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.

Over the past 18 years, I have met hundreds if not thousands of similarly minded folk.

What has always been lacking for the VJs is an organized way to earn a living. This is hardly surprising – it’s a new profession. When writers first arose after the invention of the printing press, there were neither publishing houses nor literary agents to represent them. That maturation would take hundreds of years. Today, things go a lot faster.

We have just closed on some major financing that will allow us to build an architecture online specifically for videojournalists, and those who would like to work in this way. We will be anouncing more on this in the next few days.

In the meantime, we are also building a registry of VJs around the world. We think this is the first of its kind. We have more than 750 working VJs registered so far, but we think its just the tip of the iceberg.

We are inviting you to register as well. It does not cost anything, but there is a growing demand for people who can shoot, cut and produce on their own; who have the gear and can deliver. We are a rising tide – the wave of the future. Now, for the first tim, we can join hands, share ideas, opinions, insights and work opportunities.

To register, just click on the link www.rosenblumtv.com

and we will be in touch.