Where Are the VJ Jobs?

OK. Spread out…..

One of my favorite BBC series, Life On Mars apparently is coming to the US.

I have no doubt that whatever US network picks it up will mangle it in a remake, much like The Office, but you will be happy to know you can order the complete box set from the BBC of the original.

The plot revolves around DCI Sam Tyler (that would be Detective Chief Inspector), who, upon being hit by a car during a police chase in 2006 wakes up in 1973.

Tyler is dissociated from the world around him. He understands it, and can function in it, but he is always a bit of a misfit. “Where’s my cellphone? Your what????”

I think of this as I work with conventional TV people trying to find the jobs in the new digital world. The old jobs are surely evaporating fast and furious. The notion of a ‘cameraman’ as we pointed out a few posts ago, is a vanishing species. As is an editor, as more and more people cut their own stuff on laptops equipped with FCP or Avid express or the feared Edius and others.

“Where are your VJs finding work”, the cameramen, about 2 weeks away from their own pinks slip, are prone to ask.

Fortunately, Lost Remote, which I continue to read despite the departure of Mr. Safran, provide us with some interesting answers.

Allow me to reprint the entire piece, as I think it that important:

A study by The Kelsey Group predicts that small and medium-sized businesses in local markets will increase their video spending from $10.9 million in 2007 to $1.5 billion in 2012. But these aren’t pre-rolls folks, but advertorial video sold by the increasingly aggressive online yellow pages, city guides and local business directories. See an example here of a New York pizza place on YellowPages.com. The problem with many local media sites — the ones without vibrant city guides or business directories that score high in search — is they have no place to put advertorial videos that will actually get watched by people thinking about buying a particular product or service. Since these sites are outside the purchase loop — if you Google “Dallas doctors” for example, you get no local media results in the first 2.5 pages — they won’t be significant players in the small to mid-sized advertorial video pool.

Video spending up 100 fold in just 5 years.

And who are the clients? It isn’t local TV news and it isn’t cable. Instead, it is people who probably never considered producing or paying for the production of video before. Small businesses who are then going to place that video in places like online Yellow Pages.

The Lost Remote piece gives a link to an example of a New York Pizza Place on Yellowpages.com. Here it is

I can’t embed it but if you take a moment to look at the yellow pages page, you will see it is a fairly simple and straight forward piece.

Villaggio Restaurant, and millions of others like Villaggio, are not about to hire ‘professional’ cameramen and crews to do this kind of work. They can’t afford it to begin with, and for what they need, it’s not necessary. So who is going to make the almost countless videos for the restaurants, the gourmet shops, the chiaropractors, the lawyers, the shoe stores…. Just flip through the Yellow Pages, and you’ll get the picture.

And these people are not prepared to pay the kinds of prices that conventional industrial video producers charge, (not to mention their need for travel, first class accommodations, meal allowances and God only knows what else).

Nope.

And of course Yellowpages.com is only the tip of a massive iceberg. In a kind of Gresham’s Law, more dynamic media drive out less dynamic, so ads that have video will trump those that don’t, cranking up the pressure to create and post more video.

Who is going to make the videos?

Now there is a business opportunity waiting to be seized.

Newspapers to Video 3

All across the country, newspapers are racing to embrace video.

It makes sense. First newspapers go the web because it’s the best way for them to get their information into people’s homes.

Then, the web goes to video.

The job of a newspaper is not to print a paper. It’s to go out into the community, gather information and deliver it to people in a way that they can understand.

So when papers go to the web, and the web goes to video, it’s only natural that papers go to video. And when they go to video, it’s also only natural that they go to it as VJs. Not one paper across the country, of the hundreds that have taken on video as part of their daily drill, have hired crews. Not one.

This speaks volumes about the VJ approach.

No one in their right mind would engage the archaic, expensive and editorially destructive process of crew-driven video newsgathering. The realities of the technology and the marketplace are speaking very very loudly now.

Conventional cameramen who got into this business on the tail end of a dying career might be a tad upset by all this (just read my email!). They are wrong. They are in a fantastic position to take the lead in this revolution….if….

