One Man Bands v. VJs

Henri Cartier Bresson

Howard Kurtz reports in The Washington Post today that ABC News is moving toward One-Man Bands.

OK.

Not exactly a breaking news story, but what we don’t like is the term “One Man Band”.

There are One Man Bands.. and there are Video Journalists.

What’s the difference?

One Man Bands (OMB) have been around pretty much since TV news began.

Many years ago (many!), I had an old girlfriend named Debbie Feyerick who decided she wanted to be an on-air reporter.

Today, to give her credit, she is indeed a correspondent on CNN.

But then, she had never been a reporter or on air. So she made a tape of herself doing a ‘report’, made 100 copies on VHS, flew to Miami, rented a car and started driving north. She stopped in every local TV station she could find, and she she got to Talahassee, the local ABC affiliate hired her, at what I think was $17,000 a year to be a local reporter.

Now that is drive and dedication!

In any event, I went down to see her shortly thereafter, and she was indeed a local reporter (and anchor of the Saturday morning talk show, if I recall). In any event, he job involved not just finding the stories and reporting them but also schlepping around a giant U-matic camera, the record deck (which used to connect by a massive cable), a huge tripod, lights, microphones. There was enough crap to open your own branch of B&H Photo in Talahassee.

That was One Man Banding.

And the object of the exercise was to make it appear as though she was working with a crew – at least when you saw the final product on air.

The same ‘stand ups’, the same ‘don’t look in the camera’ soundbites.

Several years later, when I went to set up the VJs at NY1, then (and current) director Steve Paulus gave me the same instructions. They wanted the product to look as though it had been shot by a crew. So the NY1 VJs were taught to set up the camera on a tripod, take a mic with a flag on it, and run around to the front of the camera to do a ‘stand up’.  That no one walked off with their cameras while they were narrating is a testament to the honesty of the average New Yorker.

Now ABC News (and others) are going to move to VJ-dom.

Let’s hope that they don’t wander down the OMB path.

Of course, technology has freed us of the kind of crazy-heavy gear that Debbie Feyerick and countless others had to drag around.

But it also has the potential to free us of the ‘grammar’ of TV news – that is, the way it looks.

TV news is remarkably ‘stiff’.

The reporter, in shirt and tie (and often shorts, which you can’t see), doing the ‘stand up’, and narrating the obvious to the camera. “I’m standing here where only a few hours ago, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger threw up on the steps of the Kremlin”; the interview in which you spend your time staring at the subject’s ear instead of making eye contact; that kind of stuff.

When still cameras were invented in the 1800s, they were also big, heavy affairs that required massive tripods to drag around.

When still photographers went to work, the sheer size of the camera dictated what the photos would look like.  You probably have one or two of these of some great grandparents, dressed in their best suits, staring into a camera.

In the 1930s, Germans gave us Leicas and 35mm roll film. (They gave us some other stuff in the 30s but we’ll skip that part).

The Leicas gave way to a revolution in the way that photographs (and photo journalism) looked – and the way that photographers worked.

Cartier Bresson (above), led a revolution in France with the formation of Magnum, a cooperative of photographers who created an entirely new kind of photography – intimate, immediate, compelling and powerful.

It was a revolution driven by the new hand held cameras.

Now we have hand held video.

Question: Can ABC News or any news organization make the break and do for Television Journalism what Cartier Bresson did for Photo Journalism?