusher for now)/Hand-held camera operator and occasional editor when the EP is desperate, I make just as much money as one of our Associate Producers do. Why jump ship?

Mike don’t get me wrong, I’ve always enjoyed reading the blog and your history lessons. You do have interesting perspectives on a variety of subjects however I’m not quite sold on your VJ argument as a career.

VJ’ing is something upper management deem necessary in order to earn their yearly bonus.

In the end…it’s only TV. Not brain surgery or leading an infantry platoon.

Brendan, as you are clearly on the ‘front lines’ of the Revolution, I thought it was important to address the issues you have raised here.

The transition from manned crews to VJs has almost nothing to do with ‘improving the quality of the product’ and everything to do with cutting costs.

This is no bad thing, and it is frankly better to face reality head-on.

VJs can, I think, produce a better product if they are given the time to do so. Most are not.

Management sees, and rightly so, I think, that the move to VJ or MMJs can result in significant cost cuts while maintaining the same output.

This is simply a function of leveraging off of what the technology is now capable of doing. And the technology is only going to get better, faster and cheaper.  I have posted below a quick lesson on iMovie on your iPhone. It’s not broadcast quality yet, but it will be, in very short order.  All of this is inevitably coming.

What we have to wrap our heads around here is that making television , or video, is essentially a manufacturing process.  It is true that a pair of stockings has more innate value than a video, but as it turns out, on a minute by minute basis, making video is generally a more lucrative business than making socks – as any number of Chinese child laborers can quickly attest.

Making television was not always a manufacturing process – it was once a craft.  It was a craft when it was expensive and complicated to do.  When I started in this business I used to produce for Charles Kuralt.  We had a master craftsman of a cameraman named Izzy Bleckman. We had some of the best editors in the world. But it cost a lot of money to make those shows.  That’s fine when you have 5 million viewers (or 15 million). You can offset those costs against the ad revenue. But when you have 90,000 viewers (which is what a lot of cable shows have these days… and even fewer), the money just is not there to invest in ‘crafting’ of the content.  In local news, where you show it once and throw it away, the motivation to invest is even lower, as is the return on a per minute basis.

To further the model, as you start to need video for online or iPhone or iPads, the ‘value’ of return, the ROI, is even lower. But you still need the video. Hence, we begin to see ‘making video’ as a puretly manufacturing exercise – which is what it, in fact, actually is.

Now, you have to say to yourself, ‘how can I manufacture the best possible quality product at the lowest possible cost’.  This is the same exercise that every manufacturer enters into – from Apple to Toyota. TV and Video are no different.

If the technology allows you to manufacture the content at a lower price point (ie VJ), and the quality does not suffer too much (which it does not seem to), then the move to VJ manufacturing is inevitable.

This is, in fact, no different than that which happened to a hundred industries in Europe caught in the maw of the industrial revolution.

Messy.

But there is good news here as well.

The Industrial Revolution may have (in fact did) destroy the craft guilds, but is replaced them with an infrastructure that created 1,000 times (and that is low) the wealth that had been possible per-Industrial Revolution.

This video revolution will be no different. In the end, the need for vast quantities of video, cheaply produced, and quickly manufactured will also radically recreate the landscape for anyone in the video business.

If you were in Britain in the 1820s, and know what you know now, you would run to invest in Stephenson’s Rocket or start your own small cotton factory.

Well, you are in 21st Century America, and since you can see what is coming, you might want to position yourself accordingly here and now.

Many years ago, I was hired to work on NY1. It was one of the very first VJ stations in the world.

The guy who hired me was named Paul Sagan.

He had been an EP at WCBS.

But Sagan was smart.

His cousin was Carl Sagan, the astronomer.

Sagan could see what was coming.

So after launching NY1 he leapfrogged the technology and the future and went to Cambridge, Mass,  where he now heads Akamai.

As of this morning, Akamai was worth just south of $2 billion.

That’s a lot of socks.