$14,000 VJ Prize

Once again, this year, we are offering a prize of $14,000 for the world’s best VJ piece.

(It is actually 10,000 Euros, but thanks to quality management of the US economy by the Bush Administration, the Euro, (once with $.87), is trading at an astonishing $1.39 to the Euro.

Fifth Avenue is filled with eager Europeans swarming into the new Eastern Europe on the Hudson.

But… enough with the politics.

For the 5th year now, we are offering a 10,000 Euro prize for the best VJ piece submitted.

Until now, this has been limited to Europeans, but this year we are opening it up to Americans as well.

 To reflect the changing news environment the award is now open to video journalism broadcast or published in any news program or on any online news site anywhere in the world.

The closing date for entries is Jan 7th 2008. Individuals can enter at anytime up to that point.

Details, rules and regulations can be found at www.theconcentra.org

The awards ceremony takes place on March 3rd at the DNA2008 conference, in Brussels.

The seven short-listed finalists will be invited to the event with their travel and accommodation costs paid by the organizers…(that would be us).

I think this is kind of a cool opportunity – and a pretty good prize.

If you’ve got any questions, lemme know.

Cingular is the new AT&T is the new Soviet Union

Networksi no workski

About 6 months ago, my trusty TREO died.

It had always been problematic, so I decided to replace it with a Blackberry.

There is a Cingular store on the corner of 53rd Street and 6th Avenue, about 100 yards from my home, so I went there.

They were more than happy to sell me the Blackberry. $500, after rebate.
In the intervening 6 months the store underwent a change – it became an ATT store instead.

And this morning, the track ball on my Blackberry died. So I walked down to my Cingular, now ATT store and told them that the Blackberry that they had sold me 6 months ago was now broken. Could I get a new one.

They asked me if I had bought it less than a month ago or more than a year ago.

I told them it had been six months.

They told me there was nothing they could do for me there. I would have to go down to someplace called the “Device Support Center”, which was on 5th Avenue and 42nd Street.

I pointed out that I had not bought the ‘device’ at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street, I had bought it right here, from them – 6 months ago.

They said if I had bought it less than a month ago or more than a year ago, they could replace the ‘device’ here, where I had bought it, but since I did not fall into either of those categories, I would have to go to the ‘device support center’ instead.

I told them that had I bought, say, a shirt, at Bloomingdales, on 59th Street and Lex, and I had to return it, I would not have been told that I had to go to the ’shirt support center’ on 34th Street instead.

They gave me a helpful piece of paper. It said, “Device Support Center. 9 West 42nd Street.” So I got in a cab.

The ‘device support center’ resembles a waiting room at the Greyhound Bus Terminal. You take a number and sit in a plastic molded seat… and wait… and wait.. and wait.

Although there were five ’service’ people working there, no one seemed to be working. And as the “Device Support Center” seemed designed to support all of New York (the sign in sheet asked, among other things – ‘how long did you travel to get here’ – some people answered as much as 90 minutes.. of travel), the lines were very long.

Two hours later, there was at last some service.

But not much.

After they swapped out my phone, it was still not working right, so I went back to my local Cingular/ATT store on 53rd Street. Edward, who works there, fixed the problem in a few minutes.

I asked him why they couldn’t just swap my phone themselves.

He said that is was ‘more convenient’ to use the ‘Device Support Center’.

It was more convenient for ATT – but not for it’s customers.

I told Edward I was going to move to Verizon.

“They’re even worse”, he told me.

In the old Soviet Union, the State was supposed to provide for the workers.  Doing away with the evils of competition, there would be only one supermarket, one clothing store, one automobile manufacturer. It didn’t work, because in a non-competitive environment, the people who work there don’t care.

Neither do the people who run AT&T, apparently.

My Father

Three years ago we were in Scotland when I got the kind of phone call everyone dreads.

‘If you want to see your father alive, you have to get to Miami in the next 24 hours”.

My father, who was then 79 had suffered a massive stroke. They didn’t think he would live through the night. But he did. Although on life support and fed through a feeding tube he had the constitution of a bull elephant, and through sheer willpower he dragged himself back to life again.

The doctors told us that he had suffered a massive brain bleed, and that this would happen again and again, unpredictably but surely.

He taught himself to walk and to function and with immense support from my mother, he recovered fairly well. It was pretty incredible to watch.

Then, a year later, he suffered another stroke that put him back in the hospital. But through sheer willpower, he came back again, but not nearly so far.

