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News from the Future of Public Media
What is public media "beyond broadcast," in the world of iPods, blogs and vlogs, of virtual reality, of cellphone audio and video? How can traditional public media and new online social networks engage and protect citizens' spaces for public expression and debate? Comments from the front lines of experiment and dialog here!
Posts
UGC uses Hollywood archetypes to support Obama
Posted by Alison Hanold on May 5, 2008
This election season has seen a surge of commentary from the User Generated Content community, and Obama supporters have taken to comparing him to Hollywood hero archetypes. Below are some great examples of pieces that rely on the principles of fair use for their commentary in the political sphere. Here is a video titled “The Empire Strikes Baracky.” This video likens Obama to Luke Skywalker and Hans Solo, and positions Hillary Clinton as what is often considered to be the most evil character in film history, Darth Vader. The video attempts to draw a comparison in the story lines in… more
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Crowdsourcing censorship
Posted by Jessica Clark on May 3, 2008
Annalee Newitz—tech reporter and editor of a hot new sci-fi blog io9—has an interesting column up on AlterNet titled User-Generated Censorship. She writes: Here’s how it works: let’s say you’re a community activist who has some pretty vehement opinions about your city government. You go to Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, and create a free blog called Why the Municipal Government in Crappy City Sucks. Of course, a bunch of people in Crappy City disagree with you — and maybe even hate you personally. So instead of making mean comments on your blog, they decide to shut it down.… more
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Fair Use Question About Using Book Covers and Newspapers
Posted by Michael T. Miller on May 1, 2008
QUESTION: Dear CSM, my little documentary that I’m producing — which of course I hope will be a big documentary — is using a montage of several book jackets to illustrate the fact that science and spirituality are becoming more related than they have been — books like “The Tao of Physics.” The rigmarole to get clearances from the publishers is daunting and I wonder if it is necessary. There is nothing negative being said about the books, and in the world of logic one would thing that showing the jackets could only benefit sales. Do I still, for the… more
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Innovation in Focus - Digital Election: Link TV’s “Dear American Voter”
Posted by Bree Bowman on May 1, 2008
Link TV’s new “Dear American Voter” project is using digital platforms to give the global community a voice in the upcoming election, an event that will shift the policies and direction of the entire world. Individuals can upload their video “letters” to American citizens about how they would vote in the election and why, how American policies have affected their lives, and what they think the priorities for the new Administration should be. “Dear American Voter” is a vivid example of how participatory digital media can bridge communities on a global level and provide a forum for diverse voices and… more
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Whose Identity Is It, Anyway?: National Film Board as Public Media
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 30, 2008
What difference does it make to have government funding for public media? Look at Canada, where the National Film Board (NFB) for more than 60 years has produced films that engage publics on national and cultural issues. The NFB shone at the HotDocs documentary film festival, which every April in Toronto showcases the latest Canadian work, as well as international production. My personal favorite of all the films I saw at HotDocs was an NFB production: Mohawk filmmaker Tracey Deer’s Club Native. Tracey Deer lives in a small Mohawk community where group membership is decided by blood kinship. That wasn’t… more
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Mapping User-Generated Media Part I: Red, Blue and Beyond
Posted by Jessica Clark on Apr 30, 2008
This is the latest post in our series featuring maps of the media landscape, which leads up to the June 17 conference, Beyond Broadcast: Mapping Public Media. (Note: Today is the last day to register at the earlybird rate!). One of the trends we’re examining at the conference is the rise of data visualization tools for examining online media content and networked publics. We began this research in conjunction with the Amsterdam-based Govcom.org Foundation, and have continued to explore other visualization and mapping approaches. The Presidential Watch 08 site provides an example of what has become a common impulse: mapping… more
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Filmmaker as Voice of Civil Society: Leo Eaton on America at a Crossroads
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 29, 2008
Our good friend Leo Eaton, a veteran public affairs and public broadcasting producer, writes in his annual letter to the field about how he sees the role of the documentarian. He also talks about the role of public broadcasting, and shares a revealing inside story that shows how embattled the notion of civil discourse on television is: I was series producer for the epic PBS current-affairs series America at a Crossroads that took over an entire week of prime-time programming (12 hours) back in April of last year. In spite of all the political controversy surrounding the gestation of a… more
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Not-So-Profitable Doc and Public Broadcasting
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 29, 2008
Arts Engine executive director Katy Chevigny, a leader in the field of documentary production (and whose timely and watchable film Election Day is part of the stunning summer season on public television series P.O.V., has written a thought-provoking blog entry. She notes that some documentaries are hugely popular (An Inconvenient Truth) and others are highly targeted (Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price). But what happens to the “smaller or artier documentary”? Katy observes that: It’s more difficult to raise the funds or to make the argument that an audience will want to see it. Films like the Maysles’ Salesman… more
