Presentation, May 2004, Vancouver, BC
It helped that NBC recruited me before I graduated to their newly minted "Associates Program" - which would pluck bright young things out of their comfort zone and have them come shake things up at the number 3 TV news network. They liked that I was Canadian with my worldview, had lived overseas, and probably most importantly, had a background in law.
So I joined NBC, making a fifth of the salary I would have made had I stayed in law. And I was religious about my new profession, the news. I was determined to work in hard news. It's not like I grew up on CBC Television or something. Because I didn't. I watched very little television news growing up - instead, I got my fill from newspapers, CBC Radio and The Economist.
I worked three years at Tom Brokaw's nightly newscast as a producer - it was great fun and I did well. But I never felt like it was the place I was supposed to be. I used to tell NBC management that working in New York for them was like being a foreign correspondent for me - and not just because I was Canadian.
I dearly wanted to be overseas, and I got my wish. Sort of. I expected London. And got Tel Aviv. Israel. For a Hosein.
Even better: during the possibly the most peaceful period in Israel's history.
But I found my conflict and strife elsewhere...believe it or not. I traveled to Kosovo to cover the war there, Bosnia to cover its aftermath, Turkey for the earthquake, Kenya for the U.S. embassy bombings.
For me producing short news stories was always a means to an end - but it was ultimately creatively unsatisfying
This revelation led me to commit an act of career suicide, when I left NBC in February 2001. I realized I wouldn't be able to find what I wanted with them. And what did I want? A creative voice. I didn't need to be a star television correspondent. In fact, that last thing I wanted to be was Kent Brockman from the Simpsons.
This is where being Canadian helped. When CTV and CBC came offering gifts, I was all ears. But I still had yet another foot to shoot. I wanted to do something different, somewhere different. I turned down well-paying national correspondent jobs in big cities to follow a whim: CBC wanted to open new one-person bureaus in rural Canada. I heard the word "Kelowna" and thought: "if I'm going to live in Canada, that's sounds like a good place."
More importantly, I would learn new skills that would help give me that voice I was looking for. I could not help but notice the young videojournalists who would show up on location at the same war zones I was covering. They had cool gadgets, small computers and cameras, and they seemed free and independent of the usual drudgery of network news. I wanted to find out more about what they were doing. For me, moving to Kelowna for the CBC was like going back to school to try and find another way of practicing journalism.
Of course, having been a stranger to Canada for so long, I had no idea about the unusual management culture at the CBC. Despite all my experience and my awards, I had taken the equivalent of an entry-level position instead of that national correspondent role. And I was left in the backwater of news, missing out on many of the big stories I had normally covered at NBC. I found small consolation in shows like CBC News Sunday, where I could do creative, unusual stories, and have nearly full authorship over them. The rest of the network's operations left me sometimes bewildered.
If I couldn't get comfortable at well-managed NBC, or at well-meaning CBC, I knew I had to go it alone. With the war in Iraq coming, CBC couldn't assure me that I'd be involved. So when NBC called out of the blue to invite me back on a six-month contract, I jumped. I didn't see it as a way to return to NBC as a correspondent. I saw them as my first client.
NBC wanted to try out this solo journalism that I had been advocating, and I was at the forefront of it all. With a 24-hour news cycle to cover during the war, and two-man embed positions with the military, it made sense to assign self-contained teams who knew what they were doing. Yes, there have been one-man bands for many years. But often, that usually just meant reporting and shooting at the same time.
Today, with digital technology, I can shoot, report, edit, and feed stories from anywhere in the world. That doesn't just cut out the cameraman from the reporting equation, it cuts out the entire bureau.
I know NBC was thinking mainly about cost, but I was thinking mainly about opportunity to get to the stories they would not normally finance. So I jumped at the chance, fully understanding I was leaving a full-time staff position at CBC for a temporary assignment at NBC.
I've never had more fun as a journalist than I did during those six months in 2003. I went live over five hundred times, produced dozens of my own stories from five different countries in the Middle East, shot over a hundred tapes and racked up tens of thousands of dollars in phone bills.
Just to give you a sense of what I did, I'd like to show you a short promotional reel of some of my work. It's a good mix: live shots with real camera crews, as-lives that I shot and fed later, and cut stories - some of which I shot and edited myself, others that have a mixture of a cameraman's beta footage and my DV material [see also "Desert Swan Song and the Dawn Patrol Fraternity"]
SHOW REEL [see "Hosein NBC 2003 Reel" in We've Done -- Video]
PRACTICALITIES
The last story in that compilation was a combination of my footage and a professional cameraman's. I don't think most people would be able to figure out who shot what.
