EmailTwenty years ago, I trained a group of young, eager journalists to be the first VJs in the UK.
They were reporters for the new Channel One, London's first 24-hour local news channel.
Like NY1, Channel One was to be All VJ, All The Time.
It was, in 1994, a bold and radical step taken by an extraordinary visionary, Sir David English.
He got it before most other people (we are still waiting for many to catch up).
In the group of VJs was a young woman named Julia Caesar.
Following her time at Channel One, she went on to work at CNBC, The BBC for many years, at latterly at ABC News reporting for Good Morning America.
But now, she has launched her own network.
As with Channel One some 20 years ago, she is once again on the cutting edge of what the newest technology makes possible.
Julia felt that what she saw on TV news did not reflect her intersts nor those of her friends and contemporaries. Not too long ago, your only option was to change the channel.
But television need no longer be passive.
The tools to create and broadcast your own content, a feat which once cost millions, if not hundreds of millions, are now available to anyone - anyone with the vision and drive to harness them and put them to work.
On The BBC....
I don't mind saying that we trained Julia to be a VJ, her first job in the TV business some 20 years ago.
She is, to my mind, a pioneer in and entirely new kind of television journalism, and one that I expect will only continue to grow.
Tweny years ago, if you wanted to work in television journalism you had little choice but to go to work for places like The BBC or CNN or (if you were very lucky), Channel One.
But now, television journalism begins to take on the look and feel and architecture of writing (as opposed to show business).
When JK Rowling wanted to write a book, she did not apply for a job at Random House. She simply picked up a pencil and paper and started writing.
When Julia Caesar grew fed up with conventional broadcast news and felt she had something to say that the 'networks' were not saying, she picked up a video camera and started to create.
I have every hope (and ever expectation) that Julia will be as successful as JK (or nearly so!).
In the meantime, you can take a look at her venture at Channel66.tv
Featured Courses
Recent Posts
No News Today — or tomorrow for that matter.
March 26, 2024
For most of human history, people lived in a world without news. The concept simply did not exist. The idea of news is really a 19th-century phenomenon, driven first by newspapers, and then by electronic media which brought us radio, then TV and now the web. Now, it seems, we are headed back to a world without news. Not because the technology is not there, but rather because, increasingly, people are no longer interested in news, at least in the way it is packaged now.
What TV News Could Be
February 26, 2024
When television was invented in the 1930s, no one knew what TV news was supposed to look like. The medium had never existed before, and so, like Gutenberg half a millennium, prior, the first creators of TV news had to fall back on a medium with which they were familiar, and that was radio.
What Is News? What Should it Be?
February 20, 2024
Maybe scary stories drive ratings… or maybe they don’t.