Learn Videojournalism Online from Top Pros

We're proud to announce that KobreGuide is officially an affiliate of the New York Video School (NYVS), an online education center created by pioneering videojournalist Michael Rosenblum.

NYVS provides anyone with a video camera an easy and affordable way to learn to make films and videos like a Hollywood professional.

As a NYVS member you'll have access to video courses, critiques, tutorials and a learning community that will help you quickly become a master at video editing, video production, videography, iMovie, Final Cut Pro and much more!

NYVS instructors have worked with PBS, National Geographic, Discovery Channel, ABC, CBS, the New York Times, and many other leading media institutions.

Among the benefits of registering for the NYVS online curriculum:

* Learn video with hundreds of online tutorials
* View the latest video news and events
* Find opportunities to use your videos
* Participate in online video contests
* Post and search for jobs and internships
* Find places to make money creating video

NYVS courses have been grouped into five categories: Storytelling, Shooting, Editing, Practical Use, Video Basics

Andre Malok, a videojournalist at the Newark Star-Ledger, took Rosenblum's popular VJ video training bootcamp two years ago. He recently produced this stellar 24-minute online documentary (below), "The Wreck of the Lady Mary." The in-depth video represents a rare high-quality blend of reporting and interviewing with shooting and editing. Remarkably Malok accomplished it all single-handedly, using techniques and skills that you can acquire at NYVS.

The Lady Mary left the Port of Cape May on the morning of March 18, 2009 on a routine scallop fishing trip. The vessel with its crew of seven traveled 66 miles to a restricted scallop fishing area. Early on March 24, the boat sank to the bottom of the ocean, and six of the seven crewman were killed. Was the boat swamped in rough seas? Or did a passing container ship strike the boat without ever knowing it? After months of investigation, the Star-Ledger explores the mystery of the wreck of the Lady Mary.

For more info on NYVS, or to enroll in courses, please go here.

A Rwanda Story You Don't Usually See on TV

Today's featured video is courtesy of Michael Rosenblum, who is spending the month in the UK teaching reporters at media organizations, such as the BBC, how to create solo videojournalism projects. In other words, how to interview, light, shoot, record audio, and edit video without benefit of a TV crew or postproduction facility.

On Rosenblum's New York Video School blog, he posted a sample by Victoria Holt, a reporter with a small BBC local station.

She was assigned to do a story on local immigrant issues.

For most local TV stations, that means finding a family and profiling them at home, sometimes with a few photos.

But not now.

Not when for $600 you can buy a plane ticket from London to Rwanda and spend a week going home with a Rwandan refugee who has not been home in 10 years.

Here's the piece that Victoria shot, reported, scripted and edited all on her own, using a small digital camera and a laptop to edit.

"You tell me," asks Rosenblum rhetorically. "Is it worth it?"

Guardian Media Academy Offers Video Training

VJ guru Michael Rosenblum, in partnership with The Guardian, is offering video training courses in the U.K. for both amateurs and professionals. It's called the The Guardian Media Academy, and its initial offerings include:

* How to Shoot Great Video (1 Day)

* Video Editing for Beginners (1 Day)

* Two-day Video Training

Do you want to be able to produce high quality videos for your business or your website or do you just want to be able to make great home movies that people will actually want to watch?

In this two-day intensive class we will teach you everything you need to get started: how to shoot, how to tell a compelling story and how to edit using Final Cut software. By the end of the two days you will have produced your own short film and will understand what it takes to make a really good video.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t have your own camera and laptop; you can rent them from us and no experience is required.

* Four-day Professional Video Producers Boot Camp

Designed for people who want to earn money or make a living from creating video content. Whether you’re a journalist who needs to re-skill or someone who wants to produce their own videos to sell to online and broadcast clients then this is the training you need to be successful.

