Open Letter to Rosenblum

Michael,

Thanks for getting back with me. I’ve been meaning to think about the questions I wanted to send you, but real life has kept me away from the keyboard. Once I did sit down to make a list, I found I could do no better than the many salient points being raised on b-roll.net. This scintillating (yet one-sided) debate renders private correspondence irrelevant in my view; why trade cryptic missives when the matter is already being hashed out in the public square? Thus I invite you to join our discussion, to provide some answers that will erase the many misconceptions you speak of.

While I am wary of the newsroom model you favor, I do see merit in the solo journalist prototype. This denies me any real motive to skewer you; I seek only civil discourse and hope anyone in the b-roll nation who take part in this thread will keep their venom in check. Despite the vitriol currently being swilled about on our raucous message board, the majority of us are reasonable enough to hear you out. You might even win a few of us over. I understand in your in the business of selling your ideas - not giving them away, but if you hope to be embraced by the U.S. broadcast professionals who make it happen every day, you’re gonna have to cough up a few details.

Let’s start with the basics, distilled from a longer list of most excellent questions from John “Lensmith” Dumontelle.

1) How do you field thirty cameras...er...VJs in your market. How do they get around? Who pays for that? Do the VJs use their personal vehicle or do the stations supply the vehicle (or bus pass). What about insurance and milage if the choice is personal vehicles?

2) What is the pay scale? Do all VJs make the same or do those who initially started as reporters continue to make their previous salaries? Do these reporters take a pay cut? Do the photographers get a raise?

3) Why would a small market really need thirty cameras in the field? Is there that much news or feature stories available? Where will all this material air? Do they really think they have enough news programming airtime available to broadcast all these stories or are they actually looking down the road to cut the staff to fit into their already shrinking budget?

4) Is this camera gear really robust enough to be operable for more than a year under regular news conditions? Will they really understand that the smaller cameras just don't last as long and accept they will need to have a continuous (think yearly) supply of cameras to replace cameras which have come to the end of their already short life expectancy? No, not all the cameras will need yearly replacement but a majority of them will.

Let’s start there, Michael. Let’s trade ideas instead of trading blows. Not ALL of us in the TV news photog world consider you an arch-enemy. It’s Kenny Rogers we really hate.

Schmuck Update: Rogers Apologizes

In a limp display of forced contrition, pampered simian Kenny Rogers finally gets around to apologizing for last week's unprovoked assault on a television photographer. The simple-minded Southpaw, who is currently appealing a 20 game paid suspension, read from a prepared mea culpa, but was too much of a coward to field any questions from the heartless media jackals that apparently haunt him so.

"This incident was completely out of character", mumbled the Moron Millionaire, "and I think without question you know that it will never happen again."

I'm not so sure. From what I've read on the matter, Rogers seems to harbor a dep hatred for the media, members of which toil at a workman's rate to help this 40 year old toddler line his pockets. Why we would assume his trademark tirades would suddenly cease is beyond me. I say we freeze Rogers in a cryogenic chamber so future generations can get an up-close look at early 21st century primitive man. That won't happen, but the very least Major League Baseball can do is disinvite him to the upcoming All Stars Game - unless Bud Selig and the boys still consider this hopped-up knuckle-dragger to be a suitable model for their beleagured sport.

Meanwhile, Larry Rodriguez, the cameraman at the business end of Rogers' inexplicable wrath, is recovering from the incident, weighing his legal options and showing his two sons what it means to be in control of one's emotions. Hopefully, they'll soon be discussing the matter in a pricey villa, paid for by the man who's done so much to malign The Gambler's good name. Schmuck.

A Blogger's Lament

I am a creature plagued by introspection. Be it behind the lens or in front of a crowd, I sometimes think I think too much. This, of course, makes me no smarter than the next guy. One sweeping glance at my marginal high school performance proves that. But there something inside my head that won’t shut up; a wry monotone voice offering ceaseless commentary and half-formed idioms. Perhaps I read too much as a child (we non-athletes will do that), maybe I submitted to one too many head x-rays (what was a bored gurney-jockey to do?), perchance I shouldn’t have memorized all those cereal boxes at the breakfast table. Whatever the reason, the reflective mechanism within my skull is permanently set at 11.

