Frank Beacham's Journal

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez at the Rolling Thunder Review

I took this picture at Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review in Gainesville, Florida on April 25, 1976. Dylan is pictured with Joan Baez. I had no camera at the time and paid a fellow sitting next to me $10 to borrow his camera and to purchase one roll of film. Well worth it, I think! 

Beth Caron's "What's Missing" at the Illuminated Metropolis Gallery in New York City

    

Through the end of November, New York photographer Beth Caron is featuring a new collection of images titled “What’s Missing” at the Illuminated Metropolis Gallery in New York City.

Capturing the innocence of children in raw black and white photography, the pictures depict truth and beauty in everyday life experiences. Several of the images are based on slices of life at the playground. The photos focus on children at play, in motion and with their families. Some images capture odd angles—almost like discombobulated body parts—that make the viewer stop in their tracks and think.

Beth is an old friend and I must say it’s her best photography work ever. My favorite of her images were made at Halloween. She captures images of kids dressed to the hilt in scary costumes that genuinely stand out in the black and white medium. My absolute favorite is titled Jokerman, a kid who somehow looks much older in the image.

                             

After a crowded opening reception at the Chelsea gallery on Nov. 10, the photos will be on public display on Thursdays from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. and Fridays and Saturdays from noon until 6 p.m. through Nov. 30. The gallery is located 547 West 27th Street on the 5th Floor.

The prints are priced at $500 each for an 11 x 14 and $750 for 16 x 20.

                              

“The Great Flood” is a Glowing Alternative History of the Birth of Rock n’ Roll

   
I have always been enamored of great floods—mostly because of the way they alter human history in unforeseen ways. Just as Katrina is still re-shaping modern New Orleans, the Mississippi River Flood of 1927 had a huge effect on American culture that we can only measure today through the remarkable impact it had on our music.

Bill Morrison, the filmmaker, and Bill Frisell, the musician, collaborated on a new project called The Great Flood, which uses archival film of the flood of '27 and a newly composed suite of music to tell the story of that natural disaster, the worst in American history. The live music and film got its New York City premiere Friday night at Carnegie Hall in New York City.

In the spring of 1927, the Mississippi River broke out of its earthen embankments in 145 places and flooded 27,000 square miles. As a result, there was a forced exodus of displaced sharecroppers, who left plantation life and migrated to northern cities, adapting to an industrial society with its own set of challenges.

   
What they don’t teach us in school is the great migration to the north fueled the rise of acoustic blues. This included artists who survived the flood, such as Charley Patton and his High Water Everywhere, as well as Memphis Minnie with her When the Levee Breaks, which was reworked by Led Zepplin and became one of the group's biggest hits. Bessie Smith, Barbecue Bob and Kansas Joe McCoy also wrote songs about the flood. William Faulkner's short story Old Man was about a prison break from Parchman Penitentiary during the flood.

Several decades after the flood, Randy Newman wrote, Louisiana 1927, Zachary Richard wrote, Big River, and Eric Bibb wrote Flood Water. The artistic output since the flood has been significant.

Just as important, the flood also helped create electric blues bands that thrived in cities like Memphis, Detroit and Chicago. This incubated modern jazz, rhythm and blues and eventually, rock & roll. 

                   

Morrison used actual nitrate film footage of the 1927 flood, including source material from the Fox Movietone Newsreel Archive and the National Archives. Nitrate film stock is highly volatile and features many imperfections, including burn marks. As great artists do, Morrison fixed nothing, but used the pock-marked and partially deteriorated film as an artistic device and window into history. 

                            

As Frisell’s score plays, the mind wanders through the silent film, suggesting different levels of reality. As the program put it, “the bubbles and washes of decaying footage are associated with the destructive force of rising water, the footage seeming to have been bathed in the same water as the images depicted on it. These layers of visual information, paired with Frisell’s music, become contemporary again. We see the images through a prism of history—but one that dances with the sound of modern music.”

Frisell’s music is magnificent and perfectly matchs the film as it tells the story. It is a parade of Americana music, from roots to jazz to modern rock. A crowd pleaser was a is scan of a 1927 Sears Roebuck catalog—one where you could buy anything from to a full orchestra of musical instruments to a full-sized house.

