And Now It’s Official

Do you think they have enough cameras on that boat?

In 1988 we introduced the concept of VJ Newsgathering in Norway at TV Bergen.

In 1990 we did it with NY1 in New York for Time/Warner.

In 1993 we did it in London with Channel 1 and in Switzerland with TeleZuri.

1994 brought us VNI, which became New York Times TV.

By 1998 we were converting The Voice of America to having 185 VJs around the world, reporting for VOA-TV.

In 2000 we started with The BBC and trained 750 journalists to work as VJs.

Then came German Public TV, Dutch Public TV, Sweden TV4, Oxygen Media, KRON4, WKRN, KGTV and so many others.

Then came print organizations.

McGraw Hill Magazines.

Last week The Newark Star Ledger got 7 local Emmy Nominations for their video news – all done by VJs.

Now it is 2010 and amazingly, The Los Angeles Times begins to pick up on the scent that hey, maybe reporters in TV News will one day carry their own small digital cameras and report on their own.

Man, is it any wonder that newspapers in the US are going out of business?

You call this ‘news’?

Yes, of course this is going to happen.

In most of the world it already has.

The US Network News organizations are way behind… way behind….

They are more like GM suddenly realizing that, hey, hybrids, there’s an idea…. maybe.

And when you read the article, it is absolutely astonishing to me that there are people who are still arguing about the quality of the work or the reporting.

And I am really sorry Dirck*, that it is your guy who is writing this kind of drivel:

While it may save money, “what it is going to do in the process is simply cut down on an individual’s ability to tell the story properly and well,” said Ronald Steinman, executive editor of the Digital Journalist, a magazine about visual journalism, who spent four decades producing news for NBC and ABC.

Ronald Steinman, whoever you are, you do not get this at all.

Not at all.

Free a good journalist from the cost constraints and physical constraints of having to drag around a team that has to set up every time they want a shot, give them a digital camera and teach them how to use it as a tool for reporting (as opposed to mimicking what a crew does), give them the time to report on their own as a journalist instead of a TV performer, and you get a vastly superior product every time. Every time.

My guess is that Mr. Steinman, (a former network news producer) actually has no idea how this works.

In any event, welcome ABC News to 1990.

You still have a very long way to go.. but at least it’s a start.

*Dirck Halstead, who was one of the first people I ever trained as a VJ was the Time Magazine photographer for the White House, with many covers to his credit.  Dirck got the concept immediately, and went on to found and run The Digital Journalist and train many of the world’s best photogs to work as VJs.