A new global forum for ideas as brought forth by editorial cartoonists and video journalists has made its debut, and I am delighted to be a part of it.

The Video Journalism Movement, at www.vjmovement.com, comes out of The Netherlands and like many good ideas, began in a bar.

Thomas Loudon was a Dutch video journalist covering the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq who realized that journalists were often hamstrung by the newsroom agendas of their employers from doing the stories they really wanted to do. Comparing notes with other foreign journalists, he learned that they felt the same constraints. He also realized that the different journalists tended to come up with utterly different stories despite being in the same place doing the same work, and began to formulate the concept of using a multitude of viewpoints online to shape a more complete picture of events.

Loudon contacted his web-savvy college buddy Arend Jan van den Beld, who shared his enthusiasm for the concept, and over drinks the VJ Movement was born. They decided to use two high-impact forms of visual communication, videos and editorial cartoons, as the means to distill the various points of view to the online audience, and compile collections from around the world to allow for a broad variety of opinions and viewpoints.

They recruited Tjeerd Royaards, a Dutch cartoonist in Amsterdam, to dig up cartoonists to become part of the project. Royaards happened upon my web site, liked my work, and asked me back in March to participate; I was the first American cartoonist to become involved.

There are about three dozen editorial cartoonists from around the world at the moment, all with very different styles; other American contributors include Karl Wimer in Denver, Douglas Potter in Austin and Tom Kerr in Omaha. There are about 80 video journalists at the moment, all professional freelancers, including Israelis and Palestinians, Indians and Pakistanis.

“There is more than one truth” is VJM’s slogan, and they consider themselves an alternative news model. All content is produced exclusively for the site; there are no repostings of syndicated cartoons here. The content is directed into eight broad “themes” such as Conflict, Superpowers, Human Interaction and Natural Resources, although those themes allow for quite a bit of latitude.

Another unique feature is that all content is chosen by the votes of fellow contributors and members of the public who register and join (for free). The initial content to start the site up was chosen by the VJM team, but once the site went beta the voting mode went into place.

Prospective cartoons are posted in the “Newsroom” and require a certain amount of votes (five, at least as of last month) to be approved. The tricky part for contributors is whether to spend the effort to produce a finished or near-finished cartoon that might well get shelved, or to post a rough sketch that won’t appeal as much to those voting; there’s also the concern of wordlessness versus captions, given the multi-cultural voters. Videos are proposed by summaries of the intended footage and may take the form of interviews, stories or explanations. Comments on all proposals are encouraged.

And unlike many an internet startup (or many established sites, Miss Huffington), they pay contributors (in Euros, but what the hell) and have thus far managed to secure funding from a mix of media foundations, government programs and miscellaneous contributions.

It’s an interesting experiment. It’s a a new global meeting place for news and views.

And for editorial cartooning, it’s a new forum. And our field can certainly use a little Movement in that direction.

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Be sure to see the huge archive of my work (organized by topic area) on my web site at http://www.greenberg-art.com