Travel Channel offers a video 'boot camp' for aspiring journalists

CHEVY CHASE, Md. -- So, you want to be a travel journalist.

Well, jeez, who wouldn't? Especially if at the end of a 12-hour day, you'd gotten a big fat thank-you from your boss in the form of a pink slip. And then on the way home, you were on the tail end of a four-car pileup, which killed your Japanese fighting fish. And shortly afterward, you broke up with your fiancé and now are sleeping on friends' couches.

Given the grim synopsis of her recent past, why wouldn't Sarah Dixon, 27, a former audiovisual technician, want to turn her love of travel into extra cash?

That irresistible pitch is what has lured Dixon and many of her 29 classmates to a fifth-floor conference room at the Travel Channel headquarters in suburban Washington. They've ponied up $2,000 to $2,500, plus travel and lodging expenses, to attend the Travel Channel Academy, billed as a four-day digital filmmaking boot camp for aspiring travel journalists.

In an era when traditional media (and the professionals who work for them) are thinning to a whisper, a cacophony is reverberating from cyberspace, where theoretically anyone can be a travel journalist. At the same time, a revolution is occurring in the video world, thanks to easy-to-use, relatively low-cost equipment that enables people to produce and edit their own videos. On YouTube alone, 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute.

Trouble is, most of it is "unusable and unwatchable," Travel Channel president Patrick Younge tells the students on Day 1. And so, with new media's insatiable appetite for content, the network launched this video course, in part to help mold an army of contributors. They call them "preditors" — shorthand for producer/editors.

Which is not to imply anyone here is likely to become the next Anthony Bourdain, Andrew Zimmern or Samantha Brown, the star triumvirate of the Travel Channel's lineup. In a testament to shrinking attention spans in the YouTube/Twitter universe, the station is instead seeking 1½- to three-minute travel videos for distribution via its website and expanding mobile platforms. This crash course offers technical and storytelling instruction, plus grants alumni special access for future submissions and ongoing staff feedback.