If they can get their heads out of their a***s and take an honest look at what is happening and embrace the future instead of fighting it. They already have most of the skill sets that newspapers and magazines are looking for. The ability to see and capture a story. They just have to be prepared to throw their reporters under a bus. Throw!

Then there is the issue of ‘quality’.

Here are a few pieces from the Star Ledger project – 4 weeks after training:

Enjoy.

Shhhhhh…..

who?

Spent all this week working with a major publishing client to convert their very well known print products to video.

Can’t talk about it.

Publisher says so.

Then, got an email from a good friend executive inside a major network. He appended a confidential internal memo about how said network is going to start training more than 100 of their news staff (reporters and producers) to carry small cameras and shoot and cut their own stories. Can’t talk about this one either.

Then had a long conversation with a big stations group about how to implement VJ training. First caveat before we can talk: ‘can’t talk about this to anyone’.

Shhhh…

Why all the hush hush?

The change is no longer ‘coming’. It is here.

And people do not like change. It is disruptive. It turns over people’s lives. It often leaves them unemployed.

A skill that once seemed ‘golden’, like being a cameraman at a TV network or being a writer at a newspaper, is suddenly ‘not enough’. Now the cameraman has to be able to shoot, cut and produce a story – or they’re out. The writer has to be able to not only write a story, but also deliver a video piece for online, or they’re out.

This might seem unfair, and perhaps it is, but that is also the way it is.

And the problem, for those of us in our 40s or above, is that while we might feel that this ‘video literacy’ is asking a bit much of us, there is a whole new generation just coming into the marketplace who grew up with camcorders, FCP and uploading to Youtube as second nature. The don’t have to learn a thing and they don’t care that they are asked to crank out the video. In fact, they think its kinda cool.

They demonstrate that producing video is not all that hard, apparently. They do it all day, for fun. They do it on their phones. They cut videos and send them to their friends.

They already have the skill set.

What they don’t have is the journalistic experience.

But that will come in time.

In the meantime, the older set has two options: get trained or get out.

It’s not a pretty picture, frankly. But there it is.

Many years ago, one of the best editors I ever worked with at CBS News, Reuben Chodesh, just could not learn Avid. He was a linear tape editor, and try though he did, class after class, he could not deal with computers. Just could not. And although he was the best editor at CBS (IMHO), when avid came, he went. To law school, at the age of 40.

People who work in the business, whether its local TV stations or newspapers understand what is coming. They understand it better than those who are looking in from the outside. They don’t want it to come. It’s understandable. They will do almost anything they can to prevent it. Who needs this kind of crap mid-career?

But here it is.

“It” has started to arrive.

So it is not surprising to me that when I arrive at a newspaper or a TV network, they ask me to come in the back door. And when we do trainings, it’s off site and a secret.

“The fog comes in on little cat feet…”

But it comes.

The New Economics

Shall we dance?

Billionaire Mark Cuban asks the following question on his blog:

“Are content producers prepared to reduced production costs….by 88%”

Cuban asks this as a rhetorical question, trying to demonstrate the almost destructive economics of video and the web.

I think, however, the question deserves an answer, and the answer is yes.

Content producers are indeed prepared to reduce production costs by 88% (or I would rather say by as much as 88%). Just not the content producers that Mark Cuban knows.

Making television and video content used to be an incredibly expensive and complex process. It isn’t any more. It isn’t anymore because new technologies have made creating video content about as complex as word processing. That does not mean that there is no creativity attached to it. There is. Some novelists make millions, not because writing is so complex,but because the content they produce is so compelling. On the other hand, there are millions of people who produce ‘words’, and make a living at it. Millions of freelance writers worldwide.

Well now creating video on a desktop is pretty much on a par with creating text. It requires about the same amount of work.

In a world that consumes millions of hours of video, the days of ‘million dollar hours’ are over.

So are the days of paying a professional cameraman $1500 a day to carry around a camera on his shoulder and push the button. The numbers just are not there, as Mr. Cuban points out.

But we draw different conclusions.

Mark Cuban asks if content producers are prepared to take an 88% cut in production costs. (I think his number is a bit high, but let’s take it anyway).

When I started to produce cable shows for Discovery, they paid about $250,000 an hour per show. The show is 44 minutes. At $250 per 44 minutes, the rate then was $5681.81 per minute. If we take 12% of that, (call it the Cuban Conversion), we arrive at $681 per minute for video produced.

