Citizen journalism meets interactive TV

Hollywood Reporter:

Video blogging is going mainstream. The latest evidence of this emerging trend is a deal between Michael Rosenblum's M3 Media and the Travel Channel to produce a new series that combines this type of individual-created content in programs that are directly influenced by audience interaction.

"5 Takes Europe" is based on a reality show concept. Five young filmmakers will travel for two months armed only with a Sony Z1 high-definition camera, a laptop computer with Apple's Final Cut Pro and a budget of $50 a day.

Rosenblum has trained the quintet in a one-person production system he calls the video journalist method. Using these skills and tools, each filmmaker -- called a VJ in this context -- will maintain a frequently updated online blog complete with video content at travelchannel.com in addition to the weekly television program.

"The participants on '5 Takes Europe' have been turned into viable citizen journalists, able to act as reporters, camera persons, sound engineers and editors simultaneously," Rosenblum said. "A $5,000 edit room is now a $400 piece of software. TV production is as easy as word processing."

Viewers will be encouraged to interact with the VJs via the Web site as they watch the daily adventures unfold. ...

Rosenblum believes there is a wealth of untapped creative potential that has been blocked by limited access to equipment and distribution. "This Travel Channel series proves that one-man reporting can go beyond home video, and even the newsroom, to produce quality programming," he said. "What is more au courant than a bunch of 26-year-olds with cameras? It's edgy, it's cheap, and it will change the whole television demographic."

The six-week series "5 Takes Europe" debuts at 10 p.m. ET/PT July 23. ...

A former producer at CBS News, Rosenblum has created Video Journalism units for the BBC and Oxygen. He also founded and was president of NYT Television and Video News International.

This is terrific stuff. We expect to be working with Michael Rosenblum (pictured above) -- who coined the term video-journalist -- on Ourmedia in the coming months. As he said recently:

"Video-journalism is more than just teaching someone to shoot and edit their own video," he says, "It is teaching creative people to be 'literate' in the most powerful medium in the world today.

"Television is a medium that has been traditionally closed to all but a select elite, and as a result, what we see on television, and increasingly on the internet, is for the most part banal, insipid and uninspired. It is the natural end of turning over our primary means of communication to a handful of people, no matter how well intentioned."