'Video journalists': Inevitable revolution or way to cut TV jobs?

[Editor's note: This article was produced as an invitation-only wiki among the discussion participants below. You can read how this article evolved by clicking the "Previous versions" link above.]

Pity the pioneer. The trail-blazer might be first to latch onto an idea, but that also means those defending the status quo see a bull's eye on his head. Thus it is for Michael Rosenblum, called a "prophet" and "guru" in the quotes on his bio but also derided as a profiteering con-man by readers of the Lost Remote blog after a recent Q&A.

Rosenblum's idea is to bring "video journalists" to TV newsrooms and beyond, one-man bands that can report stories, shoot digital video, edit it on laptops and broadcast it. His client list already includes the BBC, New York Times TV and Oxygen, and he is currently helping to train VJs at local TV stations such as KRON in San Francisco and WKRN in Nashville.

Rosenblum sells his vision to station management by promising to cut the cost of production by 20 percent to 70 percent with no loss in picture quality or storytelling. In fact, he argues that TV news can improve by giving many more people the tools to tell stories rather than the four or five news trucks full of equipment that limit what they can cover.

But critics see him as the ultimate snake-oil salesman, breaking down the longstanding cameraperson/on-air personality duo and threatening the jobs of traditional TV newsgatherers while cozying up with cost-conscious management.

"I'm talking to WKRN in Nashville, and there's enormous amounts of anxiety, hostility -- and at the same time, once people get it, they really embrace it," Rosenblum told me. "I've worked with the BBC for five years on this and they bought into it completely and they're not exactly slackers when it comes to quality. It's television done on a print model. You're a writer and when you want to write a story you sit at your computer and bang it out. Now if you want to make TV, essentially you sit down at your computer, and you bang it out. It's essentially another piece of software -- but it requires a completely different mindset about what television is."

Most recently, Rosenblum co-created a production and training company called M3 Media and is developing eight series for the Travel Channel. The first series, "5 Takes Europe," premiered last Saturday night and will run for six episodes. The premise is a reality show of six young people who travel through Europe to shoot documentaries while also being filmed themselves for the Travel Channel show each week. They all keep Weblogs and video blogs on the Travel Channel site and have online polls and forums to get reader-directed insight for their upcoming destinations.

Rosenblum told me he trained each of the show's main subjects, as well as the five other VJs who will be filming them for the Travel Channel show. It's a weird meta-show of VJs filming VJs at work. But after watching the first episode, I didn't come away thinking "cutting edge" or "revolutionary." It smacked of reality-TV clichés from "The Real World" onward, with cast members in hot tubs and talking more about sex than filming techniques.

Probably the most excited people of all would be the Travel Channel execs who only paid the main cast members $50 per day to spend in high-priced European cities such as Paris and Amsterdam. You get the drama of "How will they survive?" while the producers laugh all the way to the bank. Rosenblum says the real cost savings come from time saved in churning out a show in only a week. Plus, he has trained 5,000 VJs and says they are hungry for outlets, and "you couldn't get a union editor and cameraman to do this."

Not too long after production started, one of the participants of "5 Takes Europe" was complaining about the show's fakery on her blog.

"One thing I must mention is that the whole process of filming a show like this is a bit exhausting," wrote Faythallegra. "I'm not sure what I expected, but it wasn't this. I thought we'd just be doing our thing and the cameras would be there to capture it. Instead it's rather contrived and slightly fake. ... I just hope I don't regret this whole thing when I watch the show finally."

Some veteran TV camerapeople decry the VJ phenomenon and say that quality is lacking when you shoot with smaller DV cameras. It's true that "5 Takes Europe" does have a grainier feel to it, though it's still compelling when telling the story of five backpacking 20-somethings. Whether that would work on an entire TV newscast remains to be seen, and many news organizations such as the BBC retain a hybrid approach, using VJs as well as larger camera crews.

