You are currently browsing the monthly archive for June 2011.
Interesting read over at Poynter and the best explanation of the difference between bloggers and journalists I’ve seen. Short and to the point by Jim Romenesko.
…blogs are simply software.
…journalism is a craft…”
So not all journalists blog…and not all bloggers are journalists. Got it?
A year or two back I started seeing job postings for “predators” for broadcast news shows. Did not have a clue…originally I thought they wanted hungry workers willing to do anything to track down a story.
Now it seems the predator is the employer…hiring producer/editors. Once again merging the jobs of two people into one.
Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah – from the sixties and seventies models of four man crew (producer, camera, reporter, audio) that shrank to three (camera, reporter, engineer) to two (reporter, camera) to one (videojournalist). Strange thing…as the jobs merged, it was always the cameraman who absorbed the work. The end result: one person doing it all. If the fit was good, the job was done with flair. If the fit was wrong, you had a reporter who could barely shoot and edit or a photographer struggling with words and narration.
This new beast on the market takes a producer (writer/researcher/arranger) and merges it with the editor (corrects words/edits tape). Stick them in a feed room and let them loose…they’ll grab stories and blend words and visuals and pop out a polished story.
Um…unless they are clueless about the art of editing. Or (here it is again) struggle with a basic vocabulary and the intricacies of language.
Saw another variation on predator today…producer/shooter/editor. Three-in-one.
While I’ve pushed…and still do push…for the VJ model – knowing all aspects of your profession and aiming for excellence in storytelling, it’s not for everyone. There is a place for it. Wayne Freedman and Stanley Roberts on my half of the coast are good examples. One a reporter turned VJ and the other a broadcast news cameraman turned VJ. They make it work…and partially I suspect because they were exposed for years to excellent examples on the distaff side…and they listened, watched, and learned.
But in the long run, this is all cyclical. Industries and jobs evolve, change. We can’t hold on to the past just because WE like it.
(But I still don’t like that word “predator”…)
Um…I have been corrected and stand humbled. The spelling on that obnoxious word should be P-R-E-D-I-T-O-R. “I” not “A”.
…sometimes as the long hot summer wears on, it wears us down. We become lethargic…allowing our minds and limbs to relax and at times may just want to give up making any kind of effort.
Danger alert.
While it’s okay to relax and take it easy, the summer doldrums can be hazardous. Too much daydreaming can cause a person to lose focus of their real life dreams. Too little effort can become…too easy.
So some kind of jog to the system is good. Jump into an ice cold lake. Try to wash an uncooperative dog. Or find a fresh new face who has not lost their lust for breaking out of the box and let youth lecture age for once.
Thank you Logan for being unrealistic.
…in a backwater little valley town called Sacra-tomato, change was afoot.
Broadcast news…long the bastion of white males wearing cameras and suits…opened up to minorities and women. (Thank you FCC.)
Enter into this a tough talking chick from New Yawk and a kinda shy kid from further south in the valley. They met, they meshed and for one year they were a team.
As we age, those golden days of our youth resurface in memories that are probably pretty accurate. Oh, we may be better looking and smarter in our recollections than in reality…but I can live with that.
Me…I was the shy valley girl. Picked up a still camera at age 12 and never let go. My goal was to become a newspaper photographer, but even with a college degree, getting an internship was tough. So I took whatever job I could after marrying the love of my life and moved on. Sigh.
The roller coaster ride was about to begin.
After a year or so Ron and I moved from said Sacra-tomato to the raisin capitol of the world, Fresno, to continue with our higher education at my ala mater – CSU Fresno. Where I was called Cyndy Mog and he was called Mr. Mog. (Took a while to get those surnames corrected.)
Somehow in this move I hooked up with the college community affairs department, writing press releases and shooting publicity photos.
My goal: somehow become a news photographer.
In the meantime, diminutive Joann Lee was laboring in one of the largest markets in the broadcast kingdom – Los Angeles – as a production assistant.
