Another VJ view
by Michael Rosenblum

[In response to the AJR article, "Doing it All" and the response from news director Scott Atkinson, we heard from Michael Rosenblum, who trains VJs all over the world.]

There are many misconceptions about this, and perhaps the most glaring is the ongoing confusion between OMB [one man band] and VJ. The VJ approach is systemwide. That is, it envisions a newsroom where almost everyone is empowered with cameras and edits and is creating content. Otherwise, it does not work and it is OMB. What is the difference? As you increase (by a large factor), the number of cameras and edits in play, you also increase the amount of time that each journalist has to work on a story. (This does not deal with breaking news).

Good journalism requires time. It requires a reporter to spend time with the subject, to make them feel comfortable, to 'get' the story right. In a world with limited crews often shooting 2 or 3 packages a day for different reporters, you cannot commit the cameras to spend enough time with a story.

As well, good journalism requires the ability to take risks, the freedom to fail. We do this in newspapers all the time, we play hunches and check out stories that sometimes work and are sometimes spiked. This is why tv newsrooms check out the papers in the morning when they start. Newspapers seldom check out local TV for leads.

VJ properly applied (and this is critical), rearchitects the conventional TV newsroom (which until now has been cast as a poor man's Hollywood - making the 'show') into a video driven newspaper newsroom - a model that works quite well for journalism.

Please don't confuse the two. Putting a small HDV camera (and you must use small cameras. I cringed when I read about one person dragging around a betacam!!!), is not VJ. It is just OMB, and that has indeed been around for years. It is critical that you understand the difference between the two.