A predecessor to video journalism first appeared in the 1960s in the US, when reporters had to write and shoot their own stories.
Michael Rosenblum compared the introduction of
video cameras to the invention of the portable camera in the 1930s: film spools of plastic made
photography independent from heavy
plates and tripods, and
digital video technology liberates TV from heavy
electronic news gathering (ENG) equipment, artificial light and
television studios in much the same manner. Video journalism makes it possible for
videographers to document any event while it is still occurring. The concept of the Videojournalist using a small camera was invented by
Michael Rosenblum in 1988. The first TV station in the world to use only VJs was TV Bergen, in Bergen, Norway. Rosenblum later built VJ-only TV stations for
TV 3 Norway,
TV3 Sweden and
TV3 Denmark. Around the same time,
CITY-TV in Toronto also began to adapt the ideas for their
CityPulse newscast and other shows produced at the station, becoming a staple; similar principles were adopted by Citytv head
Moses Znaimer at other CHUM television stations and networks. In the early 1990s, the news channel
New York 1 was the first TV station in the US to hire only video journalists and have them trained by Rosenblum. In the mid-1990s, the first
German private stations followed the example of NY1, and in 1994, the regional channel
Bayerischer Rundfunk became the first
public broadcasting station to follow suit and hire a number of video journalists. By June 2005 the
BBC has more than 600 of its staff trained as video journalists. Other broadcasting entities who now use video journalism include
Voice of America and
Video News International. It also seems to be becoming more widespread among
newspapers, with the
New York Times alone employing twelve video journalists. The
Press Association (UK) is behind a training programme which "converts" regional journalists into video journalists, and more than 100 have been converted as of March 2007. In Australia, several commercial networks employ Video Journalists. They include WIN News, Golden West Network (GWN) and Network Ten. Increasing popularity in online news has seen Video Journalists employed by Fairfax, News Limited and The West Australian Newspaper Holdings to produce video content for their news websites. In Canada, the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made a widespread move into hiring video journalists (or retraining existing reporters or camera people to do multiple jobs) in the late 1990s. In most cases, they were assigned to local
newsrooms to do daily news, just as full crews had before. Primarily, it was a cost-saving measure. Within a few years, however, it was clear that this rarely produced good results because of short deadlines and the assumption that VJ's could work the same way and on the same stories. The effort was scaled back. The exception turned out to be video journalists who work more as independent documentary film-makers, using their
electronic field production (EFP) mobility and easier access to do stories that don't have short deadlines. One example of this is award-winning video journalist Sasa Petricic, who works for CBC's flagship daily
newscast, The National, and reports solo from around the world.
Tara Sutton another Canadian video journalist reported for multiple news outlets from Iraq and other conflicts and won many international awards. She has cited the unobtrusively small equipment of a video journalist as allowing her to move undercover more easily in the extreme danger of Iraq and access places where traditional news crews could not have gone without become targets. The video journalist
Kevin Sites is perhaps the best known having his own website Kevin Sites in the Hot Zone in which he spent a year going from one war to the next. He began as a traditional camera man but switched to video journalism. The
New York Times employs 12 video journalists who come mostly from television and documentary background. The Times' video unit regularly produces documentaries to go along with print pieces that run in the newspaper. In 2012, former
New York Times and
Current TV video journalist, Jaron Gilinsky, founded Storyhunter, a network of 25,000 video journalists in 190 countries. == Pros and cons ==