Time to start the coverage…..

The summer deluge of coverage of the Beijing Olympics is scheduled to start soon, and the networks are posed to spend tens of millions, if not more, on getting the story into our homes.  NBC, of course, has spent $3.5 billion just for the rights, but that, of course, is only the beginning.  For more than year, the major networks have been preparing for a China-fest.

I was in Beijing last Christmas, and Tienanmen Square was dominated by a giant ‘countdown’ clock, ticking off the months. days, hours, minutes and seconds to the start of the event.  And now, here we are… almost.

Yesterday, I got an email from Jocelyn Ford, NPR’s Marketplace correspondent in China.

She is the bureau chief for NPR’s bureau in Beijing, and before that, was NPR’s bureau chief in Tokyo. Fluent in both Mandarin and Japanese, she has covered Asia for more than 15 years.

A few months ago, Ford bought herself a small video camera and FCP. She had never, by her own admission, done video before, but she was intrigued. So she started reporting, for no one in particular, in video.

Now, every good radio journalist carries their own tape recorder and edits their own stuff. This goes without saying.  And NPR reporters are among the best in the world. So I was curious as to what would happen when a great NPR radio reporter picked up a camera and started using it to report.

Ford gets great access. Working alone, she is able to uncover the kinds of  stories that a massive network crew simply can’t get to. And of course, the cost of her coverage is… well, generally a bus ticket  - or sometimes she rides her bicycle.  Let’s compare that to what the networks spend for their coverage, shall we?

The most interesting part, of course, is the kind of stories she is able to get access to.

There has been a great deal of discussion in the printed press lately about television’s reluctance to show anything ‘amiss’ in China.  They have a kind of unwritten agreement with the Chinese government that the skies will be blue every day.

Ted Koppel, who has just completed a documentary for Discovery on China was recently on TODAY talking about massive repression in China.  When Matt Lauer commented that NBC would soon be bringing the Olympics to American homes (never miss a chance to pimp the net), Koppel commented that was quite sure it would be wall-to-wall positive coverage.  Lauer was not amused and a look of annoyance crossed his face before he moved on to ‘other stuff’.

Reporters like Jocelyn Ford have no such problems, and as such, despite the fact that their cost of coverage is next to nothing, are likely to give a far better and far more accurate picture of life in China today. That is, if anyone cares to pick up her stuff.

She is making it available as a video stringer. Her contract with NPR covers only her radio work.

Here, I think, is a unique opportunity for both television stations and newspapers.

Take it.

]

Until you learned to read and write, this thing was utterly worthless….

In the past two weeks, we have trained 80 people as new videojournalists, plus the folks at McGraw Hill and the folks at the Star Ledger we worked with during these 14 days, and we’re at a grand total around 150, give or take a few.

That’s not a lot.

Not when you consider the magnitude of what we are trying to accomplish.

This is not about teaching people to make video.

This is a revolution in literacy.

Video Literacy.

We are, today, a society that is defined by video. It is, for better or for worse, the Lingua Franca of our culture. The average American spends 4.5 hours a day watching videos, either on TV or online. That number is primed to get much bigger as video migrates to the web. ‘

Video is the way that we, increasingly, communicate stories, news, information and even ideas to one another. It is powerful because it often transcends barriers of language and of culture. It is universal. It is powerful. It drives everything from politics to religion, and much in between.

Yet the vast majority of the population (on the order of 99.99 percent) is and remains largely video illiterate. That is, while they can watch video, they cannot create it. Thus they are cut off from participating in creating the very elements of our public discourse, as well as our entertainment. They are, in effect, second class citizens.

What is worse, is that we are all the poorer as a culture when we place this incredibly powerful medium in the hands of a select (or self-selected) few.

It is a crazy and terribly destructive thing to do.

So no, we are not teaching people a skill. We are teaching them to participate in the formation of our culture, instead of being simply passive observers.

The morning after the printing press was invented in 1452, there was almost no one in Europe who was literate. Literacy was then the purview of a tiny and elite fraction of the population. The great and vast majority of the world was incapable of reading and writing.

