Michael Rosenblum

For more than 30 years, Michael Rosenblum has been on the cutting edge of the digital ‘videojournalist’ and Citizen News revolution. 

During this time, he's led a drive for video literacy, and the Democratization of Video and Video news. His work includes: the complete transitioning of the BBC's national network (UK) to a Vj-driven model, starting in 2002; the complete conversion of The Voice of America, the United State’s Government’s broadcasting agency, (and the largest broadcaster in the world), from short wave radio to television broadcasting and webcasting using the ‘VJ” paradigm (1998-present); the design behind Current TV in partnership with former US VP Al Gore; the construction of a national hyperlocal citizen journalist network with Verizon; and the construction of NYT Television, a New York Times Company and the largest producer of non-fiction television in the US.

He has partnered with a number of major media companies including The Guardian (UK), USA Today, New York Magazine, The Travel Channel and others to create video ‘Academies’ where anyone can learn to report, shoot, edit and produce video on their own. 

In 2009 he co-founded TheVJ.com, along with his wife, Lisa Lambden, an online video training site. 

He has also designed, built and implemented VJ-driven news channels around the world, including Time/Warner’s New York 1, Associated Newspapers (UK) London based Channel 1, Young Broadcasting stations in the US, Switzerland’s largest commercial TV broadcaster, TeleZuri, as well as a host of smaller projects such as Eritrea’s ERI-TV and Sri Lanka’s SLBC. His consulting clients include The BBC, McGraw-Hill, TV-24/Germany, TV4/Sweden, Oxygen Media, National Public Radio, Danmarks Radio (DK), TV-3 Sweden, Norway & Denmark, Tokyo Broadcasting, Korea Broadcasting.

As a producer, Rosenblum has produced or overseen production on more than 3000 hours of programming for both network and cable. His shows have included the long-running TRAUMA: LIFE IN THE ER, Paramedics, Police Force, Labor and Delivery, Science Times. These series have aired on TLC, Showtime and National Geographic. He has also produced for ABC, CBS, Oxygen and the BBC. Most recently his groundbreaking 5Takes series for Discovery has completely rewritten the production paradigm. The company currently has more than 350 hours in production for this year alone. 

He has conducted his unique VJ training classes and boot camps all over the world, from Thailand to Marrakech, and has lectured extensively both overseas and in the US. He recently entered into a partnership with Discovery Communications to set up the Travel Channel Academy, a national training facility open to anyone. For 8 years he was an adjunct professor of communication at New York University, where he taught “Television and the Information Revolution”, a course of his own design and at The Bauhaus in Germany. Prior to that he taught at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. His Brussels based Rosenblum Institute trains European journalists to work as vjs. He is the author of Videojournalismus (germany) and iPhone Millionaire (McGraw Hill, 2013). 

He and his wife live both in New York and in the UK and teach at Oxford University in Britain. 

3 words to describe Nature?

Real. Unmediated. Honest

3 things Nature taught you?

Who I was

Who I am

Who I could be

3 most treasured Nature spots?

Coast of England at Northumbria

Middle of Sahara Desert

Lamu, Kenya

When you look at the ocean, it makes you feel…?

Humble

When you see a forest, it makes you feel…?

Connected

When you see a volcano, it makes you feel…?

Terrified

When you see a sunrise or sunset, it makes you feel…?

Grateful

When you hear thunder, it makes you feel…?

Alive

When you hear the wind howling, it makes you feel…?

Connected

Are you an Ocean, Mountain, Forest, or Desert person?

Ocean

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is Nature to your well-being?

10

Share with us a childhood nature memory?

When I was about 10 years old, my father had a friend named Eddie Durban who had a wood Lightning sailboat - 19 foot.  No motor. One day, he took me out for a sail and we turned up into a series of small estuaries that ran in the wetlands that are now almost gone on the East Coast.  The boat was silent, but it ghosted along, and as we drifted in the marsh, the whole place around us seemed alive and vibrant. 

 


Krista Tippett

 

Krista grew up in a small town in Oklahoma, attended Brown University, and became a journalist and diplomat in Cold War Berlin. She lived in Spain and England before seeking a Masters of Divinity at Yale University in the mid-1990s. Emerging from that, she saw a black hole where intelligent conversation about the religious, spiritual, and moral aspects of human life might be. She pitched and piloted her idea for a show for several years before launching Speaking of Faith — later On Being — as a weekly national public radio show in 2003.

In 2014, President Obama awarded Krista the National Humanities Medal at the White House for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence. On the air and in print, Ms. Tippett avoids easy answers, embracing complexity and inviting people of ​every background to join her conversation about faith, ethics, and moral wisdom.” Krista is now at work on her next book, Letters to a Young Citizen. Her first book Speaking of Faith, published in 2007, is a memoir of religion in our time, including her move from geopolitical engagement to theology. In 2010, she published Einstein’s God, drawn from her interviews at the intersection of science, medicine, and spiritual inquiry. Krista’s 2016 New York Times best-selling Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living opens into the questions and challenges of this century.

 3 words to describe Nature?

Extravagant. Intelligent. Fierce.

3 things Nature taught you?

To get quiet inside

To marvel

To know myself a creature among other creatures

3 most treasured Nature spots?

The highlands and islands of Scotland 

Byron Bay, Australia.

In my hammock under the White Pines in my Minnesota backyard

When you look at the ocean, it makes you feel...?

Liberated from any illusion of significance – pensive, joyous, and free

When you see a forest, it makes you feel...?

Like clambering around in the branches

When you see a volcano, it makes you feel...?

Respectful

When you see a sunrise or sunset, it makes you feel...?

Liberated from the Newtonian straitjacket of clocks and calendars while utterly present to time as rhythm and pattern and passage and mystery.

When you hear thunder, it makes you feel...?

Happy to have no option but to hunker down indoors (if I can)

When you hear the wind howling, it makes you feel...?

Giddily spooked

Are you an Ocean, Mountain, Forest, or Desert person?

Ocean, also Valley

On a scale of 1 to 10, how important is Nature to your well-being?

10, though I am not always faithful to that truth

Share with us a childhood nature memory?

I grew up in central Oklahoma, where we kept the natural world at bay. I was never taught the names of the trees or flowers that grew on our semi-desert, oil-rich land. We were drilled only to watch out for the things that bite and blister, and they were legion: poison oak and poison ivy, black widow spiders and scorpions, water moccasins, rattlesnakes. We were forbidden to explore the wilderness that was rapidly being consigned to memory all around our manicured housing estate.

And yet, if you ask me about the happiest days of my childhood, my mind goes to expeditions through as yet unconquered woody areas nearby. It goes to tadpoles and turtles discovered with furtive awe. I can still see those tadpoles, feel them swimming in cold creek water through my splayed fingers. A rapt attention settles all the way through my body in their presence. I know how memory works, that I am reconstructing all these sensations from fragments scattered across my brain. But I feel my breathing slow before the mystery of minute creaturely life observable. Amazed.

Wrapped up in these memories, too, is a dawning tension between their smallness and my relative giant size; their fragility and my power – to scoop them up, starve or orphan them, literally kill them with my amazement. And the power instead to forego dominance, and take care with my delight.

We turned up home at the end of long summer days sunburned and freckled and festooned with pink rashes from the poison ivy we wandered into and tangled with after all. We’re covered with feasting blood ticks, fat and purple with our blood, and all manner of worms. Other worms were gifted from our dogs, who ran leash-less and half wild in those days and were officially what we were allowed to befriend from the wild.

They would occasionally disappear for days at a time. We would wash and pick them clean when they returned mangy and exhilarated. We would vicariously absorb their effusive abandon.