This is what revenue driven “journalism” has brought us. Its not competing with the web that has give us this us crap on the air, its competition with 120 other channels. Its competing with PS2 and the web. The vast range of entertainment has made it so difficult for news to compete with entertainment, news has recreated itself to look and feel like entertainment. Is it more important that TV news be flashy and attractive rather than accurate and informative. Want information, read a paper or go to the web.

VJ’s are the extension of this natural evolution. The training required to make a good JV does not exist. Time and teachers are not available. So they are poorly trained. Only those with the drive and energy will be able to learn from their own mistakes and get better, the rest will fall by the wayside.

I spent years working with technical and talent novices. No one wants to take the time and expense to train them properly. Quick and dirty will do. The clients who care to invest time (and money) to do it right are all gone. In time, more novices will find work as VJ’s and as it become the norm, some will get better at it and rise to the top. Mostly through their own trial and error. There is no time for mentoring. Only enough time to get it done.

How many of your readers have mentored someone with potential over a long period of time. Not training but mentoring? Enough so they have a skill set that is top notch? My guess is very few but I am willing to be surprised.

John: Outstanding. You raise a ton of great questions. That’s what’s great about venturing into new territory - we don’t even know all the questions yet. We certainly don’t pretend to have all the answers. We do know things have changed. But it’s true - the VJ model will be a total failure if it only tries to duplicate the old TV news model. That’s why I’m hoping it will evolve.

Left the biz: The business has changed a lot since you left it five years ago. The fact is that nobody here is talking about taking the cheapest route. Stations could have done that years ago. And nobody will ever accuse local TV stations of spending tons of money they don’t have to. So if that’s what they’re all about - why didn’t they take the cheap route 10 years ago?

Because it’s about the technology and the economy of the industry. Both have changed. All jobs do. As John put it - there is nowhere to go with the old model. It is losing audience and advertising money.

If a plane is crashing, do you insist the pilot keep flying as though it’s fine, or beg him to try anything he can think of to save it?

Let me ask you… how would you change this? We’ve put our ideas out there, and we’re wide open for suggestion - how should local TV evolve so it can compete with the online marketplace?

Let’s assume a lackluster local TV station adopts this new method in the hopes of raising their ratings. By taking on the VJ production model, will it make brilliant writers, editors or camera people out of the folks already in place? I doubt it. I suspect if you really want the VJ model to work, you’re going to have to give it time and throw some smart and creative and NEW people at it — people not bound by old thought models. Ask yourself how many people in local TV news at low-end stations are actually smart enough to craft an entirely new way to do TV news, and can convince their non-existent audience to join them on this journey of discovery?

You know what… let’s get down to the problem with TV news: it sucks. The formats are tired. The stories are all canned — only the names are changed. The visual grammar is set in stone. (It’s the Latin of the media world — a dead language we can read, but nobody writes new stuff anymore.) The stories in TV news practically write, shoot and edit themselves. TV news is basically a bad sitcom that no one seems able to kill — not the producers, not the audience, not the advertisers. The only time TV news is compelling is when we’re allowed to watch something happening right in front of us (like 9/11, which I watched in real-time for hours whether I liked it or not).

But as bad as traditional TV news is, the VJ model can’t simply replace it. Indeed, using VJ methods to recreate bad TV news is a waste of time.

The problem with the VJ approach is that it hasn’t yet solidified into semi-standard formats or approaches yet. We haven’t yet figured out what it’s “supposed” to look like — we’re still discovering the grammar and filling out the vocabulary for this new language. Try answering these questions:

* Do we publish a VJ story NOW or wait for the 11:00pm news?
* Does a VJ package need to be hosted from a studio?
* Does it need to be broadcast to be relevant?
* Do we need to see the VJ on-screen?
* Does there have to be an audible narrator?
* How long should a piece be?
* Should pieces be setup as static recordings or be designed as multi-leveled interactive experiences?

We don’t know yet.

In the mean time, as all this is getting figured out, take a look at the work being done by the Washington Post (not a local TV station!). It’s fascinating to see what they’re doing. Is it TV news? Nope. Is it VJ news? Perhaps. All I know is that it’s news, it’s video, and it’s new — and a lot of it is compelling to watch. And oh yeah — it’s better than any local news I’ve seen in the last few years.

I think local TV news folks had better watch out — not for other news teams going VJ, but for newspapers and radio stations and community groups and even the audience taking up the camera and making content and sharing it. They don’t have ratings to protect or gigantic TV egos to massage. And in many cases, they’ll be more mission-driven than TV stations are — they will capture stories that news editors will deem dull (no fires, no murders), but will mean a great deal to small groups of users that are passionate about a specific topic. These non-TV-people will have truly original content from original sources.