More importantly to me, I was able to travel down the night before the crew arrived to spend time with the Bedouin and American families in a home setting. They got comfortable with me and my small camera. I didn't have to pull the crew away from Tel Aviv for a feature just yet, in case breaking news struck. When they arrived the next morning, the family clammed up a bit, and even said they weren't feeling as comfortable as they had with me the night before.
When I first started shooting my own stories with CBC, I kept asking myself what had I done? It was too much to think about - the technical got in the way of the editorial. And both suffered. Not only were my stories not great, they didn't look great. None of them would have seen the light of day on NBC I kept telling myself. But CBC had a lower threshold of production values, which meant I could screw up in public.
But now, two years later, it run and gun in the Middle East. Just like a duelist uses his sword as an extension of his arm, so was my camera. And it was a great feeling. I had the chance to be produced and shot by others during that period. It was a lot easier, but the experience was nowhere near as gratifying. And I didn't like the stories as much.
I call it the "Zen of solo journalism." This is how I once defined it in an essay on my website: "the joyous engagement in the physical act of newsgathering that gives momentum to the mechanics of the story. You're at one with the task at hand: focus, iris, white balance and shutter speed all changed manually as the subject requires."
You're "engaged" in the story - something that rarely happened for me near the end of my career as a producer for NBC, when I let the correspondent, editor and camera crew do what they were supposed to do, and I managed the rest.
CBC News, especially CBC News Sunday, gave me the chance to master this. It's not going to look as good as a well-produced story for The National or a newsmagazine. It's not supposed to. The stories are more intimate, more immediate, and I believe, more honest to an audience that knows all about how home videos are put together - and even the behind-the-scenes of a television news organization. The mask is off, so we may as well tell-all.
More than anything, it's about freedom. To choose the story. To get there. How to tell it.
I managed to get to Israel twice during my brief tenure at CBC News. The first time, I did some Newsworld duty and put together a long-form story about Women in Combat for Foreign Assignment. I didn't shoot one frame of video during that tour of duty.
A month later, I returned when things were erupting there. This time, CBC News Sunday came calling. They said to find a beleaguered peace activist and do some sort of profile about him. So I found Rabbi Ascherman trying to defend the Palestinian village of Issawiyah with his presence. Here's a shortened version of the story that aired (click on "Rabbi" link below):
I didn't know what I was going to get when I started shooting that story. And it was incredible luck that I found a Palestinian character who spoke English, lived in New York, was visiting that village, and shot what was going on before I had even arrived there. Thanks to our technology, I was able to dub his material quickly to my camera. While I was shooting, the Israel Army shut down the entrance to the town. There was a good chance I would have to spend the night. But I didn't care. I had my laptop. I could write the script. And digitize the material on Avid. Even cut it after getting script approval via telephone from Toronto.
They're beginning to call it "Travel Light" Normally, for a full crew and editor with a beta edit pack to travel overseas, you're looking at maybe $10 - $20,000 in excess baggage - and that's not including the fly-away for satellite uplink.
Last year, I was typically paying $1,000 to $3,000, depending on how nice the airline was to me. It wasn't exactly light. I had around 17 small cases. But I was also carting around two cameras, two laptops, four satellite phones, and a full light kit. If I didn't have to worry about going live, I could probably keep the entire set-up to four cases.
SHOW GEAR [laptop computer, 3-chip camcorder, tripod, lightweight luggage, editing system]
With this stuff, you're set. Typically, I would shoot a story, write it, and then edit it. Then I would compress the video to an MPEG4 file and upload it to the server in New York. This I could do by myself. But because I was going live so often, I had the luxury of another colleague working with me to set up the live shots. That usually meant daisy chaining two ISDN satellite phones to the camera and dialing in on a temperamental line into New York. So I'd go live to introduce the cut story that I had just done. And if I still had energy left, I'd write a more comprehensive print story that MSNBC.com would then feature on the website, with the option of watching my television online.
I
even went live from the middle of the Persian Gulf on board an
Iraqi oil rig, halfway between Iraq and Iran. It took 20
minutes to set the entire shot up.
Of course, there are still compromises.
To go live from a moving, nuclear powered aircraft carrier at
night, in the middle of a war, is tough. We were lucky to
keep the signal up for long. And the huge dome we had to
transmit with was only 64k bandwidth. Which gave us images
like this:
SHOW GREEN
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
I
didn't even bother trying to feed my stories from my laptop on
board the ship, because I couldn't keep the signal going for that
long (about 2 hours). Once on land though, it got
considerably easier because I could use 128k and two satellite
phones.
