A short while back, I recall seeing a television news report about families living in the Sonoran desert in California, on an unwanted and forbidding piece of land, parked there because they had simply no place left to go.
One of the people interviewed in this piece, the father of six, living with his family in this hinterland, brandished a shotgun in one of the final images of the story and promised that he was the nicest guy in the world until you messed with his family. And, in this desolate outcrop, there was assuredly some of that going on…
I got to thinking, not so much about how this seemingly placid man was brought to this physical and emotional place by the currents of an economy run amok, but about what he said was his former profession. Until his reversal of fortune, he recollected, he, for years, ran a successful audio-visual business. I found that a little more than disturbing because, in a manner of speaking, that is my profession as well.
My business has slowed inexorably in the last few years but by the grace of a higher being I have been able to hold on. This man’s plight and to a lesser degree my own brought me to thinking about how technology, while our good friend and benevolent enabler, is our undoing, as well.
Briefly, about me: I am a network video editor who came up through the ranks at NBC and had an extremely successful freelance career in the television business for years after that.
And, at first slowly, and then quickly, the work just stopped. My clients went out of business, one by one. Veteran professionals, who couldn’t hold the line against the cheap workforce of young computer-literate graduates who could do it — editing/shooting video — with perhaps not the aplomb of the older guys, but with vision enough to make their cheaper rates worth it to the program providers, went under, no matter how “economical” their business model.
Trying to adapt, I learned many of the graphical and editing programs developed in the last decade. I upgraded my camera equipment. I was, however, enduringly uncomfortable with the erosion of the premium placed on the deep experience I have developed in my years of making television all over the world.
I can say that the quality of television news has suffered. The providers of media now rely more on the “man in the street” for video and pictorial contributions generated from devices like iphones and edited on giveaway edit programs that come standard with many computers, while hard working professionals are put out of work and no one seems to care.
I had a good run and now, as things change, just hope I can eke out a decent living as I fade into retirement in the next 10 years.
What scares me though, is how the acceptance of what I would call mediocrity came so quickly and was so modeled around the notion of doing it cheaper. Is that the future for us as this attitude transmigrates into other professions that are perhaps more critical than producing the media that fashions our ideas?