Alex Vietinghoff fiddles with a piece of plastic wrap and a cough drop wrapper, as he talks about his journalism education at St. Thomas University.
“I think they were unintentionally teaching us that we had to be working like daily news, breaking covering murders, covering drug rings, and that’s what we had to do.”
He mentions an encounter with an old journalism class friend.
“We were out at the bar awhile ago and he said I wasn’t a journalist, and it was really, it was kind of a slap to the face to me.”
Vietinghoff graduated from the journalism program at St. Thomas University back in 2012. Since then he has interned for news agencies, made commercials for businesses, freelanced and worked for a production company.
More famously, he is co-owner of the New Brunswick satirical news site The Manatee, manages a YouTube channel, and is making nature documentaries in the province, called Trekkit TV.
“I started to, I guess, lean more towards doing something that would actually make some kind of difference, or send some kind of message,” said Vietinghoff. “I started to care a bit less about being the face of something.”
Back in high school he would never have thought that this is how his life would play out. He remembers seeing the movie Anchorman and deciding to pursue the life of an anchorman. However, as he went through university, different forms of media caught his eye.
And soon Vietinghoff started to see journalism in a new light. He thinks that being a journalist doesn’t mean a steady diet of hard news.
“With documentary filmmaking you can spend as much time as you need to, within reason, to get these really nice shots, or tell a story with a camera moving, or light things in a certain way.”
Vietinghoff works for a documentary film series with Bell Aliant TV1. He was hired to help with social media, tech advice and making episodes for Trekkit TV. They’re free to watch online.
The show focuses on the outdoors, exploring, hiking, and bringing adventure to people’s lives.
“It’s fun for me because I get to do adventure reality television.”
With documentaries he hopes he’s making a difference or entertaining viewers. He hopes someday this will become his main source of income.
Vietinghoff says documentaries provide an opportunity for quality, ensuring that while the story is captivating, it’s also beautiful visually and through audio.
When Vietinghoff isn’t working on things like Trekkit TV, he’s helping Shauna Chase with The Manatee. The satirical news-site took off in the summer before last through his definition of a ‘soft launch,’ and today the site has over 3.4 million views.
“Everyone now-a-days is asking me ‘oh like my thing, donate money, subscribe, follow, retweet,’ and we’re always asking these sort of things of people,” he said.
The Manatee started off as an idea between Vietinghoff and Chase, now his girlfriend, to produce satirical news for a province where nobody big was doing it already.
Now they’re applying for government grants for funding for the site.
Access to The Manatee is free and as often as the articles are shared on Facebook and other social media, the business only receives a trickle of ad revenue through Google. Not many local businesses advertise through the site.
“The problem with the grant applications is that you put all this tons of hours of work, enough work to qualify to be like a full time job in itself, and you get a ‘no.’”
Vietinghoff would like The Manatee to be a full-time job, making money equivalent to the work they put in. And he’d like to spend more time working on his documentaries.
Still, he’s comfortable in the life he has now, the one that he couldn’t have seen himself in while in high school or in university.
“I’m not making tons of money, not everyone knows who I am or anything like that, but in all I’m so much happier than I would be if I had stuck with that notion in my head that the only successful path would be to like go be an anchorman or work 9-5 at a daily news station.”