The course covers everything from basic and advanced shooting to advanced storytelling techniques and non-linear editing. Each delegate will produce at least two high quality videos during the course which will be critiqued by professionals who have produced thousands of hours of video content for clients like The BBC, Conde Nast and The New York Times.

Emphasis will be on both technology and aesthetics. "Over the past 20 years," notes Rosenblum, "RosenblumTV has created a simple method that gets people up to broadcast quality in only a few days. And the emphasis isn’t just on the button pushing, but rather on how to produce compelling video stories. No matter how well shot something is, if it’s not a great story, no one will watch it."

Course dates are in October, and 10% early-bird tuition discounts are available through August 30. Register here.

Should Independent Journalists Join Forces and Model Themselves After Law Firms?

Instead of clamoring for one of the last remaining jobs at a conventional media organization -- for long hours and low pay -- should you collaborate with other out-of-work writers, reporters, editors, photojournalists and videojournalists, and form the journalism equivalent of a law firm?

That's the intriguing proposal on the table from Michael Rosenblum, continuing our online conversation regarding the financial future of journalism.

Though we admire Adam Westbrook's e-book, "Next Generation Journalist," we wondered outloud whether it's realistic to expect overloaded reporters -- who are already shouldering multiple tasks once performed by their exiled colleagues -- to re-fashion themselves as entrepreneurs.

Perhaps it's asking too much for someone who's talented at interviewing and crafting prose narratives to now shoot and edit video stories. Add to that a new requirement that they be able to independently promote, advertise, market and sell their services, and we wonder if there are enough hours in the day for these superhuman endeavours. Besides, the traits that make great journalists are not necessarily those that make great businesspeople.

(If you need to catch up on the conversation, start here and here.)

We postulated that the best bet for independent journalists is to form teams, partnerships, and collectives to pursue projects that enable each participant to play to his particular strength. That makes more sense to us than to expect them to absorb skills taught at business schools.

In his latest blog post, "Entrepreneurial Journalism: How To Make It Work," Rosenblum argues that, instead of contrasting J-school grads with MBAs, perhaps we should be comparing them, in personality and temperament, to law school grads. "In many ways it’s a similar career: research, investigations, analysis and presentation." Many journalists and lawyers, he notes, are similarly driven by a sense of social justice. It's just that lawyers have figured out how to make big bucks in the process.

The difference between lawyers and journalists is the way that they have elected to organize their own profession.

Journalists end up working as employees for someone else, and are thus forever victims of the vicissitudes of the marketplace and changing technologies.

Lawyers tend to organize themselves in partnerships in which they pool their skills and their business.

A law firm hires its talents out to many clients. A Journalism Firm (to craft an interesting idea) would do the same. A partnership of journalists would contract with various magazines, newspapers, television stations and websites to offer content, as a law firm offers work. In this way, they would also be insulated from the predictable disaster if one newspaper or one magazine went under.

Rosenblum fleshes out his "Journalism Firm" concept here. Go take a look and see what you think. Is this a sustainable career model? Might it work for you? We're eager to hear your thoughts.

Do Journalists Really Want to Be Poor?

We're delighted that videojournalism pioneer Michael Rosenblum has taken the time to compose a thoughtful response to our question about whether modern-day journalists need to add "entrepreneur" to their growing list of required skills.

(See: "Now You Have to Be an Entrepreneur, Too?")

We encourage you to read his comment below our original post, and also his expanded essay on his own Rosenblum TV blog.

His title says it all: "Entrepreneurial Journalism: Do We Even Have to Ask?" He sees it as a self-esteem issue.

"The biggest mistake that journalists for the last 50 years have made," he writes, "was to wrap themselves in this glorification of poverty."

His argument is that lots of businesspeople have amassed extraordinary wealth from their Web pursuits, leaving in the dust the very people who excel at gathering, organizing and disseminating the information the Web is built upon -- journalists!

The Internet happened on our watch. It happened to our business, and it happened under our noses.