Frisell knows this territory well. For over 35 years he done more than 250 recordings, with film scores from the original Buster Keaton films to the work of mid-century rural Arkansas photographer Mike Disfarmer. Frisell collaborated earlier with Morrison on The Film of Her and The Mesmerist.

Morrison is a master of combining archival material with original footage to create unique visual tapestries that are set to contemporary music. He has collaborated with John Adams, Laurie Anderson, Gavin Bryars, Dave Douglas, Michael Gordon, Henryk Górecki, Vijay Iyer, Jóhann Jóhannsson, David Lang, Julia Wolfe, Steve Reich and Simon Christensen. Morrison first met Frisell while working in the kitchen of the Village Vanguard in the early 1990s.   

During the performance, Frisell teamed with Ron Miles on trumpet and cornet; Tony Scherr on bass and guitar; and Kenny Wollesen on drums and vibraphone.

           

It’s Not That Dylan Copied Other Works, It’s That He Didn’t Make Them Better

I visited the Gagosian Gallery in Manhattan this weekend to see Bob Dylan’s Asia Series paintings. The viewing rooms were nearly empty when I was there and the paintings—well I can only say they were disappointing.

Not because of all the hoopla being made over Dylan's alleged copying, but because the works themselves had a kind of amateurish quality. It was clear to me that if Bob Dylan’s name was not on these paintings, they would never have gotten such a prestigious showing.

Back to the hoopla, which not only surprised me, but demonstrated again just how gullible many of Dylan’s fans actually are. The man, himself, admitted he had done some of the paintings from other images. So what? Dylan’s been doing that in his music since the early 1960s.

What I think is confusing to some critics with no sense of creative history is the recording industry’s misleading campaign against music copyright infringement. The Recording Industry of America (RIAA) would have people think that all songs are completely original and come out of thin air. This has led many, especially younger people, to believe the use of other works of art is outright theft.

Most art is copied and reinterpreted. Pete Seeger calls it the “folk process,” the phenomenon in which folk music, folk tales and folklore come into being or are passed from one person or generation to the next.

We Shall Overcome, a key anthem of the civil rights movement, is a good example of the folk process. The lyrics of the song originated from a gospel song published in 1947 by Rev. Charles Tindley. Originally titled We Will Overcome, it was a favorite of Zilphia Horton, then music director of the Highlander Folk School of Monteagle, Tennessee, a school that trained union organizers. She taught it to Seeger.

The song then became associated with the civil rights movement from 1959, when Guy Carawan stepped in as song leader at Highlander, and the school was the focus of student non-violent activism. It quickly became the movement’s unofficial anthem.

Seeger and other famous folk singers in the early 1960s, including Joan Baez, sang the song at rallies, folk festivals, and concerts and helped make it widely known. It was at Highlander that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first heard We Shall Overcome.

Today, the song, with the “shall” contributed by Seeger, is copyrighted by Seeger and Carawan. That’s how the folk process works. The passing of traditional tales and music among musicians from ear to ear.

So is it OK that Bob Dylan copied photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Leon Busy and Dimitri Kessel? It’s fine with me, as long as he does a masterpiece like he has done with so many songs. However, his paintings, I’m afraid, don’t live up to that high standard.

Bob Dylan has engaged in the folk process all his life. A few years ago, a poem, written by a 16-year-old Dylan and submitted to his Jewish summer camp’s newspaper, was going up for auction at Christies when alarms went off.  The auction house failed to detect that this “Dylan Original,” with a few minor alterations, was actually the words of Hank Snow’s previously recorded song, Little Buddy.

Now 70, Dylan has continuously borrowed lyrics and melodies. At one of Bob Levinson’s Dylan classes that I took, Billy Altman, the music and pop culture writer, did an analysis of Dylan’s album, Together Through Life. Though Altman very much likes Dylan’s work, he traced how songs on the record originated from other artists. For example, Beyond Here Lies Nothin’ channels back to Otis Rush’s All Your Love (I Miss Loving) and If You Ever Go to Houston extends to Leadbelly’s Midnight Special. 

One song, My Wife’s Home Town, got special mention. Altman noted from the liner notes that the song gives a compositional co-credit to the late Willie Dixon. That’s because Dixon wrote Muddy Water’s sound-alike hit, I Just Want to Make Love to You. Perhaps Dixon’s estate wasn’t so keen on allowing the folk process to work in this case.

