Welcome to the Video Revolution

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The Travel Channel Academy is a great course, but its also expensive.

$2000 is a lot to commit for a novice, (not that we don’t have our share of novices in the course).

But what we do have is a lot of folks who would like to get a sense of what this ‘video revolution’ is all about without having to spend four days in intensive bootcamp-like training.

So we’re going to do just that.

In partnership with the City University Graduate School of Journalism, Jeff Jarvis and I are going to offer a 1-day course on the basics of the video revolution.

Learn and see what it’s all about.

First class:

Date: Saturday, March 28
Time: 10 a.m.-3 p.m.
Where: CUNY Graduate School of Journalism
219 W. 40th St., New York, NY
Cost: $195 (10% discount for CUNY J-School alumni)

Back To You, Joe

Ace VJ Joe Little

Well, naturally, the day after I post on TVspy that one of the prime differentiators between VJ and OMB is that we don’t do stand-ups, KGTV/10 VJ Joe Little sends me a link to a Youtube posting that proves me wrong.

OK.

For the most part, I don’t like stand-ups. For Joe, I am willing to make an exception.

The Prize

We’re giving it away…

Six years ago, I met Philip Hilven for a drink at the Heathrow Hilton.

Philip was working for Concentra, one of the larger publishing companies in Belgium.

Concentra was in the newspaper business, but they were dabbbling in local cable TV. Philip had heard my speak in Barcelona a few years before, and had grown enamored with the VJ concept.  After the drink and dinner he invited me to come to Belgium and to work with Concentra.

The stations (there are now four), built entirely on the VJ model, are today the most profitable part of the Concentra Media Group.

The company was so taken with the concept, that the following year, they started offering a prize for the best VJ work – first in Europe, but starting last year, anywhere in the world.

Today, with the dollar where it is, and the Euro where it is, the prize for 2009 is currently worth $15,000 (plus an all expense paid trip to Brussels for the awards ceremony, March 5th).

I invite anyone in the VJ business to submit their work.

Here’s the info

Looking forward to seeing your submissions.  And maybe seeing you  in Brussels in March as well.

TC Academy New York

Today we conclude another session of the Travel Channel Academy in NY.  This afternoon, we will certify another 40 gradautes of the Academy.  We have sessions scheduled for 2009 in NY, DC and Santa Barbara, but places are already filling up.  Take a look.

The New Star Ledger

Star Ledger VJ Andre Malok’s tour de force.

Take a look at the quality of the reporting, the shooting, the editing.

The whole package.

The Newark Star Ledger is recreating itself as a digital content provider.

It’s the model for the newspaper of the 21st Century.

Could this be the future for newspapers across the country?

It’s a hell of a start.

Here’s the link to the paper’s part of the story. Print story by Amy Ellis Nutt.

News from Newark

A shy New Jersey chiaropractor suffers a stroke on a golf course, and his life is suddenly transformed. He can’t stop making art.

We were out in Newark this week at a mass meeting to talk about new directions for the paper. As the largest newspaper in New Jersey, and as New Jersey is the only state in the US without a major network TV news operation, we think the potenial here is limitless.

Contrary to popular rumor, the paper is not going out of business. It has shed a great deal of its costs however, and is now lean and mean and ready to embrace a new digital and video future.

The promo above is but a tease for a video/print special release this weekend.

This isn’t dodgy hand-held video. And it’s great reporting as well.

We think it’s a preview, not just for the weekend, but for the future of online journalism as well.. and newspapers.

If You Bild It….. will they come?

Email this morning from Pat Younge, President of the Travel Channel.*

He sends me a link from The Guardian, that BILD, the German newspaper has partnered with a German supermarket to sell small cameras and field an army of citizen journalists to feed the paper’s website.

Sounds good to me, but I think they need a training course!

Germany’s bestselling newspaper is looking to expand without the expense of actually hiring new reporters.

Bild has joined up with discount supermarket chain Lidl to sell a basic digital camera to a legion of citizen journalists, who the tabloid hopes will contribute images to its coverage.

“We can’t cover everything,” said Michael Paustian, a Bild managing editor. “We think it is an advance for journalism.”

The pocket-sized camera has 2GB of memory, can shoot still pictures and video, and costs €69.99 (£60). It comes with software and a USB port that allows “reader-reporters” to upload content directly to editors who will be assigned to review it for publication.

Bild spokesman Tobias Fröhlich said the goal was to encourage camera owners to seek the widest exposure for their work. “It’s not about exclusivity,” he said.

The move fits in with a broader trend for traditional media to turn their increasingly interactive readers into news providers.

Vancouver-based NowPublic.com gathers photographs, video clips and news tips from the public and distributes them to news organisations. The trend is likely to continue as traditional news providers scramble to match the migration of readers and advertisers to the internet.

Bild, known for breaking major political stories as well as front-page splashes on zoo animals and celebrities, will use the new cameras to streamline an existing scheme that brings in thousands of photos each day by email and text message, Fröhlich said. The paper has published 9,000 of those images since 2006.

