The Look of the New

VJ Cam ca. 1994

In 1994, I launched a new company called Video News International.

It was based on the idea of using VJs around the world to create television; an idea that, at that time, was considered extremely radical.

Television then was done by crews (as it still is in many places, remarkably).

While we started as a ‘news’ business, we soon discovered that cable presented a far more lucrative business.  If we could marry the VJ concept with programing that was repeatable, we would have a real winner.

We found our metier by embedding our newly-minted VJs into hospital Emergency Rooms.  We began with the idea of doing a single documentary, but the pilot was so successful and so compelling that TLC commissioned a full season of what would become Trauma, Life in the ER.

The secret to success here was to try and combine the ‘feel’ of traditional photo journalism – what made the work of people like Cartier Bresson or Eugene Smith to powerful to photography, and take it into television.  Many of our first VJs, were, in fact, first class professional photojournalists in their own right – people like David Kennerly or Dirck Halstead or PF Bentley or Bill Gentile.

What was needed, however, was a video camera that was closer to a Leica than to a betacam.

Panasonic provided the answer.

We went to Japan and met with Panasonic and laid out the parameters of what we thought would work.  The result you see above. They called it the VJ Cam.

While it did not go on to commercial success (I think it was way ahead of its time) it served our needs perfectly.

We went on (I think at that time without really realizing it) to create an entirely new genre in television – Reality TV.

It began as an attempt to drive television closer to the power of things like Magnum. Obviously, that idea went way off the rails!

Zsuzsanna Geller-Varga, a VJ with New York Times TV (I sold VNI to the NY Times and it became NY Times TV. I was the first President. I also was NOT cut out for corporate life!), sent me a photo of herself using one of our cameras!  Today, she’s a filmmaker living in Hungary.  The concept lives on in many iterations.

copyright 2015 Rosenblumtv

thanks to David Dunkley Gyimah for finding this.