bumpy road to air

(During the regular season, david bedard is a researcher for the CTV Television Network’s current affairs program, W5 with Eric Malling.)

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From political corruption in China secretly shot from a camera embedded in a pair of eyeglasses, to the fleshy tinkering of a nude handyman in California, up-close, real-life mini-documentaries are becoming the newest and, perhaps, brightest bodies spinning in the multi-channel universe.

The trouble is, they’re finding the journey from their celestial orbits into North American family rooms a long and sometimes bumpy one.

That was one of the most consistent messages at VJ’95, the second annual conference on video journalism and small-format videography held last month in Toronto.

Set at Ryerson Polytechnic University and developed by veteran producer Desmond Smith, the international gathering of roughly 120 industry professionals was treated to a range of speakers and video presenters suggesting, for the most part, that while small-format cameras can get you in to the story, they are sometimes not enough to get you on the networks.

Take Nancy Cain and Judith Binder, two speakers at the conference and cofounders of Camnet, a California-based network devoted to sparingly edited mini-documentaries on just about anything.

While their one rule for camcorder users, both amateur and professional, has been ‘stay wide and stay on,’ staying on has become a problem for the veteran producers. After a successful two-year run on the California-based 90’s Channel, and talk of bigger markets for their painfully real, often quirky, anti-packaged brand of television where almost anyone with a hand and an eye can make it, things dried up.

Since Cain and Binder could not generate enough advertising revenue with the series, they were forced to pull out. And while they are now in development with Hollywood syndicators to spin their material into a daily half-hour show, they are only guardedly optimistic.

Their style of documentary is unpredictable, says Cain. ‘You never know what’s coming next, so it’s not the traditional format of television. But advertisers like to know what is coming next,’ she laments.

Unpredictable, unconventional, and often controversial, these cinema verite-style programs add a certain spice to traditional tv fare – a welcome ingredient for many viewers, but a source of nervous indigestion for some network executives who draw up the menu.

‘Anything independent makes executives nervous,’ says Jon Alpert, an independent video journalist based in New York and also a speaker at the VJ’95 conference.

He too knows what it’s like being a small player in a large game. Even though he has won eight Emmys for his news and documentary programs, he is having trouble airing his latest story – a documentary about the sordid business of smuggling illegal Asian immigrants into Canada and the u.s. where they work endlessly to pay the Chinese Mafia roughly $33,000 for the trip.

Alpert’s shocking footage even supplies evidence that the Chinese government is involved in the business.

But nbc, the commissioning network, is too busy airing the O.J. Simpson trial from an l.a. courtroom that has become as familiar as our own kitchen tables.

‘We’re still trying,’ says Alpert. ‘We’re getting closer to an airdate on Dateline, but when you actually sit down and see it on the air, then we’ll applaud.’

But news from the front lines of this brand of television is not all darkened with streaks of frustration. There are streaks of light as well, and, for vjs, the future may be bright still.

As Joel Ruimy, executive producer of the Windsor Evening News, reported to the Toronto conference, CBC Windsor is a case in point. Shut down in 1990 due to the cbc’s financial constraints, the news station reopened in October 1994 with a new life and a new approach.

With the concept of ‘multi-skilling’ firmly in mind, they turned camera operators into reporters and reporters into camera operators, creating cbc’s first video journalists.

With a successful news program up and running, CBC Windsor has joined the ranks of other vj-staffed news outlets such as New York 1, London, Eng.’s Channel 1, Zurich’s Telezur, Philadelphia’s Video News International, and Toronto’s Citytv.