That, I think, is a pretty good rate, as any freelancer with a laptop and a camcorder will tell you. Current.com pays $250 a minute and places like CNN take it for free.

How hard is it to produce a minute of video with a camcorder and a laptop?

Last month, the NY Times reported that people are now uploading 10 hours of video to Youtube every minute!

Every minute!

At $681 per minute, the ‘value’ of that uploading is $409,909.00 per hour, $9.8 million day,

$68 million a week, and about $3.5 billion a year. And we are just in year 2 of Youtube.

Now, of course, not all of that is going to be worth $681 a minute. Some will be worth appreciably less. Some worth nothing. But some will be worth a lot more.

How much is a page of typing worth?

Well, if it’s the first page of Harry Potter, it’s worth quite a lot. The manufacture of writing is cheap. The market determines its value based on content. Now video starts to enter the same realm.

What does this mean in the long run?

First it means that Mark Cuban’s numbers are not so wrong and not so bad.

They are only bad if you have a career tied to the old economy – one in which the act of producing video seemed some kind of magical, difficult, secret, complex and expensive process.

It isn’t.

Oh, and by the way, at Mark Cuban’s numbers, a half hour of video would cost a network about $20,000. Anyone out there with a laptop edit and camcorder who wants to sign up to produce a cable half hour for $20,000? How about a series at that rate?

Hands down.

On in 3….2…..

Two weeks to go….

I graduated from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1983.

It was so long ago, that we still used manual typewriters.

It was so long ago, that we still cut video on RM450s. (wait…some newsrooms still do that…)

My first job was as a PA with WNET/13 in New York. Except WNET, the PBS station for New York is actually licensed in Newark, New Jersey. Someone, somewhere in the early 1960s did this. So although everyone thinks of Channel 13 as being very Manhattan, (and it has large studios in midtown), its license is really for New Jersey.

As a result, one of the unsung jobs at WNET/13 (like the guy who keeps coal going into the furnace on a steamship) is protecting the license. So, I was quite surprised to find on my first day of work that I was reporting not to W. 58th Street, but rather to Newark, a town I had never visited.

The Newark Operation was the handicapped stepchild of Channel 13; left in the attic to starve slowly to death and only brought out when the relatives asked. This, in a strange way, gave me enormous freedom. I was also incredibly fortunate to have a boss who was not only a total incompetent, but who believed his primary work responsibility was eating lunch and reading The New York Post, a task which took him most of the day.

So I was left to my own devices, and working with a very good reporter, Marty Goldensohn, who had come from NPR and would soon return to make his career there, wandered up and down New Jersey for 4 years making a documentary film a week on my own. We were nominated, I believe, for an astonishing 11 Emmys, (I think we won 5), and of course, no one ever took away the license.

But more than that, I got a great education in New Jersey culture, politics, art, geography and just about everything else the Garden State has to offer.

So what an astonishing shock, when some 25 years later (hard to believe), I found myself back in Newark, at the offices of the Star Ledger, taking that venerable state-wide paper from whom I had stolen so many stories so long ago – into video and television.

New Jersey is unique in that it has no television network of its own. New York in the north and Philly in the south dominate the airwaves. But Jersey is a state rich in stories, people, culture, history and much more. It deserves better coverage. And now the paper is going to fill that vacuum.

We’re putting the newsroom in the newsroom. We’re going to come live from the newspaper’s own newsroom, and the multi-million dollar set designers that CBS or NBC hire could not have imagined or built a better ’set’ for news. Desk after desk after desk or real reporters… really reporting! Desks piled high (sometimes a foot or more) with newspapers and books and coffee cups and God only knows what else. A real hive of activity.

This, obviously, is where it is happening. So this is where it is going to happen from (not to put the preposition at the end of the sentence). And our anchor, Brian Donnahue, is a real newspaper reporter – not some hair and teeth ‘on air presenter’. He is real Jersey, and he’s not going to ‘anchor’. It’s actually more like a daily blog – on air, with video – shot by the journalists at the Star Ledger.

We’re still piloting, but we’re far enough along now that I can tell you it is unlike anything you have ever seen before on TV news.