In the ensuing year, he suffered numerous smaller bleeds, and a constant deterioration of his condition. His ability to recover suffered as well.

Over Thanksgiving, we all went down to my parent’s home in Florida.

My father is bedridden now. There is a hospital bed in a sunny corner of the living room. It overlooks the sea. He can no longer walk. With enormous help, he can make it from the bed to a chair that is nearby. That is the extent of the world he now inhabits.

For much of the time, he does not know where he is. His mind has become untethered from reality. He asks where ‘Arthur from Forest Hills is’. He believes the Queen of England is waiting to meet him in the lobby of their building.

But on Thanksgiving, we wheeled him to the table and he was with us. He sang songs and laughed and even fed himself. It was a major achievement.

It is a bit sobering to look at my father now. This man who went to the Citadel. Who served in both WW2 and Korea. Who spent his life selling life insurance, but took care of his family. Put his two children through college. Saved enough so that my mother is taken care of for the rest of her life. Who was always as strong as an Ox, and as stubborn. It is a bit sobering because only 28 years separate us.

John Bell, my college roommate came to visit the other day in NY. He is a doctor who lives in Colorado Springs. His daughter is now at Williams, where we met, more than 30 years ago. It seems like it was only yesterday. Project that timeframe forward and I am my father’s age.

Sometimes 28 years does not seem like much. At other times, it can be a lifetime.

And every so often you realize, it’s the difference between life and death.

Videojournalist in England

In 1993, on the heels of NY1, I was invited to London to help build the London version of NY1, Channel 1.

It was the brainchild of the very far-thinking Sir David English and his Associated Newspaper group.

We hired, equipped (with Hi8) and trained 42 British VJs.

Their work was great. London had no local TV news channel. But it also lacked something else – cable penetration, which was too bad, because the idea was a good one. Cable was then in competition with satellite (the English footprint being a good deal smaller than the US, (or even New England, Satellite made more sense – if you could get people to buy the dishes and install them!)

At that time, there was even competition between two different satellite providers – Sky and something called British Broadcasting. One had a round antenna the size of a dinner plate you were supposed to affix to your window. Murdoch’s Sky had the ’squariel’ – you get the idea. In the end, they merged and formed BSkyB, and cable was squeezed out, taking with it both Channel1 and LiveTV.

However, not before we had trained and fielded our first generation of British VJs. Most of them are still in business, but none so strongly as David Dunkley Gyimah, whose video is above.

NY1 – 15 Years Later

Many thanks to Ed Sharpe who makes me aware of this story. 

NY1 celebrates it’s 15th year.

And it’s still a VJ station and still going strong.

Digitalcontentproducer.com celebrates the event. Read it here.

It is hard to believe that it was more than 15 years ago that I was invited to lunch with Paul Sagan and Steve Paulus to talk about their plans for a 24-hour news channel in NYC.  I had just completed the very first VJ driven stations in Sweden and Norway, and now Sagan, much to his everlasting credit, was ready to try an entirely new and radical approach to local newsgathering.

I explained how the system worked and Sagan then asked ‘how many VJs would you have’.

“All of them”, I said.

“and how many crews?” he responded.

“none”. I said.

Much to his credit, he went with the most radical iteration of the concept.

15 years later, it clearly works:

NY1 is one of the highest-rated cable channels in New York. Owned by Time Warner Cable, the station covers every aspect of local news: politics, weather, crime, business, entertainment, and transit. NY1 has a fraction of CNN’s budget, but, like its corporate cousin, it has 24 hours of airtime to fill every day. Therefore, the station has always needed to adopt innovative newsgathering and production strategies.

There has been some ’swiftboating’ of the NY1 experience from time to time, as opponents of the system have argued that NY1 had long ago abandoned the VJ model.  Quite clearly, this is not the case:

NY1 reporters have shot their own stories since the station’s inception in 1992, when the acquisition format was Hi8 tape.

Of course, the station long ago moved from Hi8, but when we started, Hi8 was about as good as uMatic, which many local stations were then using.

So congratulations to NY1 – a success today, and most watched cable channel in New York City.

It is surprising to me that the model has taken so long to percolate into the general broadcasting world, but it is slowly but surely gaining traction.  Resistance has been far far deeper and more profound that I could have ever imagined in 1992, but fear of change is perhaps the most basic of human instincts.

abc news adds 2 more vjs

Our loyal correspondent from Fox News makes me aware of
ABC news’ decision to add two more VJ bureaus to its original 7.