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Good News on Fair Use and Frame Grabs
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 29, 2008
For the last 15 years, film scholars have been asserting their fair use rights to reproduce stills and frame grabs of films and videos they discuss in their work. They’ve been helped by a clear statement of their rights created by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Now, Kristin Thompson, who as president of SCMS in 1993 guided the creation of that statement, has assessed in her blog what has happened since. The news is all good: Scholars have used their rights, there have been no lawsuits, and related case law (especially the Bill Graham Archives case) has reinforced… more
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HotDocs and Copyright Balancing
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 28, 2008
At HotDocs on April 21, an international panel showcased the importance of exercising the balancing features of copyright, even in countries where fair use does not exist. Canadian filmmaker Brett Gaylor, who’s making a film called Basement Tapes: The Making of a Pirate Movie, explained how he’s encouraging others to contribute material to his “Open Source Cinema” project. Gaylor argues that copyright understanding constricts creativity. His film in progress exposes the enormous creativity unleashed in mashups, remixes, and sampling. It uses the balancing features of Canadian copyright law, called fair dealing, to display such work legally within the film, which… more
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Mapping the primaries, public media style
Posted by Jessica Clark on Apr 17, 2008
This is the latest in a series of media maps I’m examining between now and our June 17 Beyond Broadcast conference. With the last of the intra-Democratic debates now over, all eyes are on the April 22 primary in Pennsylvania. Public broadcasting outlets have banded together to share news and information about the primaries through this nifty interactive map: The map provides primary-related news feeds from both national and local public broadcasting sources. It ticks off the number of delegates at stake, and includes a tracker to keep tabs on those pesky superdelegates. County-by-county results are available (the data is… more
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Political videos utilizing fair use
Posted by Alison Hanold on Apr 14, 2008
The usage of viral videos as a form of public media has grown rapidly in recent years, and political videos are no exception. During this evolution, political videos have begun quoting each other, very often utilizing fair use principles in order to provide commentary about other political commentators. Take for example “Hillary 2.0.” This video by Hugh Atkin adopts the format of videos by the group Anonymous (another fascinating internet emergence – read this post from Henry Jenkins’ blog to learn more about it). It suggests that Hillary Clinton’s campaign is a machine that, prompted by the success of videos… more
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This week’s map: 25 years of media mergers
Posted by Jessica Clark on Apr 11, 2008
This week’s entry in our ongoing Atlas of Media Maps series comes to us from Mother Jones magazine. Titled “And then there were eight: 25 years of media mergers, from GE-NBC to Google-YouTube,” it’s now more than a year old. But it effectively tells the story of a perpetual trend: the ever-increasing consolidation of media ownership. This map builds on previous media consolidation mapping efforts, like The Nation’s 2006 map of the National Entertainment State. Such visualizations of the communications landscape have served as tools in the media reform movement, championed by advocates such as the Consumers Union, and have… more
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Netizenship: The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 9, 2008
Are we headed backwards, to a media world that looks more like cable than the Internet? For Jonathan Zittrain, the iPhone is the enemy, Wikipedia is our friend, and our laptops are battle zones in a new war. By the time you’re done reading The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It (Yale University Press), you’ll be looking at that iPhone with suspicion as well. Zittrain argues that the key to the astounding creativity in the high-tech digital environment in the last two decades is the relatively open nature of the PC, combined with the relatively open nature of… more
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Fair Use Goes International: Israel
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Apr 9, 2008
The highlight of my trip to the high-energy, high-touch DocAviv Documentary Film Festival was an open workshop on copyright and documentary, attended by about 35 filmmakers and a few lawyers. It shouldn’t have been surprising, but Israeli documentary filmmakers are just as frustrated and confused as U.S. makers used to be about what copyrighted material they must license and what they can just use. They’re just as eager to figure it out, and they’ve suddenly become poster children for fair use outside the U.S. Israeli law was just changed to incorporate U.S.-style fair use. “We don’t yet know how courts… more
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Avian Flu watch on Flickr
Posted by Alison Hanold on Apr 4, 2008
A new watch pool on Flickr allows the public to follow the Avian Flu pandemic and to share information and news through images. The project is an example of the growing role that new web 2.0 tools hold in informing the public on important news from around the globe. Our research and focus on public media here at the Center for Social Media is important in understanding how society is evolving in its usage of media for public knowledge and action. You can read more about this in our Public Media FAQ. You can view the pool at http://flickr.com/groups/influenza/pool/ more
