60 Minutes Fails to Deliver
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jibdeQbh6Rw&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] Hello? Hello? Anyone home over there? Last week, 60 Minutes, the CBS News program initiated an interesting idea. Shoot a video, tell us what you think or what questions you have and we’ll air and answer them. Fair...
Read moreCBS News Fires Its Best Cameramen
Even a blind person can now see what is coming… Yesterday, CBS News fired most of its professional camera staff in its London bureau. From now on, stories will be shot by producers. This is not to say that...
Read moreWhy 60 Minutes is Great Television & Terrible Journalism
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jibdeQbh6Rw[/youtube] Chris Kohatsu tweeted me the other day. 60 Minutes was posting an invitation to people to question or respond to Lara Logan’s story on US forces in Afghanistan. As I had previously tweeted that Logan’s story was terrible,...
Read moreInto Thin Air
What happened? Next month, assuming nothing else goes wrong, The 2010 Commonwealth Games will kick off in Delhi. The Commonwealth Games are sort of the Olympics for the members of the British Commonwealth, which is what is left of...
Read moreWe Launch JLTV Film Academy
Sign up now! A few years ago we launched The Travel Channel Academy in partnership with The Travel Channel. It was a resounding success. We trained several thousand people and in the end fielded a trained army of content...
Read moreA Rant on Education in America
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezk0e1VL80o&feature=player_embedded[/youtube] For most US students, this is a documentary….courtesy, Neil Silberman – All this week it is “Education Week” on NBC News. Not that that will so much to change the way Americans educate their young. When it was...
Read moreA Bit Further Down The Road
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43D_oibI2g8[/youtube] A few years ago, Betsy Brumley-Bernier and her husband Kevin took one of our 4-day intensive video training seminars. Yesterday, we took a look at Lashan and Chris Kohatsu’s first pass at a pitch for a food and...
Read moreGrads Pitch a Series
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/14929884[/vimeo] When we run the video bootcamps we always tell students that the holy grail in this business is getting a series on cable. And the best way to get a series on cable is not to pitch an...
Read moreInteractive TV on Channel 4? What Else Is New?
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tozDUMW5mzE[/youtube] Not even in reruns In 2004, Pat Younge, now Chief Creative Officer at The BBC, then head of The Travel Channel in the US and I hatched a scheme to air a new kind of television series. It...
Read moreArt & Artifice in Newspapers and TV News
Admiral Richard Byrd… come on now.. try and look cold… A fascinating piece in the NY Times today revealed that the paper ran a photo studio in it’s building on West 43rd Street where the famous and near famous...
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