The Internet is the single biggest technologically driven transition of an industry since Gutenberg put ink to movable type. And billions have been made in the Internet Revolution – billions, but not by us.

Which is both strange and tragic because we were here first!

We should own Google and Craigslist and Facebook and a thousand other very successful sites.

But we don’t.

We don’t because we missed the entrepreneurial boat.

And why did we miss the entrepreneurial boat that sailed away right under our noses?

Because we have a love and a passion for poverty. We love to see ourselves as poor and struggling.

Personally we don't think it's quite that black and white. True, the image of the journalist as grizzled underdog had been overromanticized in books and movies (ranging from non-fiction "All the President's Men" to the fictitious "State of Play," pictured). But most journalists we know in real life aren't deliberately gravitating toward financial destitution. It's just that their passions tend in the direction of reporting and storytelling -- not spreadsheets and projections. Perhaps j-school grads aren't striving for their first billion with the same zeal as their MBA confreres, but at the same time they're not lusting after low-paying gigs for the sheer bohemian thrill of it.

More to the point, their motivation for pursuing journalism may not be the same as the motivation of a high-charging empire builder -- but, to our thinking, that doesn't necessarily translate to the presumption that journalists think "money is evil."

And, back to our original point, it can't be assumed that people who possess the skill sets required to become accomplished journalists should also be able to excel at entrepreneurial endeavours such as sales, marketing and promotion.

Ultimately, we believe the solution will lie in collaboration -- the formation of partnerships and collectives that consist of pros whose individual strengths and talents can be combined and leveraged for the benefit of the common good. Microcosms of lean, mean newsrooms -- but without the dead weight of middle-management layers... and rooms.

And while that may not make us all filthy rich, it will be a far cry from the "ink-stained wretch" image that understandably makes Rosenblum cringe.

Concentra Award Nominees Announced

The nominations for this year’s Concentra Award for Outstanding Video Journalism have been announced.

The Concentra awards an annual prize to a journalist who, in terms of both substance and production, produced an interesting news item which was broadcast on a news program of a television station. By awarding this prize, Concentra aims to stimulate journalists to film and edit their own pieces, so they master the entire production process themselves. Established in 2004, the award comes with 10,000 euros (approx. $14,000 US) in prize money.

• The Winning Hood - Stef Biemans, VPRO, The Netherlands
• Sudanese trouser woman - Mia Bittar, VJ Movement, Sudan
• Young and homeless in Almaty – Yermek Boltayev, Radio Free Europe, Kazakhstan
• Cracking the whip in Pakistan - Adam Ellick, NY Times, USA
• Close Calls - Raul Gallego Abellan, Associated Press, Spain
• This is not like Iraq - Raul Gallego Abellan, Associated Press, Spain
• Baby Feras - Casey Kauffman, Al Jazeera International, UK
• Taxi Filippino: the disappearance of James Balao - Roel Nollet, TV Oost, Belgium
• Operation Moshtarak - Vaughan Smith, Channel4, UK
• The all-dwarf themepark: a human zoo? - Angel Villariano, VJ Movement, Spain

Final judging of the 10 nominated entries will take place on May 6th in Antwerp. The Concentra jury is chaired by Michael Rosenblum, CEO of Rosenblum TV.

Recommended Weekend Reading & Viewing

Some links worthy of your time and attention:

* Here is What Journalism Should Sound Like, by Michael Rosenblum

* The future of news belongs to those who ... kiss, by Adam Westbrook

* Student video journalist in trouble again (SFGate.com)

* One of Breitbart's hacks accuses Salon of hypocrisy on ambush reporting, by Gabriel Winant (Salon War Room)

* Salon Slams O'Reilly's 'Ambush Journalism,' by Jake Simpson (Atlantic Wire)

* 5 Reasons 3D TV Won't Take Off, by Daniel Frankel (The Wrap)

* Must See: And the Awards Go To... , by Kassie Bracken & Stefania Rousselle (Lens Blog / NYTimes.com)

How the Platypus Can Change Your Life

An open letter to photojournalists and videojournalists from DigitalJournalist.org publisher Dirck Halstead:

In the late Nineties I knew I needed a lifeboat in a hurry.

