Details of my new VJ book

Out on Amazon now for just £7.99. My book is an updated version of the first edition.
The only book to detail the birth of videojournalism, the social and political landscape that changed in 1989 and the technology too-all helping launch VJs as newsgatherers!

EXCERPT
The link between videojournalism and the events of ’89
The same year saw the arrival of the age of the Hi8 camera, together with a number of individual journalists and others intent on using the small dv cameras to record events and to earn a living from it. Frontline News was, as detailed in the following chapter, set-up in a Bucharest Hotel in the midst of the Romanian Revolution. Insight News too was established. Harnessing a new technology to capture on tape an emerging new world order. As described in the chapter on Pioneers, early VJs shot and sold footage and reports from the crisis torn regions to news channels and editors worldwide. Of course they had their own news crews in the regions, but they could only cover a small part of what was happening. The material documented the revolutions, demonstrations, fighting and lives of people in turmoil across Eastern Europe, and then as it spread in 1990 to the Baltic States with Lithuania followed by Estonia and Latvia, to the Russian Republics, to Yugoslavia in 1991 and Albania in 1992. No one had ever seen pictures like these before and what news editor would refuse exclusive footage? After all they did not have to pay travel expenses, nor insure the freelancers, nor worry about them while out in hostile situations. The risk and the brunt of the cost in time above all were born by the filmmakers themselves. The irony is that the unions had been there to prevent exploitation of its members and yet here were those pushing for the acceptance of a new way of working that was both exploitative and badly paid. Nick Guthrie, BBC Producer and Ex-Assignment Editor for BBC TV Breakfast News, remembers how,

“I supported VJs because they provided programmes with reports from places that others wouldn’t go to. The VJs were freelancers who specialised in original ideas, and I wasn’t into taking them away and giving them to staff to do. We had the budget for it, decent budgets then. I was Foreign Editor on BBC’s Newsnight programme and I bought ten Handycams and handed them out. I gave them to Producers and Correspondents so we got a different source of material from that provided by professional crews. It made the journalists more visually aware of what they were trying to report and also gave them an insight into how hard it was to get the right pictures.”

Ron McCullagh who was one of those VJs employed by Guthrie on BBC Breakfast News, who went on to start Insight News, remembers slightly differently how it was in those early days.

“We were called the “fucking indies” lower than pond life. I had been a respected journalist in the BBC until I started doing this. I took on the mantle of irresponsibility, along with others who were some of the most courageous humanitarian- minded journalists of the time. But they represented

such a threat to the industry. News programmes ran on straightforward principles: you employed staff to make programmes and then there were the agencies too. So it got difficult when someone phoned up and said “I’ve got great material”. It was a pain, you have to give them money. “We just don’t do this”, they’d say, because we’d presented them with a problem for their budgets and balance sheets. They didn’t find it easy to adapt to VJs and freelancers.”

In 1991 the BBC World Service TV also issued small video cameras to correspondents and they were trained in how to operate cameras and editing. In 1994 BBC World evolved from World Service TV and its first Editor Rick Thompson remembers how he

“inherited a Hi8 system where a lot of overseas stringers had been issued with cameras and had some rudimentary training. We pushed this as far as it would go at the time and it definitely helped BBC World to provide a range of features unmatched by CNN.”

To this day BBC World TV continues to use VJs and reports from stringers and correspondents (some based in the UK too). It set-up a special features desk for commissioning, nurturing and delivering five, two and a half minute features per day to run on BBC World TV news programmes. This has now been drastically cut back.

The rise of hired VJs
ITN (Independent TV News) began to recruit VJs in 1998. They were driven by necessity as ITN had no newsgathering teams outside of London. The new Channel 5 lunchtime bulletin was to be broadcast at midday, ahead of ITN’s 12.30 bulletin, so news footage was needed. You had to have those court arrivals and stories covered and the cheapest way was to have a number of VJs. So on the 2nd January 1998 ITN had four in place in Liverpool, Bristol, Tamworth and Edinburgh. Three had previously been working at the cable Channel One. Their brief was to report to the core news desk in London. Their numbers increased to 12 but the scheme only lasted two years and was closed when the new ITV deal allowed the regional companies, Yorkshire, Tyne-tees and Granada to get their material elsewhere, not just from ITN. Giles Croot, now Group Head of Communications at Balfour Beatty, was the News Editor for the core news desk and looked after the VJs. He explains how it worked.