Bob Cohen, another guest with Altman at Levinson’s class, was a member of 1960’s folk group, “The New World Singers” with Happy Traum, Gil Turner and Delores Dixon. When they played in the early 60s at Gerde’s Folk City in Greenwich Village, a young Bob Dylan was often present. Not only did he like the group’s music, but—as Dylan wrote in his memoir, Chronicles—his “part-time girlfriend” at the time was Dixon, a black woman and New York City schoolteacher with a deep alto voice.

One day, Cohen said, Dylan announced that he had a new song and invited the group to the rat and roach-infested basement of Gerdes to hear Blowin’ in the Wind. The rest is history. The New World Singers were the  first to record the song, which, Cohen noted, that Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records refused to record unless they changed the words to make it into a love song.

Interestingly, when Cohen talked with Delores Dixon ten years later, after she had left the group, she revealed her then secret relationship with Dylan and told of his writing Blowin’ in the Wind. The song had come from the melody of a spiritual called No More Auction Block for Me, a song that Dylan had probably heard first on a Carter Family record.

Also, Dylan knew it because Delores sang it often at Gerde’s. It was a moving song of freedom written during slavery times, insisting “no more, no more” and sadly reflecting on the “many thousands gone.” Cohen sang it for the class, noting that in the Civil War an abolitionist wrote it down from Negro Union soldiers.

Delores told Cohen that Dylan had gone home with her one night and the next morning was working on Blowin’ in the Wind. When she heard it, she said “Bobby, you just can’t do that.” To Delores, one should not take a traditional song and write new words for it.

But the group felt otherwise and quickly adopted Blowin’ in the Wind. They sang it on stage at Gerdes and asked Dylan to join them. Later, in 1963 and 64, the New World Singers took the song to Mississippi, where it became a civil rights anthem.

Cohen revealed another interesting fact about that first recording. When Ertegun refused to use Blowin’ in the Wind, Moe Asch of Folkways decided to release the song on Broadside Records. It came out even before Dylan’s own version. 

However, Delores insisted on singing the chorus as “The answer my friend is blown in the wind.” Cohen said the group couldn’t talk her out of it, and it stands today on that first recording. Apparently, as a school teacher, Delores thought Dylan had used improper English with his use of “blowin.’”

Altman revealed another side of Dylan to the class, one as an aggressive promoter of his compositions from the earliest days. At the Newport Folk Festival in 1964, when Dylan really got to know Johnny Cash for the first time, Altman said the young singer/songwriter used the occasion to vigorously push his songs to the country legend.

In a motel room at Newport with Joan Baez, Sandy Bull, Jack Elliott and some others, Dylan and Cash sat on the floor trading songs. Baez set up a portable audio player, and that’s where Bob gave Johnny It Ain’t Me, Babe and Mama, You’ve Been On My Mind. In 1965, Johnny Cash and June Carter, released It Ain’t Me Babe. It became a hit for them.

And, in case you wonder, It Ain’t Me Babe was also part of the folk process. The song’s opening line (“Go away from my window...”) was allegedly influenced by musicologist/folk-singer John Jacob Niles’ composition Go ’Way From My Window. Niles was referred to by Dylan as an early influence in Chronicles.

The folk process stories go on and on in Dylan’s life. Barry Kornfeld, a guitarist who played on Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, noted that Paul Clayton had a copyright on a song called Who’s Gonna Buy Your Ribbons When I’m Gone. The lyrics are “Ain’t no use to sit and sigh; ain’t no use to sit and wonder why... tell me, who’s gonna buy your ribbons when I’m gone.”

Kornfeld wrote that he was with Clayton one day and Dylan wandered by and said, “Hey, man, that’s a great song. I’m going to use that song.” Dylan then wrote Don’t Think Twice.

When it became a legal issue, the song was actually traced to a number that was exactly the same as the one by Paul Clayton. It was called Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens When I’m Gone.  So, in effect, everything that Dylan took was actually in the public domain. Dylan and Clayton remained friends even though their publishing companies sued each other.

So, does using the folk process diminish Bob Dylan’s music?  Hardly. In virtually all cases, what Dylan borrowed, he improved. Blowin’ in the Wind is most certainly better than No More Auction Block for Me. It’s the way the greatest artists have always worked and will continue to work.