One last thing. Consider this… What would happen if NPR “figured out” how to do the VJ news thing and then taught all the local public radio and public TV stations around the country how to do it, and shared all that content in a smart online and broadcast hybrid system? These are journalists that know how to tell stories and focus on content of lasting impact. This is a serious threat. Then what do you do with your local TV station with crappy ratings and crappy TV news?

In a message with “up yours” in the subject line, you so eloquently stated:

“get back to your trailer park you illiterate anti semite.”

Where’s MY apology?

just so it’s clear — you did quote me correctly and in the right context.

But, as I told you, I was also disappointed by Rosenblum’s defensive and vitriolic retort. He launched into a personal attack, when he could have done himself a huge service and answered the question.

He implied that I’m not a real journalist . . . and that I should just “go to hollywood.”

And then another guy yelled at me, “you cover fires and fires and fires!” Both were attacks on the quality of newsroom coverage. Those points are absolutely well taken . . . in fact, I often make them myself!

But what about the quality of the VJ pieces? The technical quality, the journalistic quality, the quality of the storytelling all have a long way to go.

Who knows? I may be going there with you … I just hope it’s a more civil discussion along the way.

it isn’t whether they MAKE you do it, it’s whether you WANT to do it. newspapers seem to like this idea and how it translates on the web.

if i were you i’d keep a watch on the “other” competition instead of the other stations in town.

i don’t think the newspapers intend on putting these vj’s videos in print. if you get my drift.

We challenged Rosenblum to ask Sechrist if he was scaling back the OMB/VJs in the newsroom. Very surprisingly, Rosenblum actually did it:

“Nashville has indeed rolled back from a 100% VJ station to an 85% VJ station …”

I’m not really sure how you can go from 100% to 85%, as WKRN wasn’t at 100% to begin with before they started scaling back. We know this fact from Sechrist’s own words, as well as the words of former station employees.

Further, I’m not quite sure how you claim my points-of-view are “attacks.” I’m quite passionate about my professional career. Having some clown saunter in and claim the world’s a-changin’ because he got a handful of dead-last stations to convert (which are still dead-last, mind you) doesn’t really put me in a good mood.

I happen to think my points are very valid. For instance: you wouldn’t take your car to a mechanic who’s wiling to repair everything under the hood without even popping the hood in the first place, would you?

Rosenblum hasn’t had a job in a local newsroom in the United States in almost thirty years. Even then, he was an associate producer. He has never shadowed a field crew. Yet, he’s completely comfortable in telling us what we should be doing and how we should be doing it?

Please.

I’m all for making my job easier. That’s fine by me. But don’t try passing it off as the Second Coming.

I salute any station that tries new things. The site speaks for itself in terms of its approach and generation of new content. Feel free to get in the last word if you wish. I find ad hominem attacks of little added value in this exceptionally important debate.

As Jay rightly pointed out, we’d be doing this long before Rosenblum began darkening doorsteps.

I know for a fact that my previous station is doing webcasts on a regular basis. They’re a #1 station. Their webcasts get more hits than some of the other stations get viewers on their shows. They’re not OMB/VJ. So, what’s the explanation?

Let’s say the other stations in their market aren’t yet producing more online content. What happens when they do? The OMB/VJ stations will find themselves getting crushed in ANOTHER medium.

Like it or not, you can’t deny that the stations that have gone OMB/VJ are still getting crushed. Coloring the picture with a different crayon doesn’t change the outline.

Hell — WKRN is returning to two-person, “traditional” crews. Did Sechrist happen to bring up that nugget of information during the presentation? I bet not.

The OMB/VJ system is nothing more than a cost-cutting technique, and we have yet to see proof otherwise.

Mike’s inexperience shows in his nonsensical analogies and naive blog entries. I’m still trying to figure out why he accused me of being anti-semetic.

To be honest, I don’t think it’s all the fault of the VJ “system”. A lot of the problem is the people behind the camera. There are people shooting who have no clue what they are doing and the same with former photogs now reporting. Regardless of what Rosenblum or management at these stations might think, it takes talented people to really make any newsroom be successful, VJ’s or no VJ’s.

A station’s ratings are a giant steamship of a problem. I worked at a place that took years and years to turn its ratings fortunes around. It got screwed by the network and worked incredibly hard to improve itself. It invested a fortune. At no point in the process did anyone say “It’s been 12 months, how come we’re not number one?” And they certainly weren’t saving money.

Also - let’s face facts. There are markets where viewership is entrenched. People get used to one channel as the dominant news channel, period.

I find the “how come these stations aren’t number one?” arguments red herrings. What they are doing remarkably successfully is creating vast amounts of original content for the web - and selling it. They are taking risks. If it’s not a home run by the old metric, it’s a grand slam in new media.

(Disclosure: WKRN is an AR&D Client.)

All arguments aside, I know one basic fact to be true - especially so in this case: you can’t fight emotion with logic.

The impression I would get is that stations looked at it and decided it wasn’t worth the trade offs (at larger stations, I’d also include union issues)