Listen:
“I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers”
-Thomas J. Watson, Chairman, IBM. 1943
Before computers came along, Thomas J. Watson had built and ran the largest and most profitable tabulator machine leasing business in the world. Those would be adding machines.
In 1952, IBM owned and leased 90% of the tabulating machines in the United States, with revenues of $987 million and 72,000 employees. It was a business that worked, and worked very well.
When Watson was introduced to the idea of moving IBM into computers, he could not grasp the potential of this new technology.
Watson was not alone. A few decades later, Bill Gates, who made his fortune in software and changed the world said that “640K of memory should be enough for everyone.” He was also late to the Internet.
These revelations are not surprising. People who run successful businesses are often reluctant or unable to see the potential impact of new technologies, or how they should be used. This is why General Motors just shut down the production of their only electric car, the EV1. This is why Kodak invented digital cameras but could not bring themselves to actually sell them. This is particularly true in the TV news business.
For many years, television news was made by professional camera operators carrying around massive cameras on their shoulders. For the most part, it still is. In an earlier iteration, they would be accompanied by a sound engineer, who, more often than not, was also relegated to carrying around a large UMatic recording deck, cabled to the broadcast camera. The notion of ‘big is best’ is deeply ingrained in the TV news biz, the way film was inculcated into Kodak and internal combustion engines is deeply ingrained into General Motors.
Thus, the arrival of iPhones and the idea of replacing those mammoth professional cameras with little iPhones- things that everyone already had – seemed, well, unprofessional. At best, a TV station might allow one of their reporters to shoot a few frames with a phone as a secondary camera, but only in an emergency.
So deeply engrained in the media world is this notion that bigger is obviously better, that last week, Apple, who makes the iPhone, released a video demonstrating that their new iPhone 15 shot pretty good video.
When you look at the video, you can barely find the iPhone. It has been buried under a ton of ‘professional’ video gear.
There it is! Did you find it yet? It’s like the Apple version of “Where’s Waldo.”
This is a mistake, but an understandable one. We can forgive Tim Cook; he’s not really a video guy anyway.
The advent of the iPhone for video, and particularly for video news carries with it the potential for an entirely new and different kind of TV news – one that is more powerful, more intimate and of course, far easier to make, but only when the iPhone is used properly. Like the advent of the computer or the web or electric cars, it has the potential to completely change the nature of the TV news business.
In the 1930’s, the Leica company released a new kind of stills camera. It was small and hand-held, and it shot on rolls of 35mm film, making tiny negatives.
Up until the Leica, professional photographers had always used very large format still cameras that shot on very large sheet film – one exposure at a time. The move to these tiny toy-like cameras was, of course, resisted as ‘unprofessional’; fine for amateurs, like the Kodak box camera, maybe. “Look at how little those negatives are!”
And, if you used the Leica the way you had always used a large format view camera – on a tripod with a cloth over your head and one exposure, it was true, that the bigger format gave a better result.
The secret to Leica – based photo-journalism was to learn to use the small camera in a different way – hand held. It allowed the photo-journalist a kind of intimacy that was simply impossible with a big format camera. It was unobtrusive. You could get close to your subjects. The result was the birth of an entirely new kind of photo-journalism – one that was far more powerful. And, of course, everyone in the newsroom could have one.
In 1962, the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened an exhibition entitled The Family of Man. It was filled with the work of great photo-journalists who used their Leicas in this new way – people like Cartier Bresson or W. Eugene Smith – the father of Life Magazine. The MoMA show took photo-journalism from a craft to an art form in its own right.
What the Leica did for photo-journalism in the 1940s, the iPhone will do for TV journalism in the 21st Century – take it from a craft to a high art. Used properly, an iPhone, all hand-held, and carried and employed by a video journalist, or MMJ, can be an incredibly powerful tool for telling visual stories in a simple yet intimate way. But it means working in a different way. No tripods, no lights, no ‘crews’ and none of the encumbrances that the nice people at Apple have screwed onto their lovely iPhone 15 to make it ‘professional’. We don’t add a thing – no brackets, no lights, no tripods – no nothing. Nothing to get in the way of the visual journalist.
And it works.
Here’s a story done by Kiet Do, a reporter for KPIX, the CBS station in San Francisco (and a product of our bootcamps). All reported, shot, edited and produced in a day, by Kiet, with no crew, and all done on a hand-held iPhone (and his drone). Nothing more.