After 29 years of trotting the globe for Time magazine, I could see that the photojournalism I had known was sinking. Budgets that today would be unimaginable were being slashed, not just at Time but at all the other magazines and the movie studios that I had worked for.

If you are a photojournalist today, you know exactly what I am talking about.

Fortunately for me, a guy named Michael Rosenblum came along with his radical prediction that the new Hi8 video would revolutionize TV. I helped him get his idea funded, and Video News International was born. VNI was later bought by The New York Times and eventually faded away, but from this dream, the Platypus Workshops emerged.

In the first workshop, at the University of Oklahoma, four Pulitzer Prize winners were among its students.

Now after 37 workshops, it is hard not to find a leader in photojournalism that has not attended one. Among them are David Turley, Peter Turnley, Kim Komenich, Don Doll, Gail Mooney, David Leeson and Kimberly Acquaro, who was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005.

Many have become leaders in the industry and have won countless awards.

This year, the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize for documentary went to Tim Hetherington, a 1999 Platypus graduate, for his feature film about a platoon of soldiers in Afghanistan, "Restrepo." Since attending the Platypus workshop, Hetherington has also won three World Press Photo Awards, in 2000, 2002 and 2007.

The most common remark made by graduates is "this workshop changed my life."

We still have a few places left in our Las Vegas workshop that starts April 2nd, but if you want to learn a new skill, which can transform your own life, you need to register now. Invest in yourself. Invest in your future.

More Platypus info here.

Michael Rosenblum's New Online Video School & Video Wall Project

Videojournalism pioneer Michael Rosenblum, who has produced TV and video documentaries -- and trained aspiring visual journalists -- around the globe for decades, is now bringing his school online.

So if you don't have the concentrated time or tuition for one of his $2000 weekend bootcamps, you can study at your own pace for $9.95 per month (or $99.95 per year) via his online video tutorials at his New York Video School, now in beta. It is patterned after lynda.com's all-you-can-eat monthly subscription fee model.

While you won't get the hands-on personal instruction that comes with joining one of Rosenblum's real-world group sessions, you will get access to training materials and lessons, forums and member groups. Students will be able to upload and share their work with others, receive comments and critiques, and then re-shoot and/or re-edit their assignments accordingly. From Rosenblum's perspective, it makes more sense to learn about video from video, as opposed to reading books about it.

In a recent interview, he told Journalism.co.uk that, despite the name, the school's reach will be global -- and, in fact, not even limited to professional training:

"The school's target audience is not just journalists, he said: "We live in a world that is increasingly going to be dominated by video. You will use video to sell your car, to file a resume, to get a date.

"We think video literacy is going to be essential for survival in the 21st century. Our audience thus, is everyone."

While most of the material is tech-related tutorials about shooting and editing, we were gratified to see that visual storytelling was among the curricula offered.

In the Basic Video Storytelling class, students will learn "how to find a compelling story, shoot it with great coverage on the topic, and put it together in a exciting and interesting way that audiences will love." The Intermediate Video Storytelling class offers further instruction on sound bites, procuring and conducting interviews, and script writing.

***

On his blog, Rosenblum reveals that he has applied for a Knight Foundation grant for an unusual video project.

He is proposing to give 1,000 Flip cameras to 1,000 people in Newark, NJ, teach them how to shoot and edit their own stories, and then "create a gigantic video wall in a public space where we will show those videos, 100 at a time, simultaneously, while editing the sound to move your attention from square to square."

(He is separately trying to launch a similar project with 100 Flip cams in Gaza.)

Both ideas, he says, constitute "an attempt to change the shape and architecture of journalism for the 21st century."

