Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz
OK
Here’s a sobering statistic
The average American spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV.
And as video migrates to iPads, iPods and the web, that number is going to increase.
Good for us video makers
Now, here’s the sobering statistic.
The average American spends 20 minutes a day reading.
Yep.
20 minutes
33 on the weekends.
That’s what the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics said in 2006.
And they ought to know.
One would think that in the past four years that numbers has declined.
Maybe not.
On the other hand, you’ve now consumed about one quarter of your daily reading quota just by getting to here.
What does this mean (other than a pretty good explanation for a lot of the candidates running for office this year)?
It means that in the realm of content, we are entirely a video based culture.
It means that all the yelling and crying over newspapers and their demise is really a tempest in a teapot.
Reading, it would seem (and concurrently writing) is (are?) over.
What is in ascendency is video.
We are a video eating culture, and it’s only going to get worse (or better).
The real question is: who is going to produce the vast, almost unimaginable sea of content that people seemingly have an insatiable appetite to consume.
If we spend 12 years teaching people in school to read and write to participate in a print culture to which we devote 20 minutess a day, how are we addressing the part of our culture that demands 4.5 hours a day???
The answer is, we are not.
We are leaving that vast gaping part of what forms our society to the hands of a few people in NY and LA (and Silver Spring) who will decide what it is we see and think and feel and talk about.
There is something fundamentally wrong with this approach.
And, more to the point, it will not last.
Once people can crank out video content with the same ease (and proficiency and quality) that they crank out text, the video monopoly of a few media companies is going to be over.
And that is no bad thing.
There are a few billion dollars on the table.
Come and get them.
15 Comments
Nino October 25, 2010
Michael, we drifted from the original post.
Are you agreeing of how ridiculous and misleading this statement of your is?
“There are a few billion dollars on the table.
Come and get them.â€
Let me tell you why none of your student will never make any money from what they learn from you. It’s called brain power.
If they can not figure on their own how to put a few scenes together to start with and they have to pay somebody $2500 to tach them, they just have no brain power to figure how to make it on their own. This is why you have 20,000 students that don’t make a dime from what they learned from you.
This has nothing to do with your teaching, this is the spoonfed generation. Most people today no longer know how to think and how to solve problems. All they have is questions and let’s find the answer. They don’t know how to formulate their own answers, they always need someone else help. They have no brain power to come up with their own resolution: they google it instead.
Last night on 60 minutes the opening report was about the economy and people being out of work for over two years and with no hopes for potential job, sad. Not sad about the economy but sad that these people, some with PHDs, many with masters and most with college degrees, were blaming the government for not creating jobs. One would figure that after 2 years out of work someone would figure that there’s no longer a demand for what they do and is about time that they learn to do something else, something that it’s in demand, but apparently these people can’t.
Yes, there’s a 10% unemployment, but there’s also a 90% employment, and considering that 4% unemployment is normal even with a good economy, in reality we have 6% of people that cannot find jobs. The difference however is that these new class of unemployed are not high school dropouts as everyone picture a chronic unemployed to be, but well educated people, intelligent people not smart enough to solve their own problems and looking for someone else to give them the answer.
As you know I was born in Italy, my city had a strong Austrian influence as it was once part of the Austrian Empire, and I spent a lot of time in Austria, the land of psychology birth place of Sigmund Freud. Back in the 50s when calculators were born, those were the big clunky mechanical ones, banks forbidden their officers and tellers from using these new machines, they had them but they were allowed to use them only to double check the old pencil, paper and brains.
The fear was that reliance on machines will diminish the functions of the brain.
60 years later those fears are now realities and the VJ movement is a clear example of that. VJs are not expected to think, they are expected to react only. See what’s there, record it and make the deadline. A thinking brain is expensive and the last thing that management in news wants is someone more expensive.
Learning to do videos is easy, like you said, everyone knows how to write and could write a novel, that’s easy. But if you want to make a living as a writer and someone hires you to write a technical manual writing skills becomes secondary. You have to be smart enough to know what you are writing about it, this is where people fail.
I also noticed that you no longer teach to the general public, you go after institutions, there you don’t have to justify why your students are not making any money from your teaching.
Michael Rosenblum October 25, 2010
Well as with calculators you see the impact of technology on culture.
So you can also see the massive impact of both the web and cheap and easy HD cameras and edits on our own business.
When you were starting out, making video was a rarified world.
