INTERVIEW: VJ Movement Founder Thomas Loudon

VJ Movement (www.vjmovement.com) is an exciting new independent news organization based in Holland. The brainchild of Thomas Loudon and Arend Jan van den Beld, VJ Movement is a completely new model for sourcing, selecting, aggregating, distributing and presenting professional video journalism.

It’s not citizen journalism, but does rely heavily on input from readers/viewers/users.

It’s not traditional media, but does rely on professional video journalists.

It does not rely on the traditional newsroom bureaucracy, but it does have in place policies that guide story selection, ensure professional qualifications and drive excellence.

It launched it’s English version officially just last week, so it’s too soon to tell what kind of model this will or will not be for the rest of us, but I’m excited about it. So, I contacted Thomas Loudon in Holland Nov. 11 to chat about VJ Movement. Read our conversation below or listen by clicking on the video player:

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Q: What is your background and what led you to create VJ Movement?

A: My experience as a Middle East correspondent is what started it all. I worked in Iran for 3 years. I was one of very few foreign correspondents based there.

Q: Who were you working for?

A: Working for several media, I was working for Dutch National Television, Dutch Magazine, but also I was contributing to other media like Channel News Asia or Radio France International, different thing, very different actually.

And, while I was working there I started realizing that the International news business is, well what shall I say, a bit strange in many ways. So … and then I moved on to Egypt after 3 years in Iran and there I was not in a country that is not seen as an enemy, but more as a friend by the west. And, there I started realizing that what you can and cannot do as a journalist also depends on that.

To give you an example, when I was working in Iran the Iranian regime would arrest Iranian students, opposition members, then I was sure to have a lot of work at least for one day and sometimes even two. Then I went to Egypt where the regime did exactly the same thing and nobody wanted the story. So that kind of experience makes you think about why, why is that? What is the difference exactly?

I started realizing that one of the reasons is that Iran is a regime that we expect to arrest students and to put them in jail and the Egyptian regime is a regime that we prefer to see as a friendly regime. That we are close to. So that was one of the reasons this was happening. And I had many of those experiences, different ways. I talked to many journalists there who had similar experiences many times in Iraq and Afghanistan for instance. I saw how different journalists with different backgrounds would report about a story very differently, even though they were going to the same story. And, we had discussions about that and I started realizing that the background of a journalist is also instrumental in determining the story that he’s going to do. So, all those experiences slowly, but surely led me to this idea that is now the VJ Movement.

Q: You’re talking about story selection though too? You said that people weren’t interested in some of the stories depending which country you were in. So you’re talking about editors and producers, right?

A: Yes, absolutely. I definitely had the experience that in many cases it’s the editors and producers at home who determine what is going to be in the news and what is not. And, in many cases the correspondents are left behind basically thinking this was relevant, we should have done this, but we didn’t. That happened on many occasions.

Q: So these are fellow journalists perpetuating some of these images of certain countries you’re talking about?

A: Oh yes, absolutely. I mean the media have a major role in perpetuating those images. I witnessed that first hand. It’s, easy is maybe not the right word, but it’s very tempting to portray a picture that fits the picture that we already know rather than giving a picture that is sort of strange to us about a country or situation.

Q: So your background has been in traditional media. Has it always been as a multimedia journalist as well?

A: Yes, I did work as a video journalists in Iran and Egypt and later in Jordan, but I was also writing and producing radio pieces and pieces for the Internet. So I was doing everything at the same time.

VJ Movement.com could be the future model for international video news reporting.

Q: Was this well before a lot of the multimedia spiked on the Internet in terms of online journalism? You just happened to be multimedia because you were doing stuff for radio, for TV and for other publications, is that right?

A: Well, I set out to do as much as possible as a freelancer, so to be able to do that. I had all the equipment I needed to be able to do it. And, while I was there I started getting requests from media to do multimedia things. At the time, this started at around 2000-2001. So yeah, that was growing and media still today we’re struggling with ways to cope with this. They want to be multimedia, but some parts of journalism production are very difficult to just start doing. Maybe the hardest one is video because it’s a skill, it’s a set of skills you don’t just have, you have to learn them.

Q: Right. You told me what kind of drove your decision to do this project. What’s your vision for it. I know you say on VJ Movement “There’s more than one truth.” Tell me about that.