And it works.

So, like we say in the tv news biz…. standby….

Learning To Live With Infinity

When will it ever end…….

Since we first crawled out of the primordeal soup some millenia ago, we have lived in a world of limitations.

We quickly learned that after a while we ran out of food…. or water… or land….

This world of limitations was perhaps the strongest constant in our million year march to civilization. It is deeply embedded in our cultural DNA. We cannot but help think of a world of limitations. And as a result, we went on to build institutions in our societies that reflected this deeply understood notion of limits. Armies, slavery, capitalism, agriculture – they are all in a way designed to deal with the inherent limits that nature puts in our path. Even our own lives have built in limits – since the days of Moses, we expect to live to 3 score and 10. Not much has changed. So we talk about Social Security or Universal Health Care, or 30 year ARM mortgages. This notion of limits runs deep!

Then, close to the end of the 20th Century, along comes the Internet.

For the very first time in our culture, we are faced with something that instead of having a limited amount of space, is in fact infinite.

This is, in many ways, hard for us to grasp. All our social and political and economic institutions; indeed the very way we have been thinking for all our history on earth, is predicated on a world of limits.

But not the web.

It requires a whole new way of thinking, and whole new institutions and economies.

This will not happen over night. Indeed, there will be a long period of ‘awareness’ as we come to understand what it means to live in a world of infinity.

The Long Tail is just one small ah-hah moment of the nature of the infinite world. There will be more to come.

Now, what does this have to do with journalism?

I was much taken by the conversation that ensued as a result of Saturday’s post, and a similar discussion that arose on b-roll.net, (you can skip the earlier nonsense, but the last page is pretty interesting).

As the convergence of the web + cheap video and text manufacture unleashes a torrent of content, how do we deal with it? It is a whole new and uncharted world.

This made me think about the nature of the web. One of its most interesting features is that is just goes on forever. We are, of course, at the very beginning of this process, but that which we put into it will only continue to grow and grow in an endless mountain of information, archived forever. Think how much there will be in 100 years!

It is this very nature of infinity that now begins to define the way in which we think about information, society and journalism.

(By the way, those who develop mechanisms to manage this almost incomprehensible avalanche of content will make fortunes! Google is but the first of many to come.)

In any event….

The world in which we had all grown up was a world of limited shelf space. 3 networks shared an electromagnetic spectrum. Each had only 24 hours a day, of which, Prime Time was but a few. Newspapers required trees and ink and paper and trucks and a lot of money to maintain, so there was an inherent limit to the number of papers any town or city would support. A world of limits.

In this world of limits, we had to develop a way to deliver believable information on a regular basis: journalism. You had to be able to trust it. And since the world of limits meant that there would only be a limited number of voices, it was imperative, in our thinking, that each voice was ‘balanced’. That is, that each voice fairly represented each side of an argument. (It is arguable about whether this is even possible, but that was the ideal goal).

Essentially, the model boiled down was:

One voice – many points of view

Then, along comes the World Wide Web. And suddenly, almost overnight, the physical limitations of the how many voices can be heard are wiped away. No longer does NBC have a monopoly over who can get into someone’s home on a regular basis. No longer is The New York Times the only way to publish ‘news’. Now, in an instant really, anyone who has anything to say is free to say it and distribute it globally, at almost no cost. (Just as I am sitting at my kitchen table now writing this. I no longer have to submit letters to The New York Times in the hopes that perhaps…perhaps.. one will be published. I am talking to you, now, for free).

This is indeed a whole new world. A brand new, whole new world, with new rules, and new potential, And so here is the construct of that whole new world of journalism:

Many voices – many points of view

The technology of the Infinite frees us from the ‘need’ to try and ‘balance’ our journalism.

This was always an impossible task anyway. Who could give proper ‘balance’ to Robert Mugabe’s perspective? Yet, seemingly 43% of Zimbabwe supports him to the point of killing the opposition. Yet no credible news organization has opted to present his fairly popular perspective; though they all attest to being honest and balanced.

So perhaps we should instead embrace the new architecture. Open Platform. Free Press. Many voices. Many points of view. (and perhaps most disturbing to us… many truths).