Dylan's paintings are something else. I read that before the Gagosian show Dylan wanted assurances that his art would not embarrass him. The advice he was given was it would not. Sadly, these voices of commerce misled Dylan.

As Altman wrote in his review of Dylan’s Together Through Life, "our reactions say more about us than about him." Only a few good critics truly analyze Dylan’s work well, perhaps because most are lazy, unquestioning, and know little about their subject. Today, we live in a thumbs “up” or “down” media culture. It’s the same with the Asia series paintings.

Yet, fortunately, Dylan continues to work, marching to his own drummer. Altman put it well: “To paraphrase what this man of many famous works famously noted in 1965: ‘You’re an artist. You don’t look back.’” I suspect after this Asia exhibit closes down, Dylan won’t be looking back at this experience.

Tony Garnier -- A Photo Essay

Tony Garnier, Bob Dylan's music director and bass player, was back home in New York City this week after an extraordinary tour that included Dylan's first trip to China. Tony played Tuesday at the P&G Bar on the Upper West Side as one of Jonny Rosch's sidemen with guitarist Jeff Golub, drummer Sammy Merendino and saxman Dan Cipriano.

My friend and photograher-extraordinare Karen Sasha Smith took some wonderful pictures of Tony fresh off the Dylan tour. She gave me permission to put together this little photo essay on Tony.

Left, Jeff Golub; center, Sammy Merendino; right, Tony Garnier

   With Jonny Rosch, who plays with a new group of sidemen each week

Tony played a new German-made Warwick Infinity bass guitar

(All photos copyright 2011 by Karen Sasha Smith. All rights reserved.)

Peter Asher Going On the Road with a Rock & Roll History Show

As 1960s-era kid, I grew up a big fan of Peter & Gordon, the British duo made up of Peter Asher and Gordon Waller. I saw them play once in the mid-60s and bought all of their nine Top 20 singles. On that same 60’s bill, was The Dave Clark Five, another great British rock group.

In 2005, a wonderful thing happened that can only come with the passage of years. Peter & Gordon reunited, for one night only, to pay tribute to Mike Smith, a key member of the Dave Clark Five, who at the time had a spinal cord injury he sustained in 2003 that left him a tetraplegic. Sadly, Smith died only two weeks before he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

On that special night at B.B. Kings in New York City, Peter & Gordon harmonized on A World Without Love, Lady Godiva, Woman and Because. These two guys hadn't performed together in over 37 years! Yet, with Paul Schaffer's backup band including cellos and horns, they sounded like their old records.

Even better was the chance to trade stories at 4 a.m. with Peter & Gordon after the show in Lucille’s, the next door cafe to B.B. Kings. It was like having your life flash back full circle.

To make a long story short, Gordon Waller died last year, after Peter & Gordon had done several more appearances at benefit shows. Now, Asher, in an interview with the Gibson Guitar company, says he never wants to perform those songs again.

“At the same time, I had been doing some lectures about the ’60s and ’70s, with stories, and video clips, and odds and ends, which people seemed to find fascinating,” Asher said. “I decided to combine all of that. It’s been great fun putting this together.”

Asher is producing a multimedia stage show composed of film footage, photos, storytelling and music performances. It’s titled Peter Asher: A Musical Memoir of the ’60s and Beyond. There’s no schedule of performances yet, but I’ll be watching for it.

One has to imagine this rock history lesson will be rich. Asher, whose sister dated Paul McCartney, was close to the Beatles and one of Peter & Gordon’s big hits was the McCartney-penned World Without Love. In the basement in his own home, where John Lennon and McCartney were working in a practice room, Asher was the first hear their joint composition, I Want to Hold Your Hand.

In later years, Asher became head of A&R at Apple Records. It was there that he discovered James Taylor, who Asher continued to manage for years after he left Apple Records.

 Peter & Gordon at B.B. Kings in 2005. Photo by Frank Beacham

Jac Holzman Remembers the Day Dylan Went Electric

 

Jac Holzman is a legend in the music business. At age 19, he founded Elektra Records. He signed such legendary acts as The Doors, Queen, Carly Simon, Harry Chapin and many others. He discovered Judy Collins, the folk singer. 

 

Holzman partnered with Paul Rothchild, who became his house producer. Paul produced many great albums with artists including The Doors, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Janis Joplin, John Sebastian, Neil Young, Tom Paxton, Tim Buckley and on and on. 