A: When I was working, for instance in Iraq, every evening you’d come home in your hotel and you’d have dinner with other journalists who’d been covering more or less the same story and they would be from different countries and we’d start discussing what we did during the day. And, gradually i started finding out that journalists from different countries would approach a story very differently depending on their own backgrounds. So, that started convincing me that it does matter who you are for the choices that you make in how you tell a story. When the set of facts is the same, then still each and every journalist makes a different choice as to which facts are more emphasized and which ones are less emphasized. And what the most important bit of the story is going to be. Later I was reinforced in that idea by the BBC who did a sort of CD about Gen. Petraeus talking about the future of American troops in Iraq. They collected different reports from very different channels, from Iraqi channels, from Iranian channels, from French channels, from American channels in the U.S. from CNN and Fox, from the BBC and they put them together and they are so different that you wouldn’t even think it’s the same story that they’re covering. But, in every piece you can understand why they’ve chosen the angle they did choose when you look at their background. So that is what convinced me that it is important to show people that there are different ways to use something, so if we have one topic, what we aim to do, and what we aim to do more and more as we grow is to show different perspectives of that topic by having different journalists produce different stories about the same topic.

Q: I hesitate to get into labels too much, but here in the US we’re fond of using the phrase “mainstream media”, but I’ll use the phrase traditional media. Do you consider VJ Movement to be in that traditional media or is it new independent journalism?

A: It’s new independent journalism. No, we don’t want to be in the traditional media because that would mean that you produce your stories based on a newsroom that is centrally organized. What we have is a newsroom that will consist of the 150 correspondents that we have now and that number is growing. Plus, the people who have become members of the video journalism movement because they will participate in this newsroom process. So, it’s not a centralized newsroom process, which really distinguishes us from traditional or mainstream media where people don’t produce the news themselves, but they do add to the news by giving their story ideas, by giving us their thoughts on other people’s story ideas and their comments or maybe their different views or postions on them.

And the other thing that is very different is television has news anchors, studios, leaders and things like that to go with their programs. We don’t want to have all that. And the other thing, we don’t want to be leaning on the supply of news from the big press agencies. We want our correspondents to tell us what’s happening in their countries and to tell us what is important and what should be done.

Q: I see on your web site you have a vision for a “global free press”. Tell me a little bit about your funding though. You do have some funding from government programs, is that right?

A: We have funding from a foundation. We have funding from a Dutch program that is interested in, well, basically supporting new ways of doing journalism and the funding is basically for an investigation. What we’re doing for them is we’re keeping track of what happens to the VJ Movement in terms of who’s watching it and how many people and how long and how do you get people to join your network, etc. Because that could help, eventually, other media in getting their act together. So that’s how they fund us. And then there’s a few people who have just supported the idea personally and funded little bits as well. So, yeah, we’re trying to continue to diversify in the funding as well.

Q: Have you found something that is long term and sustainable source of funding for your organization because I know, I’m sure as over there, the conversation over here is a “new business model”, trying to find something that’s going to sustain journalism. Have you found something like that for VJ movement?

A: A new business model?

Q: Well a new business model would be great, but I mean have you found a long-term sustainable source of funding, or is this list of individual donors and these grants or things like that, has this funding, do you think that will be long-term and that will fund you over the long-term?

A: That’s what we’re working on now. We have many people and sources who are interested and who we’re talking to. Yeah, that’s definitely a goal that we’re working very hard on now. We, for the moment, we can do what we need to do with the funding that we have and in the meantime work on that. There are options, there absolutely in many ways there are foundations interested so yeah we’re very confident that we’ll find that.

Q: And  what about yourself and other people that work for VJ Movement? Is anybody making a living doing this or is it all on the side?

A: We have nine people on the payroll and so they are making a living and we are paying our video journalists for their contributions and the founders, well we try of course to make a living but we’re the last ones on the list.

Q: Let’s talk about the mechanics of it. How do video journalists get their work onto VJ Movement? How did you discover the journalists you do have and how do you acquire new journalists and their work?

A: It all started with my own network of journalists that I sort of built up while I was working. That was the very beginning of it. Then there was the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism network that I’m a part of and we sent out messages to them to see if there were people available through them and they started passing it on to others and it sort of snowballed. And, that was the very beginning. We have a few people here who are coordinating this network who simply started looking for good video journalists. They started sending out emails whenever they stumbled upon someone who was a good video journalist and in doing so we started getting people who were interested in working for us. We have very strict procedures for who is going to work for us. People really need to prove that they are good journalists. That they know their trade. They also need to sign up and sign a freelance contract and agree with the rules of our game and basically with the way they have to provide the stories, the ethical code that we have on the web site as well, etc.

Once we were sure that a journalist was a good journalist they would start sending us story ideas that we would go back and forward about those ideas and then at the end we would say, well, do this story, produce it into a video. And, that’s how we always started and we always want our video journalists and our cartoonists to produce a profile of themselves. The reason for that is what we were just discussing earlier, it does matter who you are for the way you tell a story. So, as soon as they have their profile sent to us and we had it online then they could start filing stories. So, that’s how it works until now. At the moment it’s the newsroom that’s electing the stories that are going to be produced by the video journalists. When they produce a story they can always discuss it with our coordinators here in Holland and if they have questions we are always glad to help them, but what we don’t want to do is tell them what to say in their stories. The content is theirs and that’s also what they’re responsible for.