Still, the image quality was not pristine because of the
compression that I needed to do to get the file into a manageable
size to send via the Internet to New York.
SHOW GOLAN HEIGHTS AS LIVE
But
half the battle is won just by showing up. I didn't see the
difference between a print reporter e-mailing his text to his
office in New York and me FTP'ing my edited video story in pretty
much the same way. So I set up the sat phone antennas near
the window in my Damascus hotel and filed a story nearly every day
that way. Meanwhile, another NBC colleague of mine was doing
things more traditionally with a crew and producer and had to
struggle with Syrian TV to bulk feed material back to New York and
have an editor cut it there. My way was more work for me, but
at least I could own and oversee the story from beginning to
end.
All that is great. And this may be the future. But the
world still perceived the entourage and big camera as the
professional way.
So when I showed up in Beirut to interview a top Hezbullah official
about Iraq and Washington's "Roadmap to Peace," they were a little
concerned about my small operation. They were used to 60
Minutes type interviews, with two cameras, simultaneous translation
and at least four lights - a set up that would take at least five
people and a couple of hours to produce.
We had mine up in 20 minutes. This was when I still had my
partner John Byrne, who was doing some of the shooting and managing
my lives, so we fixed the main camera on a tripod and then I had
him shoot some handheld cutaways with another camera (except that
we forgot to white balance both at the same level).
SHOW
HEZBULLAH INTERVIEW EXCERPT
This
was Hezbullah's first public announcement rejecting George Bush's
roadmap to peace, so we rushed back to the hotel where I cut the
story and fed it within a couple of hours. I then transcribed
the entire interview, wrote an article and had both uploaded to
MSNBC.com for posterity.
THE
FUTURE
Canadian, American or British
everyone says what I'm advocating is the future of television news.
They're all dabbling in it, the Canadians probably more than
anyone else because of their tighter budgets and less of an
emphasis on production values.
But the "entourage" won't go away anytime soon, especially in the
grind of daily news and in the news-meets-entertainment world of
newsmagazines.
The revolution is well underway, the question is how much the
mainstream networks will participate in it.
We've been hearing this was supposed to be the future for years.
City TV in Toronto introduced VJ's in the 1980's. New
York One perfected the craft for local news coverage. But now
it's really happening: the technology is cheap and easily
available. We can acquire the material and we can disseminate
it via the Internet. That liberates us from the gatekeepers,
and can provide a potentially huge audience.
The boom in Reality TV has also helped, with audiences willing to
take a look at documentaries with a strong narrative.
So it almost embarrasses me to think that I'd be working full time
for a corporate news dinosaur as the younger generation will surely
meld film making and something else into whatever is to come
next.
With a five hundred dollar camera and an Apple iBook, they're
adolescent mobile television studios.
And with that, comes another way to tell stories.
The quality will improve. It's quite possible to shoot
excellent stories using this technology, like this excerpt from a
ten-minute piece I did in 2002 about a small Albertan town's
opinions about the Kyoto Acccord (click on "Pincher Creek Excerpt"
link below):
I recently read a great article on the Apple website about "Democratizing TV Production." That technology has opened the field wide open for a new kind of storytelling, a new kind of storyteller. It's easier than ever to do the observational documentary with solo journalists, which is what a NYC-based company called Camera Planet is doing right now, to great acclaim.
"I believe the human head should be bigger than the camera," said the head of Camera Planet. Pointing a Betacam at someone, with a sound guy and a big fuzzy mike changes the relationship between journalist and subject. The smaller DV camera becomes part of the scenery.
With ten thousand dollars in equipment, I can do what used to cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. I can shoot a story, edit it using Avid or Final Cut Pro. I can compose the soundtrack on my laptop. I can do it fast. Since I'm the one who'll be doing the editing, that informs how I'll shoot in the field. Most importantly, I don't have to live in Vancouver or New York to do this. NBC tracked me down in Kelowna to work for them for six months in the Middle East. And I still live in the B.C. Interior. That's amazing to me.
I'd like to help others get into this line of work. I think I can help set up a network of broadcast journalists throughout rural B.C. to give anyone a voice who thought they didn't have one before. A camera, a computer and a high speed Internet line is all they need. Soon we'll all be in high quality High Def. And suddenly, the nationality of a television network won't matter much anymore. Because you won't need them.
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