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Rethinking
Video News: The Videojournalist Comes of Age
‘It is now possible for a person working on his or her own to make high-quality,
intelligent and, most importantly, very inexpensive television.’
BY MICHAEL ROSENBLUM
In 1988, I was a producer for “Sunday
Morning,” the CBS News show
with Charles Kuralt. At the age of
30, it was a pretty good job. I made
a good salary, and I got to travel the
world. It was a prestigious job and a
good start to my career in network
television.
So I quit.
I quit because I had grown increasingly
frustrated with the way that television
journalism was made. Everything
was incredibly complicated: cameramen,
soundmen, vans, equipment,
talent, lighting, audio. The simplest
bit of video seemed to take forever to
shoot. It was like a Hollywood movie
doing a scene: endless preparation and
an army of workers to manufacture a
few seconds on the screen.
I had first been attracted to visual
journalism by photography. I had been
mesmerized by the images in Life and
in books by Magnum photographers.
When I graduated from Williams College
in 1976, I received a grant from
The Thomas J. Watson Foundation to
spend three years traveling around the
world photographing. On my own.
I spent the first year traveling from
London to Kathmandu, Nepal, overland,
camera in hand. I was able to
spend months in Afghan villages or in
Isfahan in Iran, really getting to know
a place. The photographs reflected a
certain sense of intimacy. The second
year I moved in with a family in a
Palestinian refugee camp, and the third
year I crossed Africa overland, taking
pictures all along the way.
When I went to work in the TV
business, it was incredibly different.
We might spend a few hours, at the
most, shooting a story. When the crew
was working, the clock was running.
And it was annoying not to have the
camera myself. I began to wonder if
it was not possible to make television
journalism the way I had made
photojournalism—alone, living the
story, just me with my camera in my
hand—spending real time with the
subjects.
So in 1988, I quit my very nice job
at CBS News and headed back to the
Gaza Strip with a small, inexpensive
camcorder. I moved in with a Palestinian
family in the Jabalya Camp and
spent a month shooting and talking
to them. When I left, I took my tapes
to “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour”
and sold them two pieces for $25,000
each.
I had discovered a new way of
working in television journalism.
Twenty years later, my views have not
changed. But the technology has. Today
a small, hand-held, high-definition
video camera, one that is unquestionably
broadcast quality, costs less
than $1,000. Audio equipment, radio
microphones, and the like have gotten
better and smaller. Editing systems,
which used to take up an entire room
and cost more than a half million
dollars, have been reduced to a piece
of software that more often than not
comes free with your computer.
What does this mean? It means
that we have a unique opportunity
to reinvent television journalism. No
longer does it have to be complex,
expensive, difficult, require an army
of technicians, or rest in the hands
of the very few. It is now possible for
a person working on his or her own
to make high-quality, intelligent and,
most importantly, very inexpensive
television. No cameramen. No one
carrying the audio equipment. No
producers. And no “on-air talent.”
This means the barriers to entry have
not been lowered—they have been
completely blown away.
Technology Accelerates
Change
So the question to ask now is, what
can we do with the technological
revolution at our fingertips?
The first thing is to decouple television
news from the TV news people.
The idea that we would take the most
powerful means of communicating
news and ideas ever invented and
consciously turn it over to a tiny handful
of self-appointed “professionals”
is an act of cultural and intellectual
suicide. Who are Brian Williams and
Katie Couric, after all? Each is just
one more (highly paid) journalist with
something to say and a platform given
to them to say it. Fine. But there are
millions (quite literally) of others who
also have stories to tell or opinions of
equal value to voice.
Never, in the world of print, would
we say that all books sold would be
written by Katie Couric and Brian Williams.
That would be seen as insane.
Yet we gladly embrace this ridiculous
approach in television news every day.
Why does this happen? Up until now
alternative voices have been silenced
because producing television news
was expensive and getting video images
into people’s homes was vastly
complicated. No more.
So what we are doing now is empowering
millions of journalists (and
others) to be a part of this great global
dialogue we call television and video
news. I call it a dialogue, but that is
really the wrong term. Monologue
might have been more appropriate for
the past, so perhaps “multilogue” is a
better term to describe its future.
During the past few years, I’ve
been working with journalists at news
organizations—not only broadcast
outlets—to pass along my enthusiasm
Nieman Reports | Winter 2008 75