Cameras were expensive and complex.
Edit suites cost a fortune and looked like NASA control.
And there were only a handful of clients, relatively, all of whom paid a lot for what you provided.
It was a pretty secure world.
Now, everything has changed.
Everyone and their brother has an HD camera, or soon will.
Editing is easy and cheap as iMovie 9, which is pretty powerful software and free.
And now every website in the world needs video or soon will.
Different world.
Different value to the skill as well.
It’s not so rare anymore.
Pretty much anyone can do it to some extent.
How well do they do it? I dunno. It’s a range, from great to terrible and lots inbetween.
I am still working with major corporations who want to take the skill in house.
But I am very much still offering it to the public.
As with Travel Channel, USA Today Academy and NY Magazine Academy (Both launching in the fall), and the already launched JLTV Academy are very much for the public, just like Travel Channel was.
And there are more on the way.
Like I said, the demand is pretty massive.
And, of course, I am not the only one doing it. But there seems to be no shortage of people who want to learn.
Will all of them make a living out of video?
Of course not.
How many people who learned how to read and write in school make a living as professional writers.
What is quite clear to me, and I think to most of them, is that what we should call video literacy – the ability to process simple video on your own at home and upload them and have them look better than the cat in the tree on Youtube is a skill that any working person – no matter what their profession – is going to need in the near future.
Take a look at Cisco’s site. They are totally committed to video online.
That’s why they bought flipcam.
Their entire future is based on online video and millions of people sharing the content.
This is the way the world is going.
Video is going to supplant text as the primary means of delivering ideas.. or even selling things.
And who is going to make the video?
Lots of people
Lots.
And who is going to train them?
It’s a good question.
One I am trying to answer.
And like I always say – so far, so good.
Nino October 24, 2010
“Nino, while I always love to have you here the ‘debate’ over VJs is pretty much over and the VJs won.”
Michael, let me say it again, and again, and again, try to get it please. You and management have won, VJ have lost, big time.
Let’s face reality, if you qualify as a VJ you are a loser.
Although you tried to make VJ works across the broadcasting spectrum, all your efforts failed, one after one. Ultimately you landed on the news portion of the industry.
News is less than 10 percent of television and video business and is the 10 percent that is bleeding to death, and there’s nothing in the future that will make it turnaround.
Using VJ in hope to rescue the news industry is the equivalent of using band aids to plug the hole in the Titanic.
Management can claim victory with VJ but the reality is that the VJ concept is cheap, unintelligent, untrained and unprofessional labor. If you qualified as a VJ then you are a failure because all it means that you are not even considered by your own management as smart enough to make a decent livable salary, and you never will because your position was created out of the needs to save money. This is why there’s an enormous job turnover among VJs. The immediate glamour of being a videojournalist will soon be replaced by the needs of paying bills.
Let face it, this is a job and the only way to measure success is how well one is compensated.
While good photographers today take home as much as 300K per year and I don’t know of any that takes home less than 150K, a VJ on the other hand makes on the average less than 30K per year. A McDonald assistant manager makes more than that, a McD assistant manager however if he is smart has plenty of growth opportunities within the corporation, a VJ has NONE, it’s a dead end job with no opportunities for advancements and no chances to make enough money to make a decent living, and the reason is that the job of VJ in itself was created out of the need to save money and not from the need of create quality, intelligence would actually be a burden to management because it means that soon or later you will ask for more money that isn’t there. This is why of all the 20,000 VJs that you claimed you trained you were unable to come up with a single one that is making a decent living.
The other problem for the news industry is that there’s no more intelligence left to make it successful, no one with brains will work for an industry that doesn’t adequately compensate them, they’ll go somewhere else leaving behind only those who can not make it anywhere else, and any industry without talents will fail.
Michael Rosenblum October 24, 2010
Well, it may be that there is no intelligence in the news department. Far be it from me to bite the hand that feeds me but…
In any event, I cannot speak for the rest of television, but for now only for the news part, which may indeed by 10%, but for me that’s plenty, and yes indeed, there will be fewer cameramen in a news organization that make 300k or even 150k than there are pigs that fly. The reasons are many but that is certainly the way it is and the way it is going. For the moment it’s the news divisions that are signing the checks and so I cannot argue with success. You can see it for yourself in the comments on B-roll and in the want ads for news organizations. VJ is here and here in a big way. You can’t beat the economics of it. Does it deliver a better quality product? For the most part, no. But it delivers a ‘good enough’ product but more to the point at a far reduced cost point. And that is what the bottom line is all about. This is an argument we can have from now to Kingdom Come but the general consensus in the industry is that this is where they are all going.