Or, as Chairman Mao (another very popular leader (can one billion Chinese be wrong?) who got a bit less than fair and balanced reporting perhaps – particularly during the Cold War)), said – “Let a Million Flowers Bloom”.

It’s going to be a bit disturbing for a while, because it cuts against our old, small, limited yet very comfortable and understandable world.

But it’s going to come, because the technology and the economics make it inevitable.

I am sure it was equally disturbing for the people of Columbus’ day, when he discovered that the world did not end a few hundred miles offshore, but seemingly went on forever.

We Report…You Decide

Across the blogosphere, many ‘professional’ journalists decry the VJ movement and Citizen Journalism because it is going to ‘debase’ the ‘quality’ of ‘professional’ newsgathering. (so many quotation marks this morning!)

Here then, a fantastic example of the professionalism we are about to wreck. (And while you’re at it, check out the great camera work)

Courtesy:  Our local Fox news station

with a tip o’ the hat to Robert Stevenson

Travel Channel Academy NY Graduates

Once again, we graduate another class of outstanding new VJs from the TCA.

Some of the pieces were just stunning. It never ceases to amaze me what can be accomplished in just 4 days. Congrats to the the class, and we really look forward to seeing you work.

A Question of Balance

On the other hand…..

A disgruntled cameraman posting on Medialine has found a quote from someone who claims to be one of my past students at a station conversion. Says the student:

I was a victim MR and was forced to become one of his VJ’s at a station that I have since left.
He once explained to me that I didn’t need to get both sides of an issue in the same story.
It was that moment that I started to look for another job.

MR doesn’t know what he is doing and he has no business training random people to become “journalists”.
End of story. __________________

Well, of course, this is hardly the ‘end of the story’, but it does raise some interesting questions about ‘balance’ in reporting and journalism, as well as the right of ‘random people’ to become journalists.

Let’s start with the harder one: balance.

This desire for balance in every piece, or ‘getting the other side of the story’ creates, in my opinion, a kind of banality in reporting. I call it ‘The Oatmeal Effect’. On the one hand this… but on the other hand, that. It waters every statement down with its counterpoint.

This notion of ‘balance’ is a relatively new phenomenon.

As the great journalist HL Menken said, our mission is to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable’. Mencken, you will note, did not say  “to afflict the comfortable but also point out that perhaps the capitalist mill owners do indeed have a point in paying people  8 cents an hour to work in their factories”.

Most people who are great writers, and particularly those throughout our history who have been great journalists have been driven more by their passions than by a desire for ‘balance’, and this is no bad thing.  Edward R. Murrow, for example, in going after Senator Joseph McCarthy did not exactly present a ‘balanced’ report. The attack was entirely one-sided.  Murrow then offered McCarthy his own half-hour in which to respond – something McCarthy did, but to little avail.

Friendly and Murrow are also well-known for Harvest of Shame, another piece of television journalism that hardly strove for ‘balance’. (“Let’s face it, most of these sharecroppers are  either poor people or illegal immigrants and are lucky just to have a job!”……not exactly); yet it is regarded, properly so,  as an icon of outstanding journalism. Balance overall in a network over the course of a year, great. Balance in every piece… insipid.

Our ‘quest for balance’, is little more than a dogma we now repeat, without really examining where it came from or why we subscribe to it

In point of fact, we generally offer little in the way of true balance. Reports on Al Qaeda, for example, never offer Al Qaeda’s side of the story, the fundamentalist Islamist side,  and trust me, there is one.

‘Madman dictator’ Saddam Hussein rarely if ever got his side of the story told, (and nowhere near equal time) on any reporting about Iraq. When we do stories about the Holocaust, we never ever go near ‘the other side of the story’ (ie, maybe Hitler had a point). And it is not as though these perspectives don’t exist. If you would like to read Hitler’s side of the story, just pop over to Stormfront.org and you can read all about it, distasteful though it is.

We elect to be ‘balanced’ when we want to; when it is easy. In truth, it is nothing but lip service.

When we reported on Soweto in South Africa, we never felt it necessary to present the South African government’s apartheid point of view – “of course, all this segregation may be justified if blacks and coloureds are  racially inferior. Here’s Mike Wallace with that point of view”.  No way!