We decided to create a special limited wiki for this story, where readers were able to actually watch the sausage get made, so to speak. For two and a half days, this page was open for myself, VJ evangelist Michael Rosenblum, Lost Remote editor Cory Bergman, video blogger Andrew Baron, and TV cameraman and blogger Stewart Pittman to contribute their answers to my questions and to each other. Rather than being a totally open wiki, I asked them to mark each of their edits so we know who has added what. At the end of the two days, I reserved the right to a final edit. Below is an edited version of our discussion.

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Group Discussion

Online Journalism Review: Let's start this off pretty simply. For Michael, please tell us how you see the current evolution of video journalism in TV newsrooms, and where it is headed in the future.

MICHAEL ROSENBLUM: I am writing this from the newsroom at WKRN in Nashville, where we are beginning the process of converting the station from conventional television to a complete VJ model. Where once the station covered Nashville with 6 beta crews and 5 edit rooms, when we are done the station will cover the same area, and fill the same newshole with 35-40 cameras and 35-40 edits in play every day.

I cannot see how anyone can take issue with this. This is a benefit for the viewers, as it allows both greater breadth of coverage as well as greater depth. At the same time, as the demand for news has not expanded, it also allows the journalists more time to work on their stories. The math here is fairly simple. In the conventional newsroom the average reporter/camera team was required to report two stories per day! In the final configuration each VJ will be required to report 1.5 stories per week. What we buy in this configuration is time. Time for proper journalism. Time to craft a story. Time to research. Good journalism requires time. Good journalism also requires something far more important - the freedom to fail. In a conventional newsroom every story must make air. As a result this makes our assignment process very very conservative.

All local news stations in any given market pretty much cover all the same stories at the same time. But when we heve 35 cameras in play, we can have some stories that just don't make it. As in print, we can 'spike' stories. This 'freedom to fail' allows us to take risks. In our stations we try and build in a 35% failure rate. Good journalism requires the ability to take risks. And risk means that there has to be an opportunity to fail without getting fired. Sometimes a story plays out, sometimes it does not. This is a good thing.

The driver behind all this change, and much more is the low cost of production. Gear that used to cost tens of thousands of dollars now costs a tiny fraction of that. Editing software that has the power of $500,000 edit suites now costs a few hundred dollars - and they are very very simple to operate. The migration of this technology into the hands of the public means the democratization of television. That is a very important change - and one that networks and hollywood will do everything in their power to fight. But it is going to come.

OJR: To everyone: What do you see as the advantages and disadvantages of using video journalism techniques in local TV newsrooms, in programming on channels such as the Travel Channel, and for journalists themselves?

ROSENBLUM: In so far as programming is concerned, there are three technologies driving change simultaneously. Cameras of incredible quality are now available at consumer costs. The cameras used to shoot the 5 TAKES program are the new Sony Z-1s. There are high definition cameras. It is funny that you see the show as 'grainy' because the cameras are actually shooting in a quality far in excess of regular betacams. The editing for that show is now being done on Final Cut Pro on a laptop. This incredible editing power - something that once cost half a million dollars, is now available to anyone for a few hundred dollars.

The greatest driver of change however is the explosion in ouput platforms. Six hundred channels on cable alone, plus digital satellite and video on the Internet means a demand for quite literally millions of hours of content a year. As the ouput platforms grow, the audience and the concurrent advertising revenue get fractionalized. Much more content, much less money per program. Who is going to fill that demand? Even at the prices cable pays now - $40k per half hour - traditional Hollywood studios cannot deliver. But a 19-year-old kid - or a 30-year-old writer, with a laptop, a camera and an idea ....now, they can deliver shows for that price...and even less. This is all going to come together. We are just at the very begining of the process.

CORY BERGMAN: I'll chime in on some of the downsides. Regardless of how well a VJ is trained, on average, the quality of journalism will not match a two-person crew on deadline (unless both people are not working together as a team.) Two creative minds on a story are better than one. And with breaking news, a two-person crew will outcover a VJ, on average. The reporter can gather information, call into the station, track down interviews, look for home video, run tapes to the truck... etc., while the photographer is busy shooting tape.

The question remains, though, is the added benefits of a two-person crew worth the added expenditures? When a TV station is doing well financially, the answer is yes. But as TV advertising revenue begins a sustained decline, VJs are looking like a viable option for some media companies that find themselves in a soft financial position.

