From TV Sucks, by Michael Rosenblum:
Television, up until now, has been a group activity. Why? Mostly because it has been so difficult and expensive to make. After all, if Picasso had to pay $1500 a day to hire a paintbrush, and then had to deal with union canvass setters, union paint mixers and union paintbrush dippers — and then had to be an employee of the Sherman Williams company to paint, he probably would have sold life insurance instead. (Not to mention having to focus group Guerinca. “No, put the eyes back in the heads. The audience finds this disturbing!”)
Rosenblum believes the future of TV production will be intimate, lightweight & in the hands of Video Journalists (VJs) — a DV camera and a laptop should suffice. He’s a radical with an influential audience, including the BBC’s Nations and Regions teams. I was pointed towards his writings by Andy Bryant, who heads up the creative side at BBC Broadcast, and who is a bit of a visionary himself. We’ ve been talking on and off about how the broadcast world is shaping up in the face of distributed media creation (amongst other things), and the BBC seem keen to embrace and (benignly) extend the VJ concept into more of their work. Their website is certianly becoming more bloggish by the week — it will be interesting to see how far they get, and how fast, on getting user-generated programming into their schedules…