Rosenblumtv

read it and weep….

Sotheby’s, the auction house, recently announced that a rare copy of the Magna Carta, signed by King John I in 1215 is to be auctioned off. Once owned by Ross Perot, the document is expected to fetch between $20-$30 million. (more…)

and that’s the way it is….

Today we’re in Hollywood. (more…)

Not even Jim Garner could save it in the end…

2007 marks the 70th anniversary of Polaroid. (more…)

One of our instructors here at The Travel Channel Academy is Bill Gentile.

I first met Bill in 1993, when we were training out very first group of VJs.

Bill was a photojournalist for Newsweek, who had cut his teeth in Central America.

One of his best friends was shot dead next to him in Salvador, while they were working.

It was no easy job.

This is a real videojournalist. A real working journalist, whose career has taken him to war zones and hot spots all over the world with this camera and little else. This is not a cameraman shooting industrials off a tripod or some part timer picking up work at local TV stations. This is real.

Go to his site. Take a look at his work. See what real videojournalism is all about.

Bill took to the VJ model immediately, and began to combine his photojournalism and video journalism.

In 1998, he won a national Emmy for Cinematograpy for Trauma, Life in the ER, a series we produced for TLC. The show as produced by Pam Yates and shot by Bill, along with Susan Meiseles, a Magnum photographer we took into video and Alan Deutsch.

Today, Bill is a documentary filmmaker, as well as teaching at American University.

All of his work is done ‘VJ’ style, and his work has appeared on Nightline, ABC News, Frontline and lots of other places.

Above, and out-take from his most recently completed documentary - shot over 6 months in Afghanistan.

And today, of course, he’s teaching our students at The Travel Channel Academy. You don’t get this kind of instruction every day.

Some images from the first editing session at Travel Channel Academy

Pay attention!

We are back at Discovery Communications headquarters in Silver Spring, Md, to conduct yet another Travel Channel Academy.

We are going straight from here to Los Angeles to start one there.

Enrollments have been filling classes in NY, DC and LA to the end of the year.

This is clearly an idea that works.

Pictured above, two of our instructors:

Lisa Lambden, 17 year veteran of the BBC, who ran the entire conversion of the Beeb over 5 years - training and fielding more than 750 VJs.

Bill Gentile. He was in one of the very first VJ classes for VNI in 1993.  A former photographer for Newsweek, he also won an Emmy for Cinematography as a VJ in 1998.

Our teaching staff brings a lot more to the table than just knowing FCP.

now the truth comes out

Dan Rather’s $70 million law suit against CBS News is going to pull back the curtain on a fact that everyone who works for network news knows, but until now, the public has had little exposure to.

What do these guys do for all their millions?

Journalism, it isn’t.

Most news stories and commentaries on the Rather suit have been preoccupied with the details of the Texas Air National Guard story - fake or real documents.

The more interesting issue, at least to me, is in the sidebar.

Faced with a problem, Rather now says “hey, I only read what the producers give me to read”.

Interestingly enough, this was the same defense when the Westmoreland case against CBS News hit the fan twenty years ago. Mike Wallace, who had been portrayed as the ‘investigative journalist’ in the story, in the courtroom became merely the ‘reader’. George Crile, the story’s producer, was left to roast on his own.

In the Tailwind case against CNN, ace reporter Peter Arnett said the same - “I only read the copy. I don’t write it, and I don’t do the reporting. Don’t blame me”.

Now Rather says the same:

“Rather contends that in fact he should not have been blamed for the botched Texas story because others, including his direct boss, Heyward, had taken over the process of vetting the story for airing–checking all the facts and the authenticity of the documents later found to be questionable. He had been relieved of that responsibly by Heyward in order to report on other breaking stories.” -The American Spectator. 9/20/07

One of the main reasons I left network news and went off with my own small camera was that these situations are not anomalies. They are, in fact, the way that network news works all the time. The producers do all the work, almost all the reporting, write the scripts. Then they shoot the ‘talent’ into the story and give them the scripts to read.

Sometimes the ‘talent’ makes a few changes - most times they don’t.

This is not journalism.

I mean, it is journalism for the producer.

In any other endeavour, when someone takes credit for someone else’s writing and reporting, we call it Plagiarism. Only on network news do we call it Journalism.

Why does this happen?

It’s pure economics.

Good reporting takes time. You have to be there and spend time with the story.

When you are paying reporters and anchors millions of dollars a year, they can’t spend too much time making any one story. It is not cost effective. You have to amortize out the cost of their salary over a lot of stories. The most cost effective way of doing this is to spread their cost over lots of stories, and hire producers to make them - just plaster the famous reporter/actor on top of them.

It works - from a business sense. But it is not journalism. It is acting.

Rather may have been a journalist once, but not for a long time. He was an actor. And like many actors, highly paid because he was recognizable.

But this isn’t journalism. It is Hollywood. And Hollywood is great at making movies. But it is crap for journalism.

You want journalism?

Give Dan a camera and a laptop.

Send him out to Afghanistan alone.

Give him lots of time.

See what comes back.

When you are a VJ, there is no place to hide.

And no one else to blame…. but yourself.

]

Joseph Kony is a real life “Last King of Scotland”.

He is the founder and deeply feared leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a radical rebel group in Northern Uganda seeking to establish a Christian theocracy based on the 10 Commandments.

One Commandment that Kony seems to have missed is ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’.

His Lord’s Resistance Army is populated by AK47 bearing adolescents who have no compunction about killing at random - or about cutting off ears, noses and limbs.

You probably have not seen a lot about Kony. Maybe you have never heard of him.

Conventional network and cable TV operations don’t spend a lot of time on him.

He’s hard to cover.

He’s in hiding.. and if you find him, he is incredibly dangerous.

Not the kind of place you would expect to find Katie Couric.

But it is the kind of place you can find Ruud Elmendorp.

Elmendorp is a Dutch videojournalist who covers Africa. He has been covering this beat alone, with a camera and a laptop for more than 10 years - going where no one else will dare to go.

This kind of work is real reporting - not like showing up at the Green Zone and being escorted around by a bunch of US troops and given a dog and pony show by the US Military.

Networks won’t go here.

It’s too expensive.

And too difficult to get to.

And far too dangerous.

The world might never have heard of Darfur, except for Nick Kristof at The New York Times. Now, you’ve heard of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Terracotta Warrior at the British Museum

Tonight, the UK branch of Themorningafter.tv is completing its first project. (more…)

From the Newport Boat Show

She is 76 feet long. (more…)