Terry Heaton, who consults for WKRN and KRON, disagrees with my argument above (read more in his blog post). He says that VJs can outcover two-person crews on a story. How? By sending two VJs for each two-person crew.

That's the crux of the argument in favor of the VJ model. Instead of ten two-person crews (with ten cameras), you have 20 VJs armed with cameras. Instead of ten reporters, you have 20 VJs on the phones digging for stories. The end result, Rosenblum and Heaton assert, is more stories, better stories (more enterprise) and more competitive coverage.

The caveat, of course, is that stations don't get tempted to let that number erode over time.

ANDREW BARON: I find the VJ brand to be a consequence of other factors that are also consequential. It's an obvious model of cutting costs by retiring old expensive equipment for new equipment that is better and cheaper (hello TV and film, welcome to the digital age that we have been talking about for so long now). Processes that include endless chains of middle-people and bottom-line bottlenecks ought to be trimmed, obviously, etc.

Though once you get your newsroom up to speed with contemporary technology and then successfully refine your process, isn't there room to start working on improving the production again? And then start to build better and better quality work? Maybe get a few extra lights even? Maybe hire someone to hold a boom mic when you plan to be out in the street. Add an editor, a research assistant, etc. If you had the resources, these things would improve the production/story value and why not always strive to improve the quality of anything that you do? The video screens all around us are improving, the human experience of interacting with media is more demanding, people are capable of smarter content. There is no end to increasing the quality of a production.

Therefore, I would say with Rocketboom, for instance, we are going in the opposite direction to the VJ method. We consequently sprung up because we already had the contemporary technology just laying around and wanted to have some creative fun with it. Now we are interested in learning to improve our production and strive to increase the overall value of our entire show. While our production suffers all over from lack of experience and resources, I can already tell that there will never be an end to making it better.

This leads into my desire to distinguish between two kinds of scenarios, the newsroom scenario, and the 'show' scenario. One is designed for journalistic integrity, the other is designed for entertainment value.

When you apply the VJ method to the newsroom, it seems acceptable at first because ultimately, with the news, production value is not the issue. Human integrity and an informed angle is more important. People who are watching the news just want to know what the case is, as a matter of fact. And if some citizen is passionate enough to put it together freely, all the better when pertinent. The danger with the single person news story is the greater lack of objectivity. When working in isolation, even the best in the field have the most effective quirky biases, subjective beliefs and pursuits to influence the edits.

With a show that is designed for entertainment value, however, I don't see how the VJ model can work well on TV at all. It reminds me of the last show that I remember loving the most, the Simpsons. When it first came out and I watched it on TV, I imagined a brilliant genius was the writer of the show. When I learned later that it was written by an entire team of major writers, it suddenly made sense why it was so outstanding and jam packed with creative, sharp and informed entertainment value. As others have mentioned, professional content creators have a love and a passion for their work; they want to make it the best it can be; working with a well assimilated team of experts will undeniably produce a more aware production. The real focus should go into training a director to build and work with a team of varying sizes that can fluctuate well with different environments.

In this case, The Travel Channel, resorting to a VJ Method, may turn out to be a successful monetary value (at the expense of the the creative/production team and their standard of living as we all know it's dangerous and unhealthy to work in expensive cities under stress on $50 a day) though I believe the Travel Channel has failed to see what Rosenblum also decided to ignore: the real monetary gain, the real tightening of the ship, the real value for the entertainment and journalism and advertising industries alike, the face of the future in an age-old industry of smoke and mirrors, the promotion and distribution network of the future now - are you ready for this yet? It's the Internet! Hello again. Instead of scrapping the talent and the equipment, scrap the expensive, competitive, limited and regulated TV distribution focus for a free and limitless, non-competitive, on-demand channel with international reach like the other major networks are finally now doing themselves. And instead of using the web as a platform for banner ads, partner time and name-hype, they might fare well to consider the value of the Internet's social networking capabilities.

