Picture This
Videojournalist PF Bentley and Gulfstream during Drew Carey’s Sporting World shoot in Germany. (Gulftream is not Bentley’s). There is a red herring swimming about claiming that VJ is a code term for 23 year olds with no experience and...
Read moreShoot For The Cut
Series Producer Francisco Aliwalas prepares for another fast turn …. Cliff Etzel makes a very cogent point in his response to the LIFE magazine blog: Person experience story: A former Dept head of the Photo dept at a newspaper...
Read moreWhat’s Your Trip?
$1,000 if your video appears on the show… not a bad deal….. Citizen Journalism or “The Revolution” in television production is all fine, but there has to be a market for your work. What’s the ‘entry level’ slot for...
Read morePutting the VJ Army to Work
Adam Kaufmann, VJ at work on Drew Carey’s Sporting World….. In 1990 I formed a company called Video News International. By 1992 I had trained and equipped about 100 VJs around the world. No one had ever heard of...
Read moreWho wants to go to South America?
….come on down!!! Last week we completed casting for 5Takes, season four. The photo above is from the New York auditions. Lots of people turned out… and why not? This time we are sending the group to South America.
Read moreThink Small
time for a change……. In 1988, I was invited to a party at Barry Rebo’s loft on 25th Street in NY. Rebo was one of the most aggressive early adapters in the production business. He had brought the first...
Read moreOut of Focus
Can you have them shake hands instead? Since its inception, making television has been like reading tea leaves. You knew there was an audience out there, but you didn’t really know what they wanted. So you guessed, or dealt...
Read moreA Guide For the Perplexed
Francisco Aliwalas, videojournalist. There seems to be little question that the ‘VJ’ Revolution is going to happen. It is, of course, more than VJs. It is the entire move to a digtal platform, video online, on phones and all...
Read moreNothing Succeeds Like Failure
God’s number one programmer…. One of the reasons television has been so terrible until now is that no one could fail. Failure was too expensive. So we lived in fear. If you are writer, you fail all the time....
Read moreRTNDA Opening Session
Jeff Jarvis (thumb in foreground) takes the job…. Just finished the opening session at RTNDA here in Vegas. I gotta say this for RTNDA – they are grappling with digital, online and VJ issues up front. The entire opening...
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