Through a complicated series of events, I became friends with both men while living in LA. Holzman later became a writing client, while Rothchild was my partner working on a project with Orson Welles. It was Rothchild who called to tell me that Welles had died while I waited on the great director for a video shoot. 

Rothchild died in 1995, but Holzman continues to influence the music industry. At 79, he’s now consulting with Warner Music. There’s an interesting interview with him in today’s LA Times. Both Holzman and Rothchild were at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when Bob Dylan went electric. Rothchild was running the sound board, while Holzman took a picture of Dylan. 

Here’s a video of Holzman describing that historic day:

(Janis Joplin, Paul Rothchild photo copyright Clark J. Pierson)

Remaking of “USA Today” is the Beginning of the End

 

It was 1970, after I was hired away from UPI, that I sat in Bernard’s Surf Restaurant in Cocoa Beach, Florida and listened to Al Neuharth’s ideas for the nation’s first satellite-delivered newspaper. It would be some time before USA Today was actually launched, but I was there when Neuharth outlined his original plans. 

He sketched his ideas on a big pad. It would be the first truly national general-interest newspaper. It would be the first to use color widely in charts and photographs. Newstands would be modeled after TV sets. And, due to instant satellite delivery, it would be printed throughout the country at different printing plants and distributed nationally. 

Within five years, USA Today became profitable and grew to one of the largest selling newspapers in the nation. Neuharth, who was chairman and CEO of Gannett, admitted where he got most of the ideas. “We stole most of them from the tube,” he said later.

As a Gannett reporter, I had mixed feelings about the newspaper and its dependance on the television culture. I felt it’s very short, simply written stories dumbed down journalism. I had just come from writing 2,000 word “think pieces” for newspapers at UPI. There was no “thinking” to be associated with USA Today. I was ambivalent as the newspaper grew.

Today, after 28 years, we read that USA Today is in trouble and retrenching. Yesterday, the newspaper announced the most extensive reorganization in its history. It will eliminate about 130 jobs, or nine percent of its work force. 

Most radical, however, is the newspaper said it will shift its business model away from the print edition. More disturbing is that the current management failed to provide any details for this digital transition. It instantly became apparent they are clueless and are making up this transition as they go.

“We aren’t organized to adapt to the changing audience demands on all platforms,” the paper’s management told employees in a presentation last week. The publisher, David L. Hunke, declined to answer questions. A spokesman for USA Today, Ed Cassidy, said that the announcement was all that newspaper had to say on the matter, “and that pretty much closes the book on this for us.”

Actually, it pretty much closes the book on USA Today. The problem is the newspaper is rapidly bleeding subscribers and money. The Wall Street Journal has gained on it. Management is clearly lost about its future. Rather than fire the top people who don’t understand the digital future, management is firing the workers. Dumb move!

What’s worse is the newspaper’s recent track record of crossing the sacred line between news coverage and advertising. In July, the newspaper wrapped its front section in an advertisement for Jeep that obscured the entire front page. In an earlier era, that would have been considered a huge conflict of interest. The newspaper called it “a new way of doing business that aligns sales efforts with the content we produce.”

That’s total bull, of course. The outrageous ad even prompted Al Neuharth, now 86 and retired, to complain in a letter to the publisher that if he were still at Gannett, “I would have led the entire news staff walking out in protest.

“If such a stupid decision is ever made again, I hope that will be the result,” Neuharth wrote.“That would leave those who apparently don’t understand what a newspaper is to try to put one out without a news staff.”

Go Al!  Back in the 1970s, when I worked for him, Neuharth was a tough boss and, as a lowly reporter, I didn’t always agree with his decisions. No newspaper is perfect, I long ago learned. However, when it came to the separation of advertising and news, and the need for good journalistic practices, Neuharth was usually on the side of the staff.

However, today’s generation of news management is so bad it is a major embarrassment to anyone who understands the workings of good journalism. Sadly, the management of USA Today has said everything necessary to assess it’s chance of a future. It’s finished and better off dead. We can only hope something better will replace it.

RIP, USA Today.