Her goal: somehow become a TV news reporter.
After researching and writing a nifty little story on a new intern program that combined federal, state, and local monies to get college students into low-paying jobs, I applied for and was accepted as the first fem-photog intern at KFSN, Channel 30. Fresno’s CBS affiliate.
Joann, meantime, had talked her way into the field and was following cameramen around on stories. And one day she talked one of them into letter her stand in front of the camera.
“Ginsing – an oriental herb.”
On the strength of that story, she landed at job at KXTV in Sacramento. (Tomato capitol of the state – or so they liked to think.)
Meanwhile I was finishing up my internship at KFSN…rolling with the cameramen, learning the craft of shutter speed, f-stop all over again with sound and motion added. How to wear forty pounds of camera, camera brace, audio mixer. Use of a light meter when there was time and how to make quick guesses when there wasn’t. How to load film and how to process said film. My specialities: mixing the chemicals and filing the film at the end of the day. (The new kid got the work no one else wanted.)
Magical times. Met my first dead body rolling out with Chuck “Boom Boom” Hoover, the station’s scanner freak, to a drowning in a canal. He also showed me how to artistically backlight broken windshields at accidents and once even beat the fire department to a fire (something I did twice more in my own career).
Time for convergence.
Some months after Joann got established at KXTV, I got my first ever interview with chief photographer Bob Helmes. He seemed to like what he saw and heard, and only had these words before putting me on staff: “If you don’t work out, we’ll never hire another female again.”
Gee. Thanks.
Of course, those being the times, I didn’t think twice about it. Just did my best to work up to and beyond expectations.
And totally screwed up on day two. Shooting some little nothing story at the local college, I forgot some shots, crossed my axis…horrible stuff.
And Bob – who was taking a quick nap in the newscar – commented: “Yesterday I was glad I hired you. Today, I’m not too sure.”
That rammed me straight back into the ground. Put me in my place and made me even more aware that I had only this one chance.
Fast forward six months or more on the weekend shift…got moved to nights and introduced to this tiny little thing with a big, opinionated mouth. My new partner.
How DO you DO?
I’m Cyndy. With two “y”s.
I’m Joann Lee.
We initially worked together warily…and I’m sure she was more nervous than me. No reporter likes working with a newbie cameraman. They don’t always know what they’re doing and they make you look bad.
Somehow we became a team…and I am sure the shortest (most petite) broadcast news team on the continent. I was five feet two…she was five one. I was afraid people would look at me and she could drill a subject with her voice and glare from one hundred feet. (Privately I called her the “Dragon Lady”.)
What brought us firmly together was our newness to the profession and our passion. It was us against the world some days…like the day when we got sent out to interview the family of the last man executed in the state. The angry family members’ response when we knocked at the door: “If you had been a male crew we would have beaten the crap out of you.”
The day we got sent to do a story on the local rice cooperative: “Why didn’t they send a real news crew? Why didn’t they send MEN?”
And talk about the times – often Joann was mistaken for Connie Chung – the “other” Asian reporter. Me, I never got mistaken for anyone. There was only me.
And the good times. Covering state politics in the days of Governor “Moonbeam” himself – Jerry Brown. Cruising the highways with scanner on high on summer nights. Pushing deadlines…telling stories of joy and tragedy; making chaos into something understandable. Partying together on weekends.
Eventually we both moved on…me to Washington, D.C. and then to the SF Bay area. Her to Chicago, then CNN in New York.
Somehow we both ended up in education. Professor Joann Lee (Chow) set up shop as head of the journalism department at University of Nevada, Reno at the same time I was starting my first program at Middle College High School in Stockton, California. She had more than half a million to spend…me, I had five thousand.
So we get together…less and less frequently it seems. Miles and lives lived apart have built walls that hinder meetings.
But those memories still surface. Those days when we were young, brash, invincible.
Recent Comments