A camera, firewire, Internet connection and some gumption are all you need to Webcast

By J.D. Lasica
Online Journalism Review

By night, Raven — the name everyone uses for 47-year-old Harold Kionka — works as a janitor, mopping the floors and cleaning the grease traps in TGIFriday’s in Daytona Beach, Fla.

By day, he operates almost single-handedly a 24-hour Internet TV station, serving as owner, station manager, producer and on-air personality.  Daytonabeach-live brings live coverage of events in the Florida resort town to as many as 17,000 viewers a day.

Raven and a handful of others are at the vanguard of a new breed of journalism: personal broadcasting. Using equipment that is now relatively inexpensive and simple to use, these video pioneers are claiming a stake in territory that was once the exclusive province of big media.

But let Raven tell it. “I consider a lot of what I do real reporting with no strings attached. When a major event comes to town, I’m there with my camcorder to record everything that goes down while adding some color commentary. On slower days, I still capture the city’s day-to-day life.” [Read more…] about Personal video journalism hits the Net