The video wall I wish to construct, is both journalism and it is art.

We have, in the past few decades, dessicated journalism. We have removed the art from it. It has, from time to time, tried to sneak back, in the form of great photography, for example. But we have failed to embrace the art side of journalism, much to our detriment.

[The video wall] is a kind of impressionism brought to video. Instead of getting one linear video story, we are going to deliver a pointillism of video, if you will, in which the viewer of the work will be bathed in the ’sense’ of what Newark is really like.

Rosenblum's Knight proposal can be found here, and makes for provocative reading.

What do you think of Rosenblum's video wall concept? Is it art? Is it journalism? Please share your thoughts.

Travel Channel's 4-Day Video Bootcamp

USA Today reports on the Travel Channel Academy's four-day bootcamp for videojournalism training.

Approximately 30-40 wannabe travel reporters -- many who've never even handled a camera before -- fork over $2,000 tuition (airfare/hotel and equipment rental not included) to learn video shooting and editing basics from veteran TV producer Michael Rosenblum, and to meet and mingle with Travel Channel execs.

The goal of the crash course is to produce short videos (under three minutes) for potential distribution on the Travel Channel website.

But whether more videos of spring-breakers getting drunk in Cancun or tourists eating pastrami on rye in a New York deli, or even a two-minute account of "my trip to Costa Rica by land and sea" (a current TCA alumni pick hit on the website) brings more clarity or just more clutter is debatable.

"We're not doing investigative journalism. We're doing show-me-the-best-restaurant-in-your-town journalism," says Rosenblum.

Students have diverse career backgrounds; virtually none are photographers or journalists.

Of the 953 graduates since the course began two years ago, about 350 of their videos have been bought by the Travel Channel, the vast majority for its website... for anywhere between $50 and $2,000, depending on usage and quality.

Upcoming classes:

April 27-30, Santa Barbara, CA
May 14-17, New York, NY
May 28-31, Washington, DC
June 25-28, Santa Barbara, CA
July 09-12, Washington, DC
July 23-26, New York, NY
Sept 10-13, Washington, DC
Sept 24-27, New York, NY

More info: TravelChannelAcademy.com

Concentra Videojournalism Finalists

Here are the 8 finalists for the Concentra Videojournalism Award. The 10,000 Euro ($12,722 USD) prize will be presented next week in Brussels.



"On the Margins in Mauritania"
Travis Fox, Washington Post, USA




"Two Criminals on a Motorbike"
Stef Biemans, VPRO, Netherlands




"Up the Irrawaddy"
Subina Shrestha, Al Jazeera, Dubai




The Agony of Surviving
Travis Fox, Washington Post, USA




Taking Back the Streets
Bernard Weil, TheStar.com, Canada




The Healing Fields
Alexandra Garcia, Washington Post, USA




The Lost Tribe Secret Army of the CIA
Tony Birtley, Al Jazeera, Malaysia




A Man Chases His Money
Behrendt Carsten, ZDF, Germany


For this year's competition The Concentra Award received 114 entries from 46 news organizations from around the world. Final judging of the 8 nominated entries will take place on March 3 in Brussels.

Jury chairman Michael Rosenblum reports: :

There are 7 judges on the panel, all from various backgrounds and countries, so there were a lot of varied opinions as to what best exemplifies the world’s best video journalism. At the top end, it gets very subjective.

We are all looking forward to the Digital News Affairs Conference conference in Brussels. It has not been an easy year to put this together. The economic recession caused many sponsors to drop out, even after they had committed. Many participants found themselves unable to attend - their parent companies now unwilling to allow them to go. Many of our brother conferences simply folded tents this year and canceled. We were determined not to do so.

Notably, three of the finalists were produced by the Washington Post -- and two of those by Travis Fox, whose work is well represented on KobreGuide. The third Washington Post video, Alexandra Garcia's "The Healing Fields," was previously showcased on KobreGuide.com.