Which brings me to my blog, a work-in-progress I’ve done more reviewing of than adding to lately. Ouch. Re-reading one’s own work is always painful, especially when its in the hastily-typed, unpolished form of a web-log. I’m not here to make excuses, exactly - but on perusing much of written over the past nine months, I’d like to take a third of it back. Not forever, mind you - just long enough to excise some of the navel gazing, omit a bit of the bitterness, maybe clean up a few clichés. But then I guess it wouldn’t be a blog, would it? After all, these wondrous creations are by nature amorphous chronicles, cyber diaries of the great unwashed, replete with invective, pet photos and the occasional misspelling. Judged by those standards, I guess I’m doing okay.

Still, a recent post by a fellow blogger got me to thinking: Why AM I doing this? Why do I cap off my days of frustration by spelling it out for the world (or at least a very small slice of it) to see? I can’t say I really know. When I began this endeavor, I was merely on the hunt for more eyeballs. Little did I know I’d stumble onto a revolution. Since first committing my thoughts to cyberspace, I’ve made scores of new friends, enjoyed surprising conversations with old ones and reluctantly joined something larger - a movement far more significant than my own tortured confessions. Along the way, I’ve written more than I ever thought possible, even when - like now - I didn’t have an awful lot to say. I guess that makes me the average blogger: a slightly addled, narcissistic wordsmith who merely likes the sound of his own computer keyboard late late at night.

So, motivations (and site meter addictions) aside, I hereby pledge to continue firing off epistles into the blogosphere. Though I cannot vouch for the merit of everything I post, I’m in way too deep to stop now. But please forgive me if I occasionally veer off from sordid tales of the road to indulge in a little curbside self-absorption. Allow me the mixed metaphor, the half-baked thesis, the rambling diatribe best left unshared. You see, I’m just a cynical photog fending off a mid-life crisis with the power of the written word. If that alone is the end result of all this compulsive effort, then I’ll deem this little experiment a success. As to my half dozen faithful readers, I thank you from the bottom of my crusty heart and promise NOT to highlight the past nine months worth of signature blather and hit the ’delete’ button.

Not yet, anyway.

Into the Wild

In an effort to pull myself from this mid-summer funk, I decided to go to work today (big of me, eh?). No sooner had I saddled up the old news unit when I remembered today's assignment... GEOCACHING! What? You've never heard of this latest high-tech craze? Actually, I was only vaguely aware of it myself until I met a group of local geo-enthusiasts at the always beautiful Salem Lake. Together we traipsed deep into the woods in search of a hidden ammo-can full of knick-knacks that only a gang of GPS-wielding pre-teens could appreciate.

But I'm not bitter! Fact is, I had a pretty good time picking my way through briar patches and poison ivy in the name of television news. It reminded me of all those Greene County marijuana extractions I used to specialize in - except today there weren't any helicopters hovering above the treeline. Instead there were only bloated draginflys and suffocating humidity to make the trip all that more special. What better way to shake off this professional slump?

Self-directed venom aside, I give the Geocachers a thumbs-up. With their hand-held gadgets, cryptic nicknames and endless war stories, I felt like I was hanging with my pals at the crime-tape! I may even look into this Geocaching myself - drop some coin on my own GPS thingie and get the whole family involved. But if it's okay - I think I'll wait until the fall when glorious color fills these rolling hills and heavy air doesn't suck the very breath from your lungs. Until then, I'll be right here in the A.C., sipping overpriced coffee and manning the laptop. You pick your hobby, I'll pick mine.