So while the printing press was a wonderful machine for democratizing learning and ideas, it had to go hand and hand with a rather rapid process of teaching people to read and write, and empowering them with the idea… the idea… that they could do this. That it was, in fact, both their right and their responsibility.

This transformation took several hundred years, and not an insignificant amount of blood was shed in its defense.

Today, we live in a world in which print literacy - the ability to read and write, is viewed as a fundamental unifying principle of our culture. We teach people to write in school, not in the hopes that they might one day earn a living as writers, but rather so that they might fully contribute to culture as a whole.

Now, as we move rather rapidly from a print based to culture to a video based culture, it is equally important that we teach people how to communicate their ideas in video. Not so that they might one day earn a living as cameramen (though they might), but rather so that they might craft their ideas in the medium in which we are all increasingly communicating.

OK, Robbie. Just point the camera and hit the record button… It’s easy…

FORBIDDEN PLANET is probably my favorite movie. (Dr. Strangelove is a close second).

But you can’t beat Forbidden Planet for plot. Made in 1956 in an era of cheese Sci Fi, the movie stands out not just for major production values (for its time) but also for a great story line. Starring Walter Pigeon as Dr. Morbius and Leslie Nielsen (surprisingly) as Commander John Adams (before his Airplane days, when he was still playing it straight), its actually a take-off on The Tempest, by Shakespeare.

In short, Nielsen and his crew travel 100 million light years or so to the planet Altair IV, where the only survivors of an earlier expedition are an archaeologist, Dr. Morbius (Pigeon) and his 21 year old daughter Altaira,

The incredibly advanced and sophisticated Krell Civilization, which inhabited the planet, were apparently wiped out overnight in one catastrophic evening. It takes a while to figure out what happened, but the Krell were working on a massive ‘final project’ when they vanished. The final project, it turns out, was a gigantic machine buried in the planet that had the power to turn any thought, any wish, into physical reality instantly.

On demand.

And, at no cost, apparently.

What the Krell forgot to factor in was their own deep dark primitive drives. Once the machine was turned on, every hatred, jealously, anger was immediately translated into a living, breathing real killing machine that wiped out the whole lot of them overnight. (Someone, one would think, should have turned off the machine perhaps!)

In any event, it was ‘monsters from the id that killed the Krell’ and soon will wipe out Leslie Neilsen’s crew as well if they don’t get the heck out of there.

The amazing yet deadly machine that the Krell built, it seems to me, is not so different from the amazing yet potentially deadly machine we have built with the Internet.

Like the Krell Reactors, it too has the power to deliver, on demand, just about anything we want, any time, and for no cost (apparently). OK. it can only deliver intellectual content at the moment, but still, that’s a pretty fair chunk of our own culture. Movies. TV Shows. News. Videos. Music. Books. Arcane legal tracts. Blueprints for nuclear weapons. On demand. All the time. Any Time. To anyone. No cost. No delay. No trips to the library.

Pretty good huh?

The Krell probably though the same thing.

What will the impact be of a culture in which you can get pretty much anything (anything that is digitalizable - if that is word), on demand, in an instant, and for free.

It’s gotta have a very disruptive influence.

Something we probably are as ill prepared for as were the Krell for the consequences of their own machine.

The new machine will wipe out whole swaths of industry, whole swaths of business. It will change not only distribution but also valuations. In short, like the Krell, it runs the very real risk of destroying our society - at least the one we have known up till now.

What will replace it?

Ah… figure that one out, and you too can own your own Youtube, or at least the next iteration.

In Forbidden Planet, Nielsen and the crew are able to pack up the ship and fly away from the Krell Machine before (just incidentally) blowing up the planet. Back here on earth, we don’t have anywhere else to go.