“I liaised with the ITN channels 3, 4, 5, IRN radio (owned by ITN) and online and my job was to decide what needed to be done as stories by the VJs. The main stories had to be covered, stories that the channel would like from the VJ regions were next, followed by the wish list of stories that could be done anywhere in the country. We started with the Sony VX1000 cameras and then upgraded to the Canon XL1 that we thought was better quality. The VX was not reliable enough. We adapted the cameras with sound boxes (like the Beech box) gave them proper mics and lighting kits. The people we used were journalists who had then got to learn camera skills. Lots of pictures were wobbly at the start. The exception was in Northern Ireland where we employed Terry Agar who had been a despatch rider and then became a cameraman. We used him as a VJ because you had to have someone who was streetwise and he had good contacts. VJs sent in rushes, just raw footage, without commentaries, or pieces to camera. Occasionally they did voice stories for radio, but they were there to send pictures with interviews for the main bulletins. They were on call 7am-7pm, five days a week, sometimes week-ends too. There were lots of issues about how they were deployed and if it was a lousy job, people at ITN would say ‘get a VJ to do it’, instead of a cameraman. They fed their material from the ITV regional newsrooms where there were lines direct to ITN. They also could use the OB (outside broadcast) trucks, of which we had about eight out and about to send us material. Finally they could go if near to a racecourse use where the SIS (satellite) links and connect that way to London.

We landed up with VJs in Bristol, Newbury, Maidstone, Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Edinburgh.

Having VJs meant no ‘TVam moments’. This was when the breakfast station was covering the Conservative party conference in 1984 when an IRA 100lb bomb went off in Brighton. The blast tore apart the Grand Hotel where members of the Cabinet were staying. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband Dennis narrowly escaped injury. TVam had no camera crew there and went on air without pictures.
The then regulatory body, the IBA, threatened to pull their broadcast license. Among the injured were Trade and Industry Secretary Norman Tebbit, his wife Margaret and Government Chief Whip, John Wakeham. Five people were killed including Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry, and John Wakeham’s first wife Roberta. We had to make sure we were covered nationwide.”
Croot has examples of where VJ filming made a difference to the ITN coverage of news:
• when Hilary Clinton was on a visit in the UK, Terry Agar was in the crowd on other side of road from the news crews and got her coming right up to him to talk to the crowds. So different, more intimate shots were incorporated into the news report.
• when the fighter bombers left the UK for Kosovo, ITN could afford to keep a VJ at the airfield waiting for two days. So they broke the story with the first pictures.
• when a local story of a seven year old who could do a hole in one on his local golf course, got onto News at Ten that night as the ‘and finally’ slot that had amusing and touching end pieces.
Looking back Giles Croot says,

“using VJs in this way needed a lot of looking after them, they never came into the edit suites, never saw how their rushes were used and were out there by themselves. If we had continued using them I think the idea was to have around 20 who could if need be pair up with each other on occasion too.”

The first widespread use of the Hi-8 camera in features as opposed to news came in 1993 with the BBC programme called Video Nation. It showed “video diaries” shot by non-journalists over one year where they filmed their everyday lives. This could be seen as the birth of the citizen journalist, for the Community Programme Unit distributed a number of cameras across the UK to ordinary people. It became immensely popular and more than 10,000 tapes were shot and sent into the BBC who edited and showed around 1300 of them. The first one was called Mirror by Gordon Hencher. Viewing figures were between one and nine million. This success was described in The Guardian as:

“the immediacy of these programmes is entirely different to anything shot by a crew. There seems to be nothing between you, not even the glass (by which they no doubt meant the TV screen).”

Summary
Looking back to a pre-video newsgathering age, it was a period of great social change in ways of working. The end of the broadcast unions’ power allowed for ENG the first video cameras to come in, and eventually for the VJ to begin to operate. The industry is still being driven by technological change.

“We lived through the heroic age of TV news, we were pioneers doing things not done before, but we didn’t realise it then. The excitement has gone now. Before you either worked for ITN or BBC, they were the only news games in town. Now there is a plethora of opportunities in what you can do. I have no idea though where it’s going to lead.”
Mike Morris.

One man who saw how things might develop was Vin Ray, former Director of the BBC College of Journalism and ex-BBCTV News Foreign Editor,

“videojournalism is definitely evolving in two ways: as a craft in the way people do it and culturally in terms of its acceptance. There has been opposition to videojournalism amongst BBC staff because people feel it’s lowering craft standards, and is threatening to those who haven’t done camera and editing and might be expected to do it. It gives you something more, BBC stuff

looks so overproduced sometimes so the BBC has recognised this is not just cost effective but a stylistic matter too. When Foreign Editor at News, I remember some guy coming in saying “I’m going to Groszny (in Chechnya) will you pay me for to go there?” I replied with the words of all foreign editors down the years, “If you get anything good give us a ring”. I wouldn’t do that these days because he was in the parliament building when it got stormed. It was fabulous rough and raw footage, and you felt right in the middle of it. But he was alone, no flak jacket, with nothing more than a monumental amount of chutzpah. We probably fleeced him on what we paid him. He got stuff we wouldn’t be prepared to risk our staff to get and that raises moral issues today.”

Of course the BBC ran the footage nonetheless because of its exclusive nature and that, as we’ll see in the next chapter is how VJs managed to keep going, paid for their courage, and maybe foolhardy methods of newsgathering. None of this was possible without the technology and what follows is the story of just how those Hi8 cameras came to be produced.