Aiding the professional video educational effort is Dirck Halstead, a photojournalist who covered the White House for 29 years for
Time magazine and
whose photographs have appeared on 47
Time covers. Today, among his activities, Halstead is teaching professional video techniques to a new generation of photojournalists at his Platypus
workshops. Nearly 500 video storytellers have now been trained at 39 workshops throughout the nation.
Halstead sees major new opportunities for individuals in Web video and a coming end to
television news, as we know it. "What's going away is the 'Voice of God' approach to journalism," he says. "It will be replaced by much smaller and less expensive storytelling. Television today is not
about video or about pictures. It's about writing. In order for that to work, you must have the talking head. But the talking head is going to disappear very soon.
"You'll be seeing more
independent voices, but their stories won't be driven by reporters. They will be driven by the subjects themselves," he adds.
Video stories on the Web, Halstead says, will be done by
individuals at very low cost. "It's quite clear that advertising is never going to recapture the mass audience it once did with broadcast and print," he says. "A lot of things we took for granted are
not going to come back. One of those things is going to be major news organizations."