Here are some outtakes:

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]]> http://rosenblumtv.wordpress.com/2008/07/19/monsters-from-the-id/feed/ rosenblumtv http://rosenblumtv.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/meanwhile-back-in-the-real-world/ http://rosenblumtv.wordpress.com/2008/07/18/meanwhile-back-in-the-real-world/#comments Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:40:20 +0000 rosenblumtv http://rosenblumtv.wordpress.com/?p=1279

Technological revolutions have a tendency to wreck existing industries. Suddenly, none of the ‘old rules’ apply, and it can be extremely disorienting to those who are effected.

The reaction to this kind of massive technological shift can be a bit analogous to the Kubler-Ross stages of acceptance to death. After all, we are all watching the death of an industry - or in fact, many industries (just look at newspapers). And the first stage is denial.

And that is where we are now in many parts of the business. Denial.

You can see the denial all over the place. “this is not really happening’. One of the cameramen over on b-roll posted the following, in response to cable opening up to unconventional (ie, you) programming sources. The comparison is to when Hollywood first encountered cable.

Zillions of cheap movies were made just for cable distribution and after a short while the public had just about enough.

Now, here is someone who clearly has never watched Lifetime or HBO or Showtime or about a dozen other cable stations.

In fact, just this morning, Charlie Parsons, VP for Development at The Travel Channel is busy addressing our 40 Travel Channel Academy students on just how they can submit their concepts and pilots to The Travel Channel,

Charlie opens the door to the Kingdom…

Of course, the next phase in the Kubler-Ross stages is anger, which I think we’re already at in many places!

The next phase, of course, is bargaining. This too, we are just starting to see: “OK. We’ll have a few VJs, just to see how it works”

We all know where this ultimately leads.

We fly up from San Antonio, take one day in Newark and wake up the next morning in Friendship Heights, Maryland, the home of the Travel Channel.

We’re here starting up another 4-day Academy at Travel Channel HQ, with forty eager new Travel Journalists.

Sue Norton, VP for Short Programming addressed the group, and then a surprise visit by Anthony Bourdain.

Don’t move the camera!

A few images from the Star Ledger’s conversion to video.

Courtesy, John O’Boyle

Just came back from an all-day review session at the Star Ledger in Newark.

For the past 2 months, we have been shepherding the 15th largest newspaper in the country into the world of online video, preparing for their Ledger Live debut August 1.

Lemme tell you, I have been doing this for a long time, (too long), and today I saw some outstanding video, for a newspaper… or even a local TV station.

I learned a lot today.

I learned that perhaps the future of video news is in papers, not TV stations.

I mean, for years, local TV news has started the day by reading the local paper and pretty much lifting (I won’t say stealing) the stories that the paper already did the hard work on. Well, now it seems, we’re simply going to remover the middle man.

I’ll have more from the Star Ledger, including two of the best videos I have seen in a long time. So good, in fact, that I am going to use them as ’sizzle reels’ to pitch series to some networks I am seeing next week. Stand by - as soon as they post them, I will too.

Meanwhile, here’s a peek behind the scenes at the Star Ledger:

NEW VJ AWARD ANNOUNCED

Sabina Streich, Germany’s “VJ Queen” writes to me to day to announce a new VJ Award being offered by the “4th Annual Video Journalism Awards in Mainz, Germany”

Mainz, as you may know, was the home of Johannes Gutenberg, so it seems a pretty good place for VJ Awards.

In any event, here’s the copy:

The Video Journalism Awards is looking for non-fiction videos from single authors, the so called videojournalists (short VJs). A VJ is responsible for the whole creative process starting from research and shooting as well as covering the whole process of editing and sometimes even the publication of the film.
A small camcorder and a laptop are the tools of the VJ, which is comparable to the pen and paper a newspaper journalist uses.

The final deadline for entering films for the 4th International Video Journalism Awards is the 15th of October 2008. The awards are produced by vjawards.com , the host is ZDF German Television in Mainz.

The internet is converging all kinds of media, which is reflected by this year’s theme “unlimited access”. The awards try to cover all known fields of video journalism: films from TV-stations and publishing companies and productions from an independent background are awarded with a total of 12.000 € of prize money going to the seperated categories “independent and online” and “TV production”.
Recent developements that influence the VJ-scene and future perspectives are discussed in the supporting programme of the 4th International Video Journalism Awards.