The Fruitless Pursuit

I hate summer. Not the season so much, but the adverse effects it has on my working life. First there’s the weather. Schlepping gear from one random incident to another is labor in any climate, but when a wet blanket of humidity wraps around your every pore whenever you walk outside, it is downright torturous. Then there’s the ratio effect. Simply put, when the reporters outnumber the photographers, I get called in to even the score. This happens a lot during the summer months when fellow photogs selfishly go on ‘vacation’ - thus shaking me out of my soft news coma and onto the front lines of the newsgathering war. Suddenly, I’m threading a live truck through interstate traffic, staring at the bug stains on the windshield and asking myself for the millionth time ‘Is this all there is?’

I know, I know - every human pushing 40 asks this question. I’ve been pondering the matter for a few years now. Leaning against the back wall of a county commissioners' meeting, wedged in the shotgun seat of a police cruiser, skirting the perimeter of a school auditorium; it doesn’t matter where I am. Call it Viewfinder BLUES - the nagging feeling that you’ve framed up this shot a thousand times over and you don’t wants to do it no mo’. But repetition at a breakneck pace is a cornerstone of TV news, I tell myself. Add a good dose of artifice and a smattering of facts and you have my chosen profession. Things didn’t seem so bleak at the starting line, when I was younger, reckless and not entirely of sound mind. Back then, the daily chase was intoxicating stuff - these days it feels like the final hangovers of a drunk on the verge of rehab.

Melodramatic? Perhaps, but these are the undiluted thoughts of a 38 year old photog as he goes about the act of repeating himself to death. Maybe that’s what happens when you mine one of your loves for career possibilities. Before you know it, you’ve transformed passion into occupation until you can’t remember why you were ever so intrigued in the first place. Pretty bleak, eh? Don’t worry - there’s no need to hide the cutlery. I’m just deleting files in my mental inbox - right-clicking mass copies of the same damn riddle and trying desperately to drag them to the cerebral trashcan. Okay, I’ll ditch the metaphors and dumb it down for you folks in cheap seats: I love what I do - in theory. But the practiced application of said duties is wearing thin - eroding my shoe leather, my lower back and my soul. It’s what happens when you spend your life processing the trials and tribulations of others. You sometimes forget to live your own.

Speaking of life, I’m full of it (full of shit, some of you might say). As much as this post sounds like the tortured exhortations of a doomed madman, it’s merely the reflections of a weary lenslinger. Still, I’m excited - as I’m growingly convinced I’m on the cusp of something greater than TV news. What that is exactly still escapes me, but one thing is undeniably obvious: life’s too damn short to ride around in a live truck full of regret. It ain’t just the humidity talkin’ either. I first viewed edge of the precipice two and a half years ago, while pacing through the blackened slush of a icy overpass while a co-worker in a station parka yammered into the lens about salt trucks and school closings. I knew it that day as I know it now: Act II is long overdue. In a way, this very blog is my first few hesitant steps onstage.

Either that, or I’m having a mother of a mid-life crisis.

The Big Link

This week on The Big Link, the blog of a woman I look forward to meeting someday.

Life After News?

It's always scary to see a co-worker leave the cloistered enclave of the TV newsroom for a crack at the real world. But that's exactly what Mark Grzybowski is doing, setting aside ten years of producing excellence to become a real estate shark, or house-painting tycoon, or trampoline magnate. Whatever field he pursues, I have no doubt he'll rise to the top, as Mark is smart, talented and a fun guy to be around.

For years I've given this five o clock producer a hard time for never leaving the building, for adoring the band 'Tears for Fears', for never missing an episode of 'The Price is Right'. What I never told him is what a fine newscast architect I considered him to be. You see, Mark never panicked and (most) always trusted his field crews - traits not shared by all of his producing brethren. It is for these and other reasons that I will miss this particular punk and forever savor the eight years we worked together. It's a shame he's leaving us really - I just did figure out how to spell his last name. So good luck, Mark. If the world of high finance doesn't work out, you can always come back and stack shows for us.

For a substantial pay-cut of course...