The VJ Registry

Can you see the future…….

In 1988 I quit a job at CBS News as a producer for Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt, bought a small video camera and went to live in Jabalya, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip for a month. I wanted to see if it was possible to make television journalism the way print journalism was done – just a reporter with a pencil, but in this case, a video camera.

When I left Gaza, I came back to the US and sold two stories to The MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour for $50,000. The idea of being a ‘videojournalist’ was born.

Since then, the VJ concept has gone through a lot of iterations. The technology has gotten vastly better. The platforms for the content have expanded and now exploded with video online. Every day, more and more young journalists pick up the camera, grab the laptop and head off to report stories in video just the way young writers would have gone off in the 19th Century to be real correspondents in the age of print.

Listen Up!

Jack Hitt…. A real journalist…..

Congratulations to my old friend Jack Hitt who just won a Peabody for his story on “Gitmo” on This American Life. He and I both went to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (‘83), except he really became a journalist.

Here’s the link to the winning story.

If only the rest of us did journalism like this.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=310

5Takes – Season 4

No time for photos… we’re on a very tight schedule…

A REVOLUTION IN A LAPTOP

Two years ago, we engaged in a small experiment in television production.

We wanted to send 5 young Americans to Europe for the summer with backpacks, laptops and small digital video cameras.

It was, in many ways, a predictable series for The Travel Channel – summer backpackers on $50 a day.