High-Tech, One-Man Reporting Team

L O N D O N, July 24 -- I have a great job. I'm a news tourist: I travel the world with a digital video camera in search of good stories for World News Tonight.

Let me explain how this series, which we are calling "The Road to Anywhere," got started.

For years, television news has wrestled with how to cover all of the stories from around the world that we felt were important, or even potentially important. Clearly, we cannot be everywhere, all the time.

But even trying to be in just enough locations to cover the main stories was a nightmare for executive producers and assignment managers. Our camera, sound and editing equipment, while providing high quality video, was bulky and heavy, and extremely expensive to transport. Sure, we quickly moved mountains of gear when a big story breaks. We still do. We also move smaller mountains of kit for feature stories.

But we've always longed for the luxury of exploring more worldwide locations, for longer periods of time. Great news stories are often like great fish. You need time to land them. But we cannot send four- or five-person news teams on extended fishing trips.

Now, thanks to the new generation of high-quality, lightweight, personal DV cameras, and laptop video-editing software, we have the extended global reach we hoped for. Smaller news teams can travel farther, for longer periods. A reporter can even travel alone, as a one-man band. It can be lonely, but it's a great adventure.

I recently spent 50 days on "The Road to Anywhere," with stops in South Africa, Ghana, Australia, the South Pacific, and Asia. On the Africa leg, I traveled with London-based producer Bruno Roeber, a knowledgeable and companionable Brit. The rest of the way I traveled alone.

For techies, here's the equipment I carried:

Cameras — I carried two: a Sony VX1000 (3 chip) and a Sony TRV9 (one chip). I used the larger VX1000 for the main shooting. The TRV9 served well for tight spaces, and for making backup copies of video, using a FireWire cable, of course.