ROSENBLUM: I don't disagree with Andrew. If you have read Neil Postman's 'Amusing Ourselves to Death' you can see how prescient Postman was in predicting the mix of news and entertainment, much to the detriment of news. Journalism is now virtually non-existent and this is a real problem for a democratic society. Entertainment has its place, and God knows, that place is pretty dominant on the media landscape, but serious public discourse also holds an important place.

When television was first invented there was no model for it, and lacking any coherent approach, those first progenitors of TV news looked toward newsreels as their model. They went to Hollywood and aped Hollywood production methodoliges. Thus, our TV newsrooms are now filled with 'producers,'
'associate producers,' 'directors,' and we make 'shows.' These are all Hollywood terms.

Hollywood is great at making entertainment but it has never been a great model for journalism. That model however, does exist - in newspapers. We have had 350 years of practice in crafting journalism in the form of newspapers and it works very well. This is why we start each morning in our TV newsrooms looking through the paper. When cameras cost $60K each and edit rooms were $500K a pop, this model just did not work. But today it is possible to equip every person in a newsroom with a camera and a laptop edit and to construct a TV newsroom on the model of a newspaper - aggressive, authored, independent, with a very low risk to trying (TRYING) a story.

Andrew makes the point that one person reporting alone is not dependable, but this is actually wrong. The New York Times does not send out a team of two reporters to make sure that one does not get swayed by the power of the story. Entertainment certainly has its honored place in the pantheon of media both old and new, but so does journalism. The First Amendment of our Constitution guarantees the right to a free press because the founders understood that a free press and the free exchange of ideas is essential to a democratic society as is an informed electorate. We no longer live in a world of print - we live in a world of television. And it is critical to create a digital world in which there is an open and freewheeling exchange of intelligent ideas and public discourse. This technology allows it.

OJR: Do you think VJs can help bridge the gap between TV journalism and online video journalism? If so, how?

BERGMAN: I can see how there's a natural transition from VJs to video blogging -- a more personal form of photography -- but let's not dismiss the rapid transition from 'conventional' TV photography to online video journalism that's already underway.

TV stations across the country are beginning to post raw video clips on the Web that viewers won't see on air. For example, here at KING-TV, one of our chopper photographers is posting unedited aerial video on our blog, Blogger KING. And this is just the beginning. As online viewership continues to grow, more and more photographers will lobby to get their unedited video posted on the Web.

STEWART PITTMAN (LENSLINGER): As one who has shot, written and edited daily anchor packages for the better part of 15 years, I am torn over Rosenblum's proposals. While I agree that a talented individual with state-of-the-art gear can be an effective newsgathering model, I wouldn't want a newsroom full of them. Why? Because as proud as I am of my individual work, even I know a two-person crew can out-perform a one-man-band. The techniques we've honed over the years have centered around the duo crew and as a result our viewers have come to expect a certain type of coverage. Scattershot reportage from a flurry of nameless correspondents ain't it, as much as it may please me.

I'm proud of my one-man-band past, and delight in surprising others as an anchor package auteur. But I'm careful what kind of stories I get myself into - not so much subject matter but logistics-wise. Therefore I turn lots of b-block and '5:30 leads,' stories more apt to end a newscast than start it. When big news breaks, be it a visiting President or an inconvenient hurricane, I move in like a ninja, finding ancillary victims to help flesh out my station's continuing team smotherage. Let the two person crews have the nuts and bolts, I say - give me the color anyday.

I tell you all this to better explain my position. One-man bands, in their many forms, are often force multipliers; new and ever-shrinking technology will only make him/her more powerful. But I feel Rosenblum's rush to critical mass is something of a misstep. I'd rather see the VJ movement flourish in accordance WITH the two person crews, not touted as a replacement for them altogether.

Still, I'll certainly give this VJ thing a listen. That makes me different from most photogs. As a whole those behind the lens consider Rosenblum a sham and a nutball - out to take their heavy glass and push them out of a job. I can't really blame them, though I still can't decide whether the rumbling in the distance is truly the sound of a revolution or just the carnival barkings of a rather slick snake-oil salesman. I'm guessing it's a little bit of both.