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ICA Preconference: Remapping Public Media—registration still open until May 3
Posted by guest on Apr 4, 2008
On May 22, the Center for Social Media will be sponsoring a preconference as part of the International Communication Associations yearly conference. It will build upon the Center for Social Media’s Mapping Public Media project, directed by Jessica Clark. Clark heads up CSM’s Future of Public Media project, funded by the Ford Foundation. The preconference will showcase cross-disciplinary perspectives and conclude with discussion of a research agenda on public media (click here to read our public media FAQ) in a participatory digital era of communication. Please join us for this exciting event! International Communication Association Preconference: Remapping Public Media Thursday,… more
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Success in Alternative Distribution
Posted by guest on Apr 2, 2008
By Laurie Moy, Graduate Student, American University, School of Communication, International Media Program For most directors, going from Hollywood to YouTube would be a demotion. But for Robert Greenwald the move from the silver screen to the computer screen was part of a “personal transformation.” Speaking at the Center for American Progress’s Internet Advocacy Roundtable, Greenwald explained how he has come to embrace “alternative distribution.” And it has embraced him. His films had had over 43 million views, and it is estimated that one of his online films is seen every 2 seconds. So what’s the secret to his success?… more
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Fair Use Question About Non-Profits Using Music
Posted by Michael T. Miller on Apr 1, 2008
QUESTION: Dear CSM, I am interested in streaming audio on my organization’s website. More specifically, we want to stream a song on each of our issue pages. We want to find songs that reflect our positions on issues. What kind of music can we stream? We are a tax exempt 527 organization. Thanks, - “Green Change” ANSWER: The Supreme Court generally considers three things when deciding whether a use of someone else’s copyrighted material is fair or not. These include whether the use is transformative, i.e. whether the use changed the context of the original material or not, whether the… more
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Innovation in Focus: ITVS’s Fatworld
Posted by Bree Bowman on Apr 1, 2008
Using video games to educate the public on diet, nutrition and making informed decisions. As American youth reach unprecedented levels of obesity, ITVS Interactive and PBS’s Emmy-award–winning weekly series Independent Lens are using a new kind of media to help find a solution to this complex problem. FATWORLD is an experimental, online video game that explores the relationships between obesity, nutrition and socioeconomics in the United States. Launched in January 2008, and downloaded 53,000 times in the two weeks after its release, the project demonstrates how public media can open a dialogue on deeply rooted social and economic problems, as… more
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WAM! showcases new directions in feminist and activist media
Posted by Alison Hanold on Apr 1, 2008
This weekend I had the great pleasure to attend the Women, Action & the Media (WAM!) Conference on the campus of MIT. While there, I met an impressive array of young activists and experienced professionals who use media (magazines, blogs, comics, radio, documentaries) to draw attention to their causes. align=”right”>The conference featured Keynote Speakers Helen Thomas, the first woman officer of the National Press Club and the first woman member and president of the White House Correspondents Association, and Haifa Zangana, a novelist and former prisoner of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime. The conference featured sessions focused on making high impact… more
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This week’s maps: Social Starfish and the Map of Me
Posted by Jessica Clark on Mar 31, 2008
This week’s media map post is a twofer, since I was distracted last week by the stimulating Media Re:public conference, all about how the rise of participatory media is intersecting with the news and information environment. In honor of that theme I present the Social Media Starfish: Created in November by online marketer Darren Barefoot in response to a video by Web 2.0 guru Robert Scoble, the starfish is useful for public media makers thinking about different distribution, publicity and engagement platforms for involving publics with their content. It serves as a bit of a checklist in the round: create… more
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Digital Storytelling – A Movement in the Making
Posted by Bree Bowman on Mar 31, 2008
The Center for Social Media welcomed Stefani Sese, of the Center for Digital Storytelling, who led a discussion on the growing role that digital storytelling has in advocacy campaigns. She initiated the discussion by defining digital storytelling as “something between slideshow a PowerPoint presentation, and a documentary.” The Center for Digital Storytelling provides training to individuals to produce three-minute digital shorts that focus not so much on the technology or production technique, but on a good, powerful story driven by narrative and personal life experience, an approach that is rooted in theater and storytelling traditions. The projects are made possible… more
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Turnitin, Fair Use Hero
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Mar 26, 2008
There’s an irony in the recent court victory of the anti-plagiarism site Turnitin. I believe that Turnitin protects the jobs of the laziest group of teachers across the nation—people who assign the same general assignment year after year. Worse, Turnitin depends on a romantic and wrong idea of creativity (individual originality as the highest value), and it forms part of the