They don’t call them VJs, they call then Digital Correspondents – just like at KGTV in San Diego.

OK by me, so long as it works.

I think we can expect that we will soon see many more DCs or VJs at the network level. You can’t beat the combination of cost savings and improved coverage.

Here’s the link.

A Happy Thanksgiving.

Huh?

I’ll get to this one later…

The New York Times reports today that the National Endowment for the Arts reports today (which is a lot of reporting going on today), that reading among the young is dropping at a precipitous rate.

Having spent 8 years teaching at New York University, this is no surprise to me.

My students, though often extremely bright, would for the most part approach reading or writing as I might approach a quadratic equation – it is something I know how to do, if I have to… but would really rather avoid if I can.

The miracle of the technology of calculators, (created when I was in high school – we were no doubt the very last generation to know how to use slide rules), allowed us ultimately to depart from the realm of being forced to learn the intimate structure of maths. Once you could punch in the numbers on a screen, why bother with pencils and papers… really.

This impact of technology on what had once been through native skills (Neil Postman does a wonderful study on how the rise of writing in the earliest days of civilization spelt the death knell of memory), has been with us since time immemorial.

Now, technology begins to impact on reading and writing – skills we once thought fundamental to survival in an advanced culture. Apparently, this is not the case.

While the Average American watches an astonishing 4.5 hours of television a day (and as video comes to the web, we can only expect to see an escalation in this), the average American family purchases but one book a year!

Reading is indeed tangential to our culture now, and it does not take a study by the government to confirm this.

We communicate, instead, in images.

The problem, of course, is that we are still teaching to communicate in words and letters, long after the train has left the station.

What we have done is to create, for all practical purposes, a population that is illiterate in the lingua franca of its own time – video.

We have placed the ‘ability’ to create in this now very fundamental medium, in the hands of a select and elite few.

This is a mistake.

We may bemoan the death of reading and writing, and perhaps properly so. There is an elegance to it. But it would seem to be well on track to join pottery making and painting as the quaint pass-times of the elite and the elderly.

Yet we do our culture no great service when we effectively keep 99% of our creative minds away from the tools of creativity.

Perhaps if we unleashed them, television would get a whole lot better.

Hamas TV

are you watching?

My project just got turned down by the Knight Foundation.

It’s not really surprising, but its too bad, because I think it was a good idea.

Hamas TV.

In 1988, I spent a month living in Jabalya, a Palestinian refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. Just me and my video camera – and a family. It was my first “VJ” experience, and it convinced me that this was a better way to do television journalism than dragging around a crew. The work I produced aired on MacNeil/Lehrer.

A few years later I was hired by the PBC, the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, to build a VJ-driven station in Ramallah. It’s one of the projects I don’t talk too much about. Six weeks after we started, Arafat closed it down. It wasn’t because of the small cameras, however. My Palestinian journalists took their training about journalism a bit too seriously and went after the Palestinian Authority and corruption. No more TV after that.

Before I got into the TV business I had been in a PhD program (never completed) in Islamic History. My Arabic is no longer so good, but I can still ‘bis’millah with NY taxi drivers, much to their bemusement.

My whole belief is that young Palestinian kids don’t strap explosives to themselves and walk into Israeli cafes to set themselves off because they are protesting Israeli coffee (which is particularly bad). They do it because they are incredibly frustrated and they want to draw attention to the really awful conditions in Gaza.

It’s a crappy way to get attention.

But maybe the solution is not to wall them in, but rather to give them video cameras, teach them to use them, so that they can show the world what is pissing them off so much that they are willing to blow themselves up. (After all, isn’t this the basis of the First Amendment? Free speech, no matter what?)

My idea then was to find 25 or so young Palestinians in Gaza who I would then so empower and train – and train them to make coherent reports on their conditions and situation that anyone could understand – and then to use some of the Foundation money to buy a half hour, once a week, on Israeli television, to air their work. To force a dialogue. To give them an equal field – at least on TV.

It was, I think, an interesting idea. A kind of ‘Citizen News’, but not the kind you would expect to see, or maybe even want to see – but one that you probably should see.

The Foundation did not agree – which is too bad.

They rejected the proposal – but I don’t think it was because of the small cameras, at least.

The Write Stuff

Did ‘writing for broadcast’ start with him?

I was in the back of a taxi this afternoon, and the taxi had a TV in it.

Are We Missing the Point?

When new technologies come along, existing businesses as a rule, tend to adapt those new technologies to their existing way of working.