BERGMAN: Great point, Stewart. I think there's too much of an 'either-or' argument going on. Some stories are best covered with two-person crews, others with VJs. VJs should work in concert with two-person crews, not replace them.

LENSLINGER: Again, much of what Rosenblum proposes rings true. TV News is still rather stodgy and formulaic; it's in desperate need of a good kick in the ass. I'd love nothing more than to see a re-imagining of the form - a retooling that emphasized depth over breadth, regionally distinctive storytelling over cookie-cutter dog-lick live shots, content-rich Web sites over fluffy anchor bios.

But to hang the future of the craft on the already burdened shoulders of the one-man band/backpack journalist/new-age VJ doesn't inspire confidence in the average station staffer - even those of us who prefer to gather news alone. As the veteran of a few too many newsrooms, I have no faith in most management when it comes to properly equipping, refrain from exploiting and financially rewarding anyone who takes on the VJ mantle. Promises of suitable story selection, days off-line to do leg-work and recompense for personal mileage will flitter away like the pillow talk it is once the daily grind sets in. Call me cynical, but history has proven station chiselers to be less than kind to the front line - especially those of us behind the lens.

Speaking of lens, my biggest problem with Rosenblum's plan is the size of the camera he wants to stick in my hand. Without the power and precision of a full-sized lens, much of what I've learned over the years falls by the wayside, tried and true techniques rendered impossible by down-sized gear. Rave all you will about your three pound cameras - they'll make the local news look like the video your Aunt Bernice shot at the scrapbooking convention last May.

Ya hear that clicking sound? It's the din of thousand of TV news viewers voting with their remotes. Let the market determine the VJ's fate...

ROSENBLUM: Stewart, I can understand your anxiety over the small cameras. It is not what you have been used to. Let me make an analogy if I may. In the early days of still photography, all still work was done on massive view cameras. These shot onto 8x10 glass plates coated with silver haloid. Those images were stunning. They still are. You can see them at the MOMA in New York. But the images were also very stiff. Getting photographed was a complicated affair. The cameraman placed the big camera on a tripod, the subject, dressed in their Sunday best sat stiffly before the camera. One...two..three..click.

I am sure you have photographs of your grandparents done in this way. This was photography in 1890. Then, in the 1930s, the Leica company introduced a radical innovation. Roll plastic film. Small, hand held cameras. I have no doubt that the professional photographers of the day were aghast. 35mm negatives? On plastic? And look at the tiny cameras! Toys!

Well, you know what happened. The 1940s saw an explosion of photojournalism as an art. Powerful, personal, intimate, highly evocative. Cartier Bresson, Magnum, W Eugene Smith, Life Magazine, Sebastao Salgado. Photojournalism went from being a capture/represenational craft to a dynamic artform in its own right. A great deal of that was driven by the new technology which allowed lots of people to get their hands on the gear and 'try,' allowed a much more intimate kind of photojournalism, and also allowed 'freedom to fail.' You could shoot 36 exposures (instead of just one), and even if you only got 2 shots per roll, you were doing great.

These big betacams are a lot like those view cameras from the 1890s. They are big, cumbersome, complex but they take a very nice image. The problem is that when we use them, they militate toward those kind of stiff photos that my grandpa had taken. Look at Peter Jennings on World News Tonight. Stiff, formal, in a suit, staring in the camera. Sepia tone him and he IS my grandfather.

These small HD cameras are the Leicas of the video revolution. They give us the chance to do for videjournalism what Leicas did for photojournalism 50 years ago - to change the fundamental grammar of what we do. If all we do is use these to immitate what we do with a betacam and a tripod then we are really wasting our time. We have to embrace this technology in a whole new way, to create a whole new product.

When I run the training bootcamps for the VJs, (many of which are cameramen) I tell them that they must forget everything they know. They have to be prepared to embrace an entirely new approach to television journalism - just as the photographers from Magnum embraced an entirely new approach to photography. But the results wil be worth it. We are at a unique moment. We have a chance to create and to define what television journalism is, and to set the path for the next 50 years.

