When the term Broadcasting meant something else entirely
Even though I am sitting on an ‘out island’ in the Bahamas this August, it does not mean I am not working!
This morning, I spent an hour on the phone with a young woman named Mary Thorsby. She works for the very prolific Ken Kobre, whose blog I think is one of the best things in the Videojournalism world. You can read it here.
Ken is writing a book about the videojournalism revolution and Ms Thorsby called me this morning to pick my brains about the prospects of earning a living as a VJ. I probably didn’t give her the answers she was looking for.
The future is, to my mind, in the V part, but not so much in the J part. That is, I think there is a very bright,almost limitless future for video and those who can make video in a world of web, iPhones, iPads and video screens everywhere, even in elevators!
Where I don’t think there is much of a future is in journalism.
This is not because journalism doesn’t have a future. I think that does as well, and it is equally bright. But the idea of grabbing a video camera, heading off to Iraq and selling your work probably does not have much of a future. It doesn’t have much of a future because the very technology that allows you to do that also allows anyone else to do it, and so the market for content has been flooded.
This is no bad thing.
But it does make for a different world.
When I was in my early 20s, I ran off to Gaza with a video camera and sold two pieces to PBS for $50,000. Those days are over. But in those days, an 8 minute video report from Gaza was well worth $25,000. Who went to Gaza with a video camera except big networks, and they produced in a way that was totally cost inefficient. But they were all that there was.
Today, there are probably 500,000 people in Gaza with video cameras, and more and more of them are getting their stuff on Youtube or elsewhere. Add to that the number of 22 year olds running around the world with video cameras and you would be hard pressed to find someone to pay you $5,000 let along $50,000 for two 8-minute pieces.
All of this brings me to The McCormick Reaper.
The Reaper was a mechanical way of harvesting grain.
Invented in 1831 and patented in 1834, it made its inventor fabulously rich.
It also shattered the British agricultural industry. American grain production increased a breathtaking 700 percent in a deade. As the price of American grain went down, food became cheaper for everyone, even in the UK where it was imported. But farmers in England were effectively driven out of business. The high prices they were used to getting for grain could no longer hold. The imports killed them and the big Ameican farms were perfect for the era of mechanized farming that was at hand.
Like the McCormick Reaper, small video cameras in every cell phone have made what was once an expensive rarity a commodity.
There is so much video flooding the marketplace now (24 hours to Youtube every minute) that no one is going long pay, or pay very much for yet another story from Gaza.
That is not where the future lays.
It does lay in aggregating, editing, and publishing the best of this tidal wave of material.
The McCormick Reaper didn’t mean the ‘end of Agriculture’. It did mean the end of expensive, inefficient farmers.
Same goes for the future of video and journalism.
There’s a future there for video, but it’s probably not running off to Iraq to ‘make your documentary’.
1 Comment
leo July 05, 2011
But, there’s a major flaw in your argument. Mobile phone style video is poor, it’s bad quality, bad sound, shot frantically, not stylised, crude, raw video with zero editing. An editor would rather see an embedded experienced VJ’s quality footage right from the heart of the action otherwise ALL video from CNN to Fox or Sky would be shot on an IPhone or streamed live from Skype.