Carpe Medium
Hold everything! Many years ago, when I was a producer for CBS News, there was a kind of hyper-sensitivity to phone calls. We might run a story and conceivably 7 million people might watch it. However, if the phones...
Read moreCBS News Leaps Headlong into 1994!!!
       OK. Let’s not go TOO fast here…. CBS News announced today with great excitement that they had hired a real, live ‘VIDEOJOURNALIST’ to report for them!!!! On TV no less. The network...
Read moreKPIX SF Goes VJ
Two down, three to go… KPIX, the CBS affiliate in San Francisco announced today that they are moving to a VJ-driven newsroom. The official press release today said: Feb 11, 2009 3:58 PM EST KPIX management told the staff...
Read moreOlympic Memories
The last time I had a ‘real’ job was 1988. I was working as a producer for CBS News, and my last assignment was to go to the Seoul Olympics. I was working with Bill Geist, a contributor for...
Read moreRequiem for a Network
Barbarians at the Gate: Odoacer takes the number one slot, prime time and otherwise 1976 marked the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the fall of the Roman Empire. It passed pretty much unnoticed. 1976 had been the 200th anniversary of...
Read moreOne Down… Two to Go
And that’s the way it is…. CBS News apparently is about to outsource part of its newsgathering operation to CNN, or so says The New York Times. This is hardly surprising. For far too long network news operations have...
Read moreWhat I Learned from Charles Kuralt
On The Road to making better video…. When we train VJs now, we train them to work in very different ways. One of the ways we differ is that we teach them to lay in all the pictures first...
Read moreThe "Talent" Trap
What’s it worth? The notion of ‘on air talent’ represents an interesting dilema for local and network news, particularly as video heads for the non-linear web.
Read moreCouric v. Halberstam
David Halberstam – Journalist I am about 1/3 of the way through David Halberstam’s last book, The Coldest Winter, a history of the Korean War.
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