In 1999, Michael gave a keynote speech at the Newsworld Conference in Barcelona, Spain.
The talk about was the concept of the Video Journalist or MMJ, at that time a totally new and extremely radical idea.
After the talk, Greg Dyke, then the Director General of The BBC invited Michael to come to London to address the managers at The BBC about the concept.
When the talk was completed, Dyke asked him how we could best proceed. Michael suggested a pilot program to test the concept. He invited him to send us 50 BBC staffers – journalists, camera operators, producers – young reporters, and 25-year veterans. We were going to put them through an intensive boot camp (the same ones we still do today) and the only thing we asked was to be left alone with them.
He agreed.
We were able to four-wall a space at the Crown Plaza Hotel in Birmingham and set about turning them into VJs. We did two groups of 25 each, and they all learned to shoot, edit and produce their own stories. We also focused on character-driven stories as opposed to the kind of news stories they had been used to doing – reporter stand-up, b-roll, interviews, and man-on-the-street soundbites.
The results were impressive. Here’s an example of a story done by Peter Wilson, the BBC health reporter for Birmingham:
The results were so good, in fact, that Dyke signed us to a contract to spend the next 5 years working with the BBC. Lisa Lambden was The BBC executive who ran the project for the Beeb and was charged with implementing the concept in the various stations. Over the next five years, we would put 1400 BBC staffers through the boot camps. When we started, The BBC had 43 camera crews to cover the entire country. When we finished, The BBC had 1443 cameras to cover the country, all in the hands of highly trained professionals.
One of the great discoveries during our years with The BBC was that former ‘crafts’ people – camera operators, editors, etc were more often than not amongst the most stellar Video Journalists – the process and the boot camps unleashed their power to tell great stories on their own. The VJ concept engenders a sense of personal authorship in television news stories.
The results from our first five years with The BBC were so good that we were soon working all across Europe with many national and private broadcasters, as well as in the US, and eventually worldwide.
The success of the first tranche of BBC boot camps led to other boot camps and training sessions with The BBC, amongst those, working with the Natural History Unit in Bristol; the network news division in London, and starting next month, the comedy, drama, and documentary departments of BBC Northern Ireland.
We have been affiliated with The BBC for more than 23 years now, and the relationship continues to grow.