This, of course, fulfills very much a vision I had a long time ago that this was going to happen. And indeed it is happening.
If you want my opinion on the next big thing (probably you don’t but here it is anyway), it is all about making the hundreds of thousands of people who want to make good video for their websites or small businesses and do it on their own. This, of course, as you know, is entirely possible. Again, we are in the realm of ‘good enough’, and that is where, as you can see, I am focusing the majority of my time these days.
I am more than happy to leave the training of local news operations to places like Poynter, who seem to be getting into the game quite nicely. For me, I am tired of arguing with local cameramen and with local reporters who ‘don’t want to do so much work’. I had one such comment this morning from a local TV station in Arkansas. Go to Poynter! Better them than me. It’s not worth the effort. The demand among ‘regular’ people to learn video is more than enough for me.
Nino October 24, 2010
Darn Michael, what happened to this blog of your. I was hoping to engage in some sort of open debate like the good old days, might as well exchange e-mails, where’s everybody, not even Cliff? This is depressing.
Michael Rosenblum October 24, 2010
Nino, while I always love to have you here the ‘debate’ over VJs is pretty much over and the VJs won.
There is not much to debate any longer.
As you can see, every broadcaster (and magazine and newspaper and website) in the world is doing this.
My brother-in-law who is with NBC was here for dinner last night.
He said NBC just sent around a questionaire to its staffers asking them what kind of camera, light kit, edit software etc they wanted.
ABC of course is doing this in house as well.
I am going back to the The BBC next week where we’ll be training 1,000 of their staffers and I have meetings with two other European networks to do the same.
We are launching NY Magazine and USA Today Academies next month, and of course I have just finished with BET.
Like I said, the days of debate, fun though they were, are over.
But please feel free to stay and offer your insights.
You are welcome as always.
Nino October 23, 2010
WOW Michael, I’m speechless. I haven’t been dealing with the general public but has overall intelligence fallen so low that people are actually buying this BS of yours?
You got me rethinking about what to do in my “slow down†phase of my life (not to be confused with retirement)
Thanks man.
BTW, my return to b-roll was after receiving dozens of e-mail asking me to do so, including Kev.
http://www.b-roll.net/forum/showthread.php?t=26220
Michael Rosenblum October 23, 2010
Actually, I got dozens of emails from people at b-roll asking me to stay. We’ll see.
As for the training business, it’s an open field. come on down. There’s more than enough to go around.
Nino October 23, 2010
“Actually, I got dozens of emails from people at b-roll asking me to stay. We’ll see.”
Of course you did, and the support you got from them on the last thread was overwhelming.
http://www.b-roll.net/forum/showthread.php?t=26223
Is that what they mean about the “silent majority?”
“As for the training business, it’s an open field. come on down”
Come on down where, to your level? You must be joking.
Michael Rosenblum October 23, 2010
Hundreds in fact
As for the training business… the ball is in your court.
entirely.
Nino October 21, 2010
Michael, only a week ago you told me this on B-roll after I asked you how many of 20,000 students you claimed you trained are actually making money with their videos.
Your answer was
“Dear Nino
I am not running a job training business.
I am running a business offering Video Literacy.â€
And when I asked you about what happened to the claims you’ve been making for the last 8 years of:
“In the next ten years there will be an “explosion of needs for videos†and “unlimited earning potentials†(these claims can be found right here on your blog)
Your answer was:
“My business, like any business, has matured and changed over the years as the world changed. To do otherwise would be just plain stupid.â€
And now you are saying this?
“Once people can crank out video content with the same ease (and proficiency and quality) that they crank out text, the video monopoly of a few media companies is going to be over.
And that is no bad thing.
There are a few billion dollars on the table.
Come and get them.â€
Well? which one is it? Are you customizing your speeches for different audiences?
Telling people that they can make money just by learning to put a few scenes together would be he equivalent of telling someone that now that they’ve learned to change the oil in their car they can work the pit at Daytona.
The reason that none of your student has ever made any money for what they’ve learned from you is because when you put video and money together in the same sentence, like it or not IT IS A JOB, something that you don’t teach.
