November 16, 2009
RICHMOND, Va. -- Have you ever needed to find a bricklayer who could teach you biology and then write about it for an on-air newscast? If so, Mark Holmberg is the man for the job.
A journalist for WTVR, the CBS affiliate in Richmond, Holmberg writes, shoots, and edits a video column. The topic of each column is entirely up to Holmberg, and he often chooses subjects that conventional news might find trivial.
However, to Holmberg and his viewers, the journalist’s stories about subjects such as “haunted” houses provide quality journalism with a softer edge. And, after two years of airing the column, CBS is not showing signs of censorship.
Holmberg’s move to CBS in 2007 followed an interesting collection of interests and occupations, starting when he was in college. Majoring in biology, he quickly changed tracks after graduation, delving instead into the world of manual labor.
Laying bricks for nine years after college, Holmberg realized a natural ability for the work. If not for a badly-written concert review in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Holmberg might still be stacking bricks and mortar.
The article, a review of heavy metal artist Ozzy Osbourne, inspired Holmberg to try his hand at reviewing concerts. After watching the band Ratt perform a few nights later, Holmberg wrote an account of the concert and submitted it to the Times-Dispatch. That piece of journalism landed him a job as a free-lance music reviewer for the paper.
“I was interested in the world in a different way,” Holmberg said during a recent talk he gave in a journalism class at VCU. “I consider myself a scientist.”
After only a year of writing reviews, Holmberg was promoted to feature-writing, where the increasing poverty and crime in the city kept him busy for eight years. He gained prominence in Richmond during that time, and for the 11 years following, Holmberg wrote two columns a week for the paper, including the main Sunday column, in addition to his other writing.
When the paper pulled one of his columns from print following a slow financial decline caused by a decrease in advertising funds, Holmberg wrote one last piece concerning the newspaper itself and left the print journalism world.
Holmberg’s penchant for writing high-quality articles about interesting topics did not go unnoticed, though, and a call from CBS 6 ended his brief unemployment. He began producing a column similar to that which he wrote for the Times-Dispatch, but he was forced to adapt it for television.
At first, “it was horrible,” he said. “It just didn’t fit.” But after learning to shoot and edit his own footage, “it all started making sense,” and the video column blossomed into a success.
Perhaps the biggest difference between writing for print and for broadcast, Holmberg mused, was that broadcast writing relied much less on the writing to propel the story. With the capabilities of sound, video, and editing techniques, the actual copy of the story is less important.
Learning to rely on video and audio instead of the copy was both the most difficult and most productive adjustment Holmberg made at CBS.
“Once I quit writing, I started doing a good job,” he said. That’s not to say a broadcast journalist should ignore writing altogether, but since the video and sound drive the story, he said, he finds it easier to shoot the video before writing.
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