Tales of a video journalist

So my boss walks in the door and puts this box on the desk.

"There you are he says. When can we see something"

For the last fortnight I have been bricking it. Three newspapers surrounding our patch are posting video.

The bosses are getting nervy. You'd think their jobs are on the line.

In meetings they give it some welly, you know we must be doing video, but no one's told us quite how.

So we've taken to watching videos, lots of them; sometimes as much for an hour, and the truth, a lot of it is pretty shocking.

I wouldn't mind but the site our boss cites as the standard looks like that lot from South Park having a laugh.

Can't be that difficult though: point and shoot, a mate told me.

Yesterday, we heard from the local nick ( police) a VJ from another newspaper had been arrested and cautioned. He was filming outside a school, where it's alleged a local paedophile stalks.

The journo wanted to show what the perv sees, but a teacher nearby called the police, believing he was a perv.

His NUJ card didn't help much. Police referred him to some law governing the filming of children and gaining consent. Apparently he didn't know

Police cells stink of sick. urghh!

What's the point in all this? Came across a brilliant site, names escapes me, which spoke about increasing the diversity of stories, the ones mainstream fails to cover, but the piece also noted that if its not done well, you might as well not have bothered in the first place.

Jumped up TV ******* some of them, but tomorrow we're getting a TV guy in who's finally going to be teaching us video journalism.

Looking forward to this.

Tales of a video journalist, is a fictional account of a video journalist gleaned from feed back of more than 200 video journalists and their own stories, which will appear on Viewmag.blogspot.com.