INTERNATIONAL VIDEO JOURNALISM AWARD

a) TV production – broadcast reports (2000 €)
A journalistic or documentary report with a maximum duration of 15 minutes, produced by one or more video journalists/video reporters, and which has already been broadcast.

b) independent or online video (2000 €)
A journalistic or documentary report with a maximum duration of 15 minutes, produced by one or more video journalists/video reporters, but which has not necessarily been broadcast.

GERMAN VIDEO JOURNALISM AWARD

a) TV production - broadcast reports (2000 €)
A journalistic or documentary report with a maximum duration of 15 minutes, produced by one or more video journalists/video reporters and which has been aired by a German-language television channel (please indicate the station and broadcast date). All genres.

b) Independent or online video (2000 €)
A journalistic or documentary report with a maximum duration of 15 minutes, produced by one or more video journalists/video reporters, but which has not necessarily been broadcast.

REPORTAGE AWARD (2500 €)
A feature report in the German language with a minimum duration of 15 minutes and a maximum duration of 29 minutes, produced by one or more video journalists/video reporters, but which has not necessarily been broadcast.

NEWCOMER VIDEO JOURNALISM AWARD (1000 €)
A journalistic or documentary report with a maximum duration of 15 minutes, produced by one or more video journalists/video reporters. The applicants must be under 30 years of age or currently enrolled in an institution of higher education. Those productions will be considered for awards whose appeal lies in a unique style of content or cinematography and indicate a great potential of the applicant.

Online- audience prize (500 €)
A specially developed open online voting system will allow the users to cast votes for their favorite entries.

Special mentioning of the jury
The jury nominates a film, that impressed them, and that might expand the term video journalism.

Further information is provided on our website:
http://www.vjawards.com

Courtesy, “Buck” at b-roll.net Thanks, Buck, for always including me in your tag line.

Our pals over at b-roll.net, the website for professional cameramen, have posted the above photo in response to a local Florida TV Station, Tampa Bay 10, starting to gin up the role of “Citizen Journalists’.

This kind of stuff scares the crap out of the old school guys, and they’ll come up with a million reasons why this is a bad idea. Of course, the number one reason is that it just brings the close of their careers one day closer. After all, if ‘anyone’ can create content for air, then what makes them so special? Good question.

Of course, in the world of print, almost all writers are ‘citizen journalists’. They don’t have to go out and hire scribes or even typists to crank out their ideas. They just sit down at the word processor and have at it. Computers and word processors were the death knell of ‘professional’ stenographers, typing pools and scribes. That’s what technology does. If you’re a scribe, the printing press was a bitch, but what are you gonna do.

Of course, just because you can pick up a camera and point it at something does not mean you can create great content. That’s a matter of storytelling talent. Some people have it, some don’t. At the Travel Channel Academy (and other places) we’re very much reaching out in to the community at large and trying to locate and nurture people with the talent to tell stories. It’s good to see that places like Tampa Bay 10 and The Travel Channel, among others, respect these people.

Oh, and as for the photo above. Well, in point of fact, this kind of ‘danger’ does not really happen. I remember many years ago, when I was at CBS News, we were required to have an IBEW Union ‘Engineer’ in the room with us when we screened UMatic tapes. The ‘engineer’s’ job was to put the tape in the deck and hit the play, stop or pause buttons. When I asked the ‘engineer’ why I could not do it myself, he replied that left on my own, I could ruin the tape. Yeah……

Below, some photos from Travel Channel Academy Texas this week. Don’t see too many people with tape wrapped around their heads, do you? Does not really happen….. Sorry for the former ‘engineers’.

“The eyes of Texas are upon you… all the live long day!”

OK.

It’s July in Austin, so it’s hot. Really hot. But San Antonio is providing us with tons of material to shoot.

At the invitation of Texas Tourism, we’ve come to San Antonio to run our first Texas-based TCA, and so far, despite heat (lemme tell you, wearing black here makes no sense), we’re having a great time.