BARON: In any case, the most successful business models in any industry, I would argue, are ones where the people in the business are being paid exceptionally well, have a lot of creative input and ownership of the projects that they are passionate about while enjoying a healthy and supportive lifestyle. In the long run, this is what creates the best work and highest profit margins but especially the best human spirit. When not accidental, the most important work will be the best quality work created by people who are extremely informed.

ROSENBLUM: Jeez Andrew, I cannot help but respond to this one. I think your Rocketboom site is one of the most creative places on the Web. Yet my guess is you are not exactly getting paid like a Disney Executive. I think the best creative work is by those who are most creative and most driven. Good pay comes after the fact in our business, not before. JK Rowling didn't exactly receive an advance of millions (or even an advance...or even a contract) when she penned the first Harry Potter. If she had waited for that high-paid writer's job before she got started, I am pretty sure she would still be waiting.

Today, there is a whole generation of video JK Rowlings out there. Instead of pens and pads (or cocktail napkins as her legend goes), they have camcorders and video editing software. What will they create? Who knows. But as Mao said (and not a great one for democratizing anything) 'let a million flowers bloom.'

BARON: I don't think we disagree, we are talking about two different things. One is the individual VJ and the other is the newsroom itself. We are missing a lot of information from you about how the VJs integrate into the newsroom. In traditional journalism, when a writer goes out and does their own thing, they still have an editor. And a senior editor. And other support in place. Does the VJ have a senior VJ editor who will say 'no, go back and change that edit?' for instance?

Now that we have an understanding of what your VJs are like, what is the overall newsroom like? When I suggest that someone be paid well, I mean to say that I imagine it is the newsroom that is paying the VJ. So how much is the newsroom machine making now that they have reduced salaries and support? And is this needed to survive, or is this preferred for you? If the newsroom is beyond survival, perhaps they might spring for a much more experienced VJ, for example, an award-winning, Rosenblum-trained, established industry professional.

The point is, it's one thing to save a newsroom from going under with this method. But if you want to do more than that, or if we want to talk about what a successful newsroom looks like, I'm merely suggesting that a successful newsroom is filled with expert people who are happy and well paid.

ROSENBLUM: The VJ-driven television newsroom is just like a newspaper, but intead of a room full of reporters sitting in front of their terminals creating the contents of The New York Times in text, there is a room full of videojournalists sitting in front of their terminals creating the contents of the nightly news in video.

Just as in a newspaper there is an editor and a strong editorial input, there is the same in the VJ newsroom. In a conventional newsroom there is no time to make corrections. Stories are shot and pile up outside the edit suites as the editor rush frantically to get the stuff cut before 6. In the VJ newsroom, as everyone is an editor and every computer is an edit suite, editing is happening all day long, as the opportunity to rewrite, correct, re-edit or kill the story. As you can see this is a vastly more flexible machine thatn a conventional newsroom.

We can add to this a second tier of what we might call freelance or out-of-house contributors. These are freelance videojournalsits (or staffers far away) who work on their own, cut on their own and upload versions for review prior to air. Again, the print model brought to television.

I guess the best model might be that we are passing from an era of producing to an era of publishing, with all the rigorous editorial controls that contempoarary text publishing has today.

As far as pay is concerned, again the print model is instructive. At a place like The New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize winners will extract higher salaries than the journeyman reporters. It is pretty much a meritocracy and I think that is as good a model for the VJ-driven newsroom.

OJR: If one person is doing the job of two or three people, shouldn't that person be paid more and not less than the average cameraperson or reporter? There's a widespread notion that VJs are young, fresh college kids who will work for very little pay. Is that true?

Rosenblum: First of all, the VJs at KRON, at WKRN, at the BBC and so on are the established journalists and camerapeople and editors who have been here all along. They are simply learning to work in a different and better way. This notion that this is '22-year-old kids with cameras' is a red herring. The new technology makes it possible to liberate journalists - it doesn't make 22-year-olds into journalists.