Q: Okay, so there is kind of a central hub that is deciding on story topics and story selection a little bit?

A: Well, it’s more deciding on who is going to work and then based on whether or not these people have the quality, so are they people who can shoot? Are they people who can edit, can they tell a story? Do they know what it takes to do the journalistic research? So that’s what we test them on and we’re very open to people who have opinions that are not ours, I mean that’s what we’re all about, to be open to different opinions and ways of seeing things. But, still when they do a story, they have to make sure that it’s journalistically sound.

Q: So it sounds like you’re working very hard to, though you’re not traditional media, you are independent journalism, you’re working very hard to make sure your audience is getting professional journalism?

A: That’s exactly what we want. Yes. And that’s also the big difference. If you would say there’s citizen journalism, there’s traditional journalism, and there’s new journalism, then the difference between us and citizen journalism is that we don’t want citizens to produce the stories, because then you can never guarantee the quality of them, but we do want their ideas, we do want their input, we do want their knowledge. Sort of in preparation of the story that is going to be produced by the professional in the end. And if you look at traditional journalism then we say it’s not this newsroom filled with journalists in one central place deciding what the news is, no it’s this big digital newsroom that is spread all over the world discussing what we should do.

Q: So it sounds like your freelancers really have to apply for the job? Traditional freelancing isn’t quite as rigorous as with you guys which is probably a good thing in your mission.

A: Well yeah, we, again we want to be sure that the quality of what we produce is good. We want to be a place where people find serious stories and interesting stories and well told, well shot and worth looking at, so yeah we’re very vigorous about making sure our video journalists are good at that.

On the other hand for them, once they’ve gone through that process, they know that the other ones they’re working with are of good quality as well.

Q: How big is your audience now? Is it growing? What metric do you use to find that out?

A: Well, we launched officially on Oct. 5 for the Dutch market, which means that we try to make noise here in Holland about this and we were pretty successful about that. But, or launch in the English language market was only last week so it did move up significantly, the numbers of people going to our web site and some stories have been watched quite a few times, but it’s very, very early days to say well we have some many, or this is our audience. I don’t think you can say anything very sensible about that after just a few days.

Q: It seems like reaching new audiences, especially being an online only news organization, that would be one of your biggest challenges?

A: Absolutely. We have a marketing team that is completely geared towards online marketing and they are working very hard on reaching people through the right channels and in different ways. I mean you can sort of aim very broadly and say well here we are and send out press releases and things like that, but what we also do on the other end is to be very, very focused. To look for groups of people who, for instance, are interested in issues concerning abortion anywhere in the world and you can go online and look for places where people are discussing those issues, look for bloggers writing about those issues, etc. and you can notify those people that you have stories about that specific issue and then when a blogger who is interested in that and has an audience that is interested in that hot topic picks you up, then you know we’re going to watched by this number of people. There’s a lot in between that, there’s also the Facebooks and the Twitter and the YouTube channels and everything else, so we have all that. It’s very diverse from very focused to aiming a groups who are interested in one particular story to very broadly sending it out as a press release to media who are interested in general.

Q: I know this is still the early days of the VJ Movement but I’m going to ask this question anyway. Do you see VJ Movement as a unique venture or do you see VJ Movement as a model for future news organizations in this changing media world?

A: Well we hope of course for the last thing you’re just saying. It is absolutely an attempt to become that, to become a new model. But as you said yourself, it’s very early days to see if we’re successful. We’re also seeing that media are interested in licensing, so they’re sending us messages saying well are there any opportunities to basically show your material on our platforms? We’re very open to that as well. So there’s a lot that can be developed. We’re also interested in selling stories for regular newscasters who say we want to air that story on television. That’s another possibility.

What we’re aiming for is to get the content, to get that right, to get very good content and then there are many different ways to distribute them in the end, not just on our platform, although we hope that the large chunk of our audience will find us eventually.

Q: How important is reader input/citizen input to VJ Movement?

A: I think if you have a news organization in a central newsroom, then you have a very limited set of eyes and ears in society and very often there’s always a group chemistry inside a newsroom so I’ve experienced myself how some newsrooms tend to snub certain topics because they don’t consider them fitting for their audiences, but they snub it, they don’t ask their audience to see it. So, our feeling is much more that all these people who are walking around have jobs, have interests, have questions. They watch the news. They have ideas and some of them can be very good and very necessary stories to tell. So, I think it’s hugely important to keep our eyes and ears open for all those experiences of people everywhere to help us determine what the news should be.

I want to thank Thomas Loudon for taking the time to interview with me. This is exciting stuff Thomas!