Alfred Eisenstaedt's "V-J Day in Times Square" Image is 65-Years-Old Today

 

To a generation brought up on video, it's perhaps hard to understand how a single iconic image can still be so powerful—much less even remembered—after 65 years. But it's true. Alfred Eisenstaedt, on assignment for Life magazine, was in Times Square with his Leica camera on August 14, 1945 looking for a shot that would represent the announcement of the end of World War II.

Just south of 45th Street looking north from where Broadway and Seventh Ave. converge, Eisenstaedt snapped an image of an American sailor kissing a young woman in a white dress. A week later, it was published in Life, in a 12-page section called Victory. Though there were other poses of couples kissing, Eisenstaedt's image stood out and became an icon for a nation that finally was at peace.

Because Eisenstaedt was so busy taking pictures of the crowd that day, he didn't get the names or any details about the people in the famous picture. Their faces are not clear. Perhaps for this reason, many people have come forward through the years claiming to be the man and woman in the photograph. 

Eisenstaedt, whose picture became a cultural icon overnight, copyright protected his image and carefully controlled the rights to it throughout his lifetime. Since his death in 1995, rights to the photograph have passed to the Getty Museum as part of their Life magazine archives.

Today, we would have thousands of pictures—both moving and still—of the same scene in Times Square. But we would most likely not remember a single one of them. Drowning in so much mediocre imagery, we are now blind to the single great icons that define our times. 

Dirck Halstead Speaks The Truth About TV News

 

I first met Dirck Halstead in 1983 on the Day in the Life of Hawaii photo project. He was one of the 100 “world’s best” photographers invited to photograph Hawaii in a single day. I was there to do a documentary with my Betacam and to teach the photographers how to use the world’s first camcorder. The documentary was a dream project. To my extraordinary delight, I was directed by Gordon Parks, one of the world’s great photographers and a terrific man.

Dirck worked for Time Magazine for 29 years. During that time, his photographs appeared on 47 Time covers. Now, as one of the best news photographers in a vanishing profession, he edits the Digital Journalist website online and conducts the Platypus Workshops to teach a new generation of photojournalists how to survive in this brave new world. 

His recent comments in a couple of interviews I did with him were not surprising to anyone that follows photojournalism. But since truth is rarely told to the public anymore, his comments are worthy of repeat here.  

TV news, said Dirck, is dying fast. “I stopped long ago watching the three networks,” he said. “Now, it’s all on the web.” Video journalism, he said with certainly, is moving quickly to the Internet.

A total shakeup of the existing media infrastructures has been underway for a long time, Dirck continued. “The whole business is getting smaller. You are going to see far less reporter and anchor driven packages on television. What’s going away is the ‘voice of god’ approach to journalism. 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. The talking head is going to disappear very soon.”

 

Rather than writers, the new journalistic storytelling will be driven by the subjects themselves, he said. “There will be a lot less money available to produce pieces. They will be done on the cheap. You will be cutting out the overhead of all those expensive people.”

Today, Dirck said, the very best video journalism is being done by NPR.  That’s right, National Public Radio! They have hired the best video journalists and are paying them to do top quality video pieces from around the world, he said. Go to radio to find the best television.

Television news today is whole new business model. The medium is used to dealing with big money based on advertising budgets. Once the advertising budgets are gone, which is happening very quickly, there will be no money available to TV, Dirck said. 

The web, however, is very inexpensive to work with. It can be produced by individuals, rather than organizations. And it’s quite clear that advertising is never going to recapture the mass audience that way it once did with broadcast and print. “We are in a total shakedown economically now,” he said. “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.”

Dirck’s Platypus workshops, the 39th just held at the Maine Photographic Workshops this summer, has trained nearly 500 new storytellers. They come from TV, newspapers and other media seeking a better way to work in this new environment.

Many are using Canon and Nikon DSLR cameras because the video quality is much better than standard video news camcorders. “The quality of the images stops you in your tracks,” Dirck noted. “Previously you could get this only out of a 35mm camera.”

In many ways, the shakeup of television news will do away with much of the mediocrity that we find today on television. The change will shift emphasis back to the photographer from the TV engineer, who has dominated news photography during the growth of the video medium.

“The storytelling is the crucial element,” Dirck said. “That’s what this is all about. It’s moving storytelling into a new arena and in the process is empowering a lot of people who couldn’t have done this before.”

Though the changes will come with a lot of pain, ultimately it means the power is shifting from large media companies back to individuals. That can only be good for truth and honesty in reporting.