Michael Rosenblum (former CBS News producer) presenting at the Society of Editors conference November 10, 2008. This is excellent. Exactly the type of paradigm shift and reaction we report on at Metaprinter. He argues, quite convincingly, that in the new information and news paradigm ONE person with a camera can outperform an entire news agency.
“The technology today is all automatic and dirt cheap. The cost is effectively zero. The problem that you’re (news producers) encountering is that you’ve come up against a new technology and you don’t like it. ”
Michael Rosenblum @ Society of Editors 08 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.
Click to continue for the other 2 videos.
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Michael Rosenblum @ Society of Editors 08 pt2 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.
Michael Rosenblum @ Society of Editors pt.3 from Paul Bradshaw on Vimeo.
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But it’s really not dirt cheap. It requires news workers who are paid about $60,000 a year with benefits to work on these videos. And in the States, the news orgs can’t partner with the television companies because it violates federal antitrust laws. So let’s just say you have a news room with 50 people and they are all needed to put out a ragged version of the print product and then you ask five of them a day to do video. You are already vulnerable on the local product because you’re running on fumes and then you take five more people out to do video all day. It’s not free. It’s not cheap. Five people a day 52 weeks a year given an average vacation of 4 weeks is about $500,000 a year and if you can’t syndicate it like they do in Europe, you have to capture additional ad revenue when advertisers are dropping like flies.
I think Michael has good points. But they may not apply to most new orgs now in existence. Just my ramblings.
And in case, Michael doesn’t know this, Huffington is using the free work of lots of people to build equity in her product. Once you tease out that free labor, there’s not a whole lot there.
N.
Nel,
You state good points about human resources, however I feel Michael is referring to the cost of technology which is now so low, it has broken down the traditional barriers to entry.
-robert
Robert is right. The technology is so cheap and ubiquitous that NON journalists can provide more and better positioned video content than print or television newsrooms can through their own employees. I hate to say it because I am one of these people, but we content producers in newsrooms, reporters and camera people, are becoming obsolete. Call it “The Rise of the Rewrite Desk (and editors).”