Rosenblumtv

can we put the contact info on the screen as well?

In 2000, when I cut the deal with the BBC to spend five years converting their stations to the VJ model, I was asked to address the Board of Governors, the body that runs the BBC. (more…)

Meet Tiffany Burnett.

She came to our attention when she sent us a video she had shot and edited herself.

We took her with us on 5Takes Pacific Rim where she continued to make content for us.

Now, she has been signed to a 1-year contract with The Travel Channel to travel the world with a video camera shooting and producing stories for the network.

This is not a bad ‘gig’ for a 24-year old whose only previous experience had been working in a PR firm. Where does the ‘democratization’ of video lead?

For Tiffany, it leads to the opportunity of a lifetime…paid.

The next generation of content makers at Discovery HQ

Today is the second day of V.J. training here at Discovery Channel’s main offices at Silver Spring, Md. Yesterday our 22 trainees learned how to shoot a piece - lots of important tips like: 5 shots. sequences. Don’t move the camera. Get a few important and very focused sound bites. And so on…

Then we sent them out across Washington, DC to shoot their stories - and screened their raw footage when they came back.

Today, they learned how to edit and are busy cutting their first stories.

The workshop also features speakers from Discovery, producers and executives, all of whom are interested in the people here and the work they are doing and would like to do. Everyone here has pretty much wrapped their heads around ‘how the production world has changed’ (as one DCI exec put it this morning). Another addressed the group and told them ‘you are the future of this industry’.

We think so.

And the folks here in the course run the spectrum from people with no experience to those who have been in the business for some time but want to add new skills (and get in front of some network execs.)

There’s another one of these next week back here in Silver Spring, then in the fall we take it on the road, adding to the DC sessions with sessions in NY, LA, Chicago and one scheduled for the Bahamas.

Mindy McAdams, one of the students in the class has her own blog, but she gives a pretty good assessment of the first day of class.

Today we start on the 2nd Travel Channel Academy.

This time we are running the course in Discovery’s HQ in Silver Spring, Md. And as of this morning, twenty eager young documentary and filmmakers have learned the first lessons in VJ-ing; gathered here at the DCI offices now to engage in our 4-day intensive bootcamp.

The pilot for the Academy was a major success. More than 500 people applied for the first 20 slots.

Then, we married the Academy to our new series - What’s Your Trip.

This is only the beginning of a ladder with Travel Channel. Tiffany Burnett, a TJ from the first season of 5Takes has been given a one-year contract with Travel Channel to travel the world with her video camera. More will follow.

We have now scheduled Academy sessions across the US, from LA to NY to DC and beyond. And this is just the beginning. We expect to train more than 1,000 new VJs in the next year. Many more. And the channel is committed to working with those who prove themselves great visual story tellers.

It’s a whole new kind of TV.

still number one….

Like many people, I post my blog on WordPress.com. (more…)

It all started with him…. Edward R. Murrow and Channel 13’s first broadcast….
After I graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1983, my first job was with WNET/13, the PBS station in New York. (more…)

…where to now?…

On May 31, 1911, the Titanic left the Belfast shipyards with state- of -the-art technology. (more…)

every once in a while something hits you that changes your life….

I was 12 years old when I first read The Source by James Michener. (more…)

In 2005, I was invited to speak at the Eurasian Median Forum in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

I only went for two reasons: First, I wanted to see Almaty. Second, I wanted to meet one of the other speakers -Oh Yeon Ho.

In 2000, Oh had founded OhmyNews (hangul:오마이뉴스) is a South Korean online newspaper with the motto “Every Citizen is a Reporter”.

Ohmy (based on Mr. Oh’s name, rather than an exclamation from Victorian England), was the world’s first open source style of news reporting. About 20% of the site’s content is written by a 55 person staff. The rest of the content comes from more than 27,000 ‘citizen reporters’ across Korea.

The Citzen Reporters are paid entirely on the basis of the number of hits their stories receive. It is a kind of pure market for news and information - a real ‘democratization’ of journalism.

OhmyNews was influential in determining the outcome of the South Korean presidential elections in December 2002 with the election of Roh Moo Hyun. After being elected, Roh granted his first interview to OhmyNews.

But Ohmy was done entirely in print.

I wondered if you could not do the same thing in video.

While I was in Almaty I met Ken Krushel, a former NBC executive and the founder of Proteus, a company that was one of the first to put video on cellular phones.

He liked the concept. So he, Carl Spielvogel (the former Chairman of Ad agency giant Backe/Spielvogel/Bates, and later Vice Chairman of Interpublic), formed CitizeNews.

We are out raising money to turn the vision into reality - a place where the burgeoning numbers of VJs around the world who already have video cameras and editing systems and stories to tell can post their work and get compensated for it.

I was not going to write about this until we had closed on the financing. But Josh Wolf beat me to it with a piece on C/Net today. I am not going to argue with a man who went to jail for half a year to defend the concept of free press.

Instead, I will gladly follow his lead.

We are looking to put together an open platform for the best videojournalists in the world. A place where their work, real news and information, honest and intimate reporting can both be published and compensated for. (not to end a sentence in a preposition).

Now, we are putting together a core group of ‘founding VJs’.

If you are interested in participating, get in touch with me directly.

We are heading out to the West Coast next week for a series of meetings with the silicon valley VCs. It’s going to be an interesting ride.

“see what else is on…”

For most of our existence, we have lived in a world without images.

We are today so inundated by them, from TV to movies to magazines to billboards that we forget that all this happened only yesterday. (more…)