Secondly and this is VERY imporant. This is not one person doing two or three jobs. This is one person doing one job. Punto. One job. Making TV. Writing is one job, no? We don't say....well, it's complex. You gotta think up ideas, you have to use a technicial tool like a pencil. You have to master the eraser. You have to worry about spelling and grammar, not to mention making all the letters. Boy, this writing is complicated! It's like five people's jobs!

I think not. Print journalists work in and have a command of print. Radio journalists work in and have a command of sound. Photojournalists work in and have a command of photography and cameras. And videojournalsits work in and have a command of video.

And I will tell you something else. These people are good. And this is not so hard to do. And in five years if a journalist can not shoot and cut their own material they will be effectively unemployable. And they should be. They are for all practical purposes illiterate in their own medium. It's like a reporter for The New York Times who does not know how to write.

OJR: There's been a lot of talk about quality. Can Michael or someone else please point us to award-winning journalism done by VJs? Is there a way to do a side-by-side comparison of the new and older technologies?

ROSENBLUM: Travis Fox, videojournalist for washingtonpost.com won the White House Press Photographers award this year. Bill Gentile, videojournalist and former photojournalist; Susan Maiselis videojournalist and former photojournalist and Alan Deutsch videojournalist all won National Emmys for cinematography. For the past three years the winner of the Ruby Award (the news emmy in the UK) has been won by a BBC videojournalist. We have lots of awards. And we are just getting started.

OJR: This discussion seems to be confusing two topics. One is the change in process and jobs, of having one person do more in newsgathering by shooting, editing, reporting, etc. The other is a new mindset by TV news organizations who might want to change the type of news they cover, the depth they give a story, the faces in front of cameras (and behind). Just because a TV station's management decides it wants to have VJs (the former point) doesn't mean it's buying into a new set of values for how and what it's covering as news. Does anyone have proof that these TV stations such as KRON and WKRN really want to entirely revamp the subject matter and people who bring local TV news to the masses?

ROSENBLUM: I'm sittin here and that's what they're tellin me.

OJR: What does the future hold for VJs? Will there still be a need for big TV cameras lugged onto the scene of breaking news? For how long? Michael, do you think local TV news will end up being all VJs and no traditional cameraperson/standup reporters? And where will the Travel Channel experiment lead?

OJR: Andrew, you're basically doing a mini-newscast for the Web every day with Rocketboom. How does what you're doing fit in with Current TV, the VJ movement, and other video blogs? Is there a point where all of this converges or diverges?

BARON: First of all, in considering this question Mark, I can't help but lay into Rosenblum here because not only is he missing the point of new media, he is actually stifling progression and that makes me angry.

The idea that one person can write, shoot and edit their own work is not some revolutionary idea that Rosenblum formulated. People have been using a videocamera and a laptop for years thanks to Sony and Apple. Think of the students all over the world who are right now sitting in front of a computer with their cameras plugged in while they tweak media on Final Cut Pro. Your mom may very well be plugged into iMovie by now.

To me the 'VJ thing' is fine, but it seems no different then saying, here is a workshop on "How to use Photoshop" or, more specifically, "How to Create Journalism with a Video Camera and a Laptop".

Web site and graphic designers made big money at first, because not many people had access to the tools or knew how to use them. Now, even the expert Photoshop users and web site designers are hardly worth their breath up against the salary of a slacker who works at Magnolia Cafe.

What may have seemed revolutionary 15 years ago, is now just another suburban training center for people and businesses that are so far behind in technology, they still need to be told that things have changed. They can send their closed minded employees to the VJ camp to try and lose weight for the summer.

So not only has the video journalist's value gone down, but so has Rosenblum's value.

But the most important shift that we will see, is a shift in the content of the media which can be successful now with Internet distribution.

Most of us grew up in a world where our exposure to the moving image came from blockbuster films and limited TV programming. ABC can be presented with all of the content in the world, even excellent professional and entertaining content, but they can only run 24 hours total a day (including commercials) and ALL of their content MUST meet a bottom line that is tested, tried and true, to garner the largest sums of money. Therefore when presented with a choice to run story A or B, it will ALWAYS be the one that leads to the greatest financial gain for that newsroom or media house. It was the only way to survive. All the rest of the content that was almost good enough or maybe even better, is sitting on the shelf.