Making money from anything requires an in depth knowledge of the market and how to apply those newly acquired skills to meet client’s needs.
I posted several thread on B-roll about “video with a purposeâ€, the importance and what it takes to meeting client’s needs.
It’s easy to teach someone to go out and do cute little stories that nobody really care but when you are taking somebody’s money you better know what you’re doing, and you and your student haven’t got that far yet.
If you looks back at all your wacky ideas of how to make money with videos you’ll see that what you have been trying to do is to create needs that do not exists and directed to businesses that don’t have any money to spend in the first place, not a very good marketing plan.
The only way to succeed in any business and stand any chance to make money is to be knowledgeable and understand the market, then fill the needs.
Just making videos is not a skill, knowing how to apply it to the market place is. This is why only a microscopic fraction of people who create videos actually generate some profit from it, the rest posts on Youtube.
Michael Rosenblum October 21, 2010
I teach people to be proficient in the medium. What they do with that skill after that is entirely up to them. Some never do a thing. Some improve their own websites. Some, like Mr. Besemer, take off and sail around the world and shoot their experience. Is it a TV show? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. That’s up to Mr. Besemer and Nickelodeon and whomever else he pitches it to. That’s now in his hands. This week I am with BET, Black Entertainment Television. I am teaching their producers and reporters to shoot and cut. What will they do with the skills in the long run? I have no idea. Some will succeed, some will not. This is what video literacy is all about. I can teach the skills. What people do with it afterwards is up to them. Will Mr. Besemer’s work turn into a TV series? We’ll have to wait and see. For Jay Russell, another grad, it turned out pretty well.
As for b-roll, I don’t think you’ll find me there any more. You and Chicago Dog can have it all to yourselves. But you are always welcome here.
Nino October 22, 2010
Let’s not kid ourselves Michael, your objective is to sale training and using the billion dollar potential is deceptive, you know darn well that it will never happen. Those are dreams. It’s like telling someone that he has the potential of becoming a doctor because he learned to put a band aid on a paper cut.
“Once people can crank out video content with the same ease (and proficiency and quality) that they crank out text, the video monopoly of a few media companies is going to be over.
And that is no bad thing.
There are a few billion dollars on the table.
Come and get them.â€
You’re the equivalent of a driving instructors telling his students that there’s tons of money to be made once they learn how to drive, why should NASCAR and Formula One driver have the monopoly.
C’mon Mike, 20,000 satisfied students you claim you trained and we are doing a solo here? Kind of lonely here don’t you think. Or may be everybody is too busy getting those “few billion dollars on the table?â€
Remember those day when you actually had supporters here and we had heated argument were everyone was trying to telling me that I was wrong and you and them were right? Where are they now?
As far as B-roll goes I have been wondering for the last 8 year why you keep coming back. How many times have you said that you’ll stop posting there? Eight year, hundreds of posts and you haven’t won an argument yet. I truly admire your persistency.
Start showing people how to really make money instead of charging for dreams.
Michael Rosenblum October 22, 2010
Well I suppose I said I was leaving B-roll as often as you have. We’ll see who breaks first.
As for my past students, no one seems particularly unhappy. And clients keep coming. I am off to the UK for a month where I will be training staff from the non-news departments like history, science and drama. This week I am wrapping up with Black Entertainment Television. The market is speaking loud and clear to me and it tells me that what I am offering is in demand, both from professionals and from the general public. nyvs.com now has more than 3500 members and it has only been up and our of beta test for a few months. All in all, so far, so good.
As for the implicit expectation that one can earn money from knowing video, I would go even further and say that in future, if you don’t know how to produce your own video content you will find yourself increasingly unemployable. You might take a look at any job at any media company today from newspapers to magazines to local tv and the web. All of them are looking for ‘multi media’ people. That means video as well as text. Text we all know how to do. Video… well, that’s my part.
Ts October 20, 2010
It reminds of the monopoly of the written word by the clergy/church in the Middle Ages. People could speak but few could write. In the past(or first) video century, people in general could write but few could produce video and even less people could publish it due to technological restrictions. Good point about the print x video demand and the emphasis on print in the educational system. We’ll have to deal with that, soon.
A link about the consumers x producers issue:
Marx After Duchamp, or The Artist’s Two Bodies; http://bit.ly/aPSt1q …
“At the turn of the twentieth century, art entered a new era of artistic mass production. Whereas the previous age was an era of artistic mass consumption…”