When we report on Israel and Hamas, we never present the Hamas perspective – ‘here to explain how the Jews stole all this land from the Palestinians – Bob Simon’. I don’t think so

So where did this notion of ‘balance’ (when it does not offend anyone) come from?

Like much else in our business, it is derived from the limits of the early technology of television.

In a world where the electromagnetic spectrum limited the number of channels, and hence the number of voices, the world of public discourse was left in the hands of a few ‘anchors’ and networks. They became, because of their small numbers and deep penetration, the voice of God. A kind of authority all their own.

And how could we trust these ‘voices of God’? How could we know they would be fair?

Only if they showed all sides all the time. Equal treatment to everyone (except the truly repugnant, of course).

And so was born the idea that Walter and his ilk were above reproach. Much like the King. They carried with them a sense of nobless oblige. All wise. All knowing. All seeing.

This, of course, is pure nonsense. But like much of early TV, it quickly became part of the accepted dogma of the new medium. Newspapers had never hesitated to take a political side and make that side loud and clear (see William Randolph Hearst or the McCormicks).

But in TV it was going to be different. Every story balanced. If this… then this…

banal.

insipid.

Now along comes the web and its millions of websites covering every point of view in the world.

A real free press (unlike TV).

The balance is there, its just overall. Don’t like Huffington Press? Go see Stormfront.org.

There is something for everyone.

Same thing happens to video now, when 100 million people get their hands of video cameras. A 100 million different perspectives. It’s healthy. We like a free press.

The only people who don’t like this whole thing of course, (to bring this argument to its logical conclusion) are those whose careers are suddenly evaporating as fast as ice in July. The so-called ‘professionals’ of our industry, who are increasingly finding themselves in an incredibly open and competitive market.

Now, the ‘random people’ (as in We The People) are starting to express their opinions in the public domain,

Good for them!

“These bloggers” the ‘professionals’ complain, “don’t know journalism. They refuse to present the other side of the story”.

On the contrary, the bloggers, the people are the other side of the story.

Moments of Revolution

The power of empowering the masses

Today we had a visitor at the Travel Channel Academy.

A representative from an O&O in Philadelphia, she said that the local news station was starting to get concerned because The Philadelphia Enquirer (which fields about 125 reporters a day), was starting to equip their print reporters and photographers with video cameras.

Her station fields 6-8 cameras a day to cover Philly.

It’s a realistic concern.

The local news station is going to get buried alive unless they can change their approach to news coverage.

But a great deal of their problem lays not in the technology, but rather in the mentality. A kind of arrogance – we are the nobles, the elect, the elite of electronic news gathering.

It’s an interesting idea, but it won’t take them too far.

In 1798, France was in a shambles. The Revolution had shaken the country to its core, and the nobility, who had previously made up the military, were dispersed and soon to be executed in The Terror.

Before 1798, armies had been made of highly trained professional soldiers. Career soldiers. Nobles – a concept derived from knights and the cost of maintaining each soldier. It was a nobleman’s career. Not for the peasants. They tilled the field.

Napoleon’s genius (among much genius) was to empower the peasants and create an army from their ranks. No one had ever done anything like this before. Had there been no Revolution, no execution of the Bourbons, it would never had been tolerated. But moments of revolution create moments of opportunity for the bold. And Napoleon saw the potential in Citizen Warriors that no one else could see.

When street rabble rose against the National Convention at the Tuileries, Napoleon organized them and took control, and hence an idea was born.

Napoleon would ultimately raise an army of nearly 1 million men, an almost incomprehensible force in an 18th Century Europe in which an army of 30,000 was considered large; and wielding that power, would come within a hairs-breadth of conquering all of Europe. Even so, he would stand astride Europe, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to The Lebanon – a feat that had not happened since the Roman Empire.

This was the power of the Citizen Army.

I look at the local TV station with their anemic 6 crews to cover a city of several million people. Then I look at training room for The Travel Channel Academy. In this one room is 6 times the power of an entire local news operation, and this is only scratching the surface. There are millions who would ‘take arms’ (in a digital sense), for the cause of a better public discourse.

Who will have the vision and the courage to do for journalism what Napoleon did for military power?