Now that the audience is moving online, they are suddenly being exposed to all kinds of other content that has never had an avenue before. This doesn't just mean more or lesser content. It means better content. How better?

Media can afford to become more niche online because the distribution means is open and the time is flexible. While CBS 5 O'Clock news is geared towards providing the lowest common denominator news, and must compete with the other stations at that time, an online station, which pays next to nothing for video on demand, can get very personalized and very specific, with alternative, catered news and media and a network can be profitable in masse, because it takes so few resources to reach so many people.

Instead of one channel of news that costs millions of dollars to distribute on TV, a newsroom could create a variety of niche news programs that cater to niche audiences for more total revenue at a fraction of the cost. This is the kind of plan no doubt Rosenblum will eventually wallow in or say that is what he is doing right now. The case study mentioned with Terry Heaton, who I very much admire, perhaps includes the Rosenblum Summer Camp as one element to the transformation of the business, but it is Heaton who more likely understands how the content of the production can evolve.

Rocketboom has an audience of well over 50,000 a day at no distribution or promotion costs. By Hollywood benchmarks, our production has a market street net-income value of well beyond a half a million dollars annually from ad revenue alone, and aside from our friends who pitch in from time to time, it's literally only two people behind the ENTIRE business. No secretary even.

If Rosenblum set out to use his old school business model to finance a Rocketboom, instead of the half a million dollars going to the two creators of the show, it would go to him, with just enough leftover for the creators to scrape by on their own, no longer even a team.

And that's why I'm pissed off - because that is how he treated us in the past with his dealings and it's an obvious example of an age-old record-label model of one for you nineteen for me. This is what breeds dumb content. While yes, the passionate artists will always do it for nothing, they will always do it better with something. Especially as a long-term lifestyle.

So by using the Internet as a distribution means, you can a) eliminate all of the unwanted middlemen like Rosenblum, (2) create content for a niche audience that will be happy to have an alternative (3) create a bi-conditional platform where the audience and creators work together to improve the production naturally and (4) create a society where creative artists can be paid their value.

ROSENBLUM: Well, needless to say I feel compelled to defend myself against what I perceive to be a slanderous and utterly uncalled for attack against me. We are all participants in this video revolution from our various venues. Andrew is very bright, very creative and extremely naive when it comes to business. He lives in the rather exciting but still ethereal world of on-line video production and still holds a grudge against me for failing to commission him to do some work for The Discovery Channel. In the course of hiring people, as with all producers, I talked to many, many people and Andrew was one of them. We did not commission him largely because while his platform is perhaps one of the most interesting on the web, his content is largely banal and sophomoric. And at the end of the day it is content that people will pay for. I don't feel I am stifling 'progression' (I assume he means progress), but rather have contributed to it since I started doing this in the 1980s.

At the end of the day Internet or TV, this is still a business. Content creators have to be paid or they will soon tire of creating the content. The market will determine who gets paid and who does not. It is pretty simple really. And as you add more and more outlets for content, you continually fractionalize the audience. Niche is great in theory, but soon the niche is so small that there is no longer a viable audience to warrant paying anything for the content. We reach a moment of diminishing returns.

Print faced a very similar disruptive readjustment several hundred years ago. Mass media meant that many people could produce content, but just because they could write it and print it, it did not mean that they were ever going to make any money out of it. That required editorial and publication channels - and that reality of the marketplace holds true today whether we are talking about publishing print, cable tv, or Internet. This is still a business and people still have to get paid for what they do.

Rocketboom is a fantastic idea for a distributive publishing platform for the web. The world is filled with people with videocameras and edits producing lots of junk but also some very creative and interesting material. Somewhere along the line, someone will figure out how to marry these two things properly and it will produce revenue. Lots of it.

And, as I have produced more than 400 hours for cable myself using the VJ model and continue to do so (such as the Travel Channel series), I rather resent the perjorative term 'middleman.' And of course, out here in the real world, a half million dollars a year in revenue while cute, is hardly earth-shattering.

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