He said Bild may pay for the best ones it uses or establish a contest for the best content submitted each week; details would be worked out after gauging demand for the cameras that go on sale today.

Some worry that Bild’s new media experiment will lower standards and interfere with professional reporting.

“It poses a threat to quality journalism, the more images from non-professionals that are pushed on to the market even though professional images are available,” said Eva Werner, a spokeswoman for the German Journalists’ Association

But Paustian thought the opposite was true. “We’re not YouTube,” he said. “Every contribution will be viewed, reviewed and journalistically evaluated.”

*and this just in from NZ correspondent Alan Morrison

Hello Bolly

She’s the little old lady from Utta Pradesh now…

James MacPherson is the publisher of an online website called Pasadena Now.

Pasadenanow.com is causing a lot of buzz in the journalism community. Not because it’s hyperlocal news. that’s old stuff.  But because MacPherson has announced he is going to outsource the reporting jobs to India.

India.

MacPherson believes that since City Council meetings are streamed on the web already, there is no need for a reporter’s physical presence in the room, and the goings on can be covered just as easily from Bangalore.

Well, maybe

His move has caused such as stir that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has already picked up on the story.

MacPherson’s idea may or may not work, but it gave me a moment to think about the whole notion of outsourcing video production in general.

I am on the board of a wonderful organization called Video Volunteers.

It was founded a few years ago by a graduate of one of my seminars, Jessica Mayberry, and today it is a world leader in empowering people in India with video cameras, laptop edits and the skill sets to tell their own stories in video.

Some of our trainees have now been making video for several years, and are quite good at it. So good, in fact that I think perhaps it is time for them to break out onto the world stage.

It is fine to give out video cameras and teach people to ‘tell their own stories’, but after a while, perhaps it is time for them to start and tell other people’s stories as well. After all, that’s what happens when a crew from Atlanta or New York flies half way around the world to shoot stories in Thailand or Rwanda for ITN or CBS or the BBC.

Well, maybe it is time for our Indian camera crews to get into that business as well.

Of course, in India the median income is an astonishing $115 a month.  That’s one hundred fifteen dollars a month (just in case you thought that was a typo).  So my guess is that our Indian camera crews will be pretty competitive… and quite happy to work long and hard hours and produce a superior product.

At those rates it might just be worth it to fly the crews into the US for work here, in fact.

Bollywood indeed.

The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You

First, many thanks to Buck over at b-roll.net. for finding this.  Nice research!

Austin likes to think of itself as ‘different’ from the rest of Texas.

And now, The Austin American-Statesman takes a giant step in moving from a paper to a digital information center.   They not only reprint articles from The New York Times and The Washington Post on a regular basis (hey, this is TEXAS!), but their websites, both the paper’s and their entertainment website, Austin360 are clean and heavy on blogging, video and citizen journalism.

As for their point about local TV news vs. newspapers…..

In my experience most local TV newsrooms start their day by scanning the paper for stories to cover.  I have never seen a newspaper scan local TV news for what to cover that day.

The Man Who Came to Breakfast

Notice the marmite……

Jeff Jarvis dropped over for breakfast yesterday.

Somewhere between Dubai and Davos, he carved out an hour for a few slices of Sullivan Street Bakery sesame bread and white fish salad.

He came over to talk about DNA2009.

Like Jeff, I attend many conferences. (I can’t turn down an audience).  But one of the greatest flaws I see at a lot of conferences are that once you assemble the great and the good, no one really knows what to do with them.  There is the ‘let’s give a speech’ route. You sit, a famous person we have paid 100k will recite a talk that someone else has written for them, and then we’ll have coffee.  Not great.

Then there is the ‘let’s pretend we’re in a TV studio’ route.  A well-known TV presenter who has little or no knowlege of the topic at hand will carry out a mock Dick Cavett (for those old enough) type TV interview, – lights, swivel chairs, set – all that is lacking is the TV cameras..and the broadcast.  The audience sits and watches this reinactment of a 1975 TV show and then thinks about what is wrong with TV…

Finally there is the much lamented Panel Discussion.  Five or six luminaires on an industry are invited to offer their opinions on a few topics while 300 people watch them try and explain very complex issues in 2 minute soundbites.  Also shows what is wrong with TV.

Well, it’s not easy.

The thing I like about Jarvis is he thinks out of the box all the time.  This goes for his new book, What Would Google Do, which I shamelessly pimp here (my pre-order is already in); but also for conferences.

At his last conference at CUNY, he tried quite hard to break the mold.  Lightning round, solve the problem, live webcasting with comments – he tried to get everyone involved.

So we’ve invited him to DNA (March 4-5, Brussels), where we’re going to try some new ideas on group involvement as opposed to sit and watch this stuff. I think it will make a big difference.

And, using my new flip cam (Jarvis was quick to note that he now has the HD version… so it’s back to B&H Photo as soon as I am done here), we got him to do a quick promo for us. (Well, it’s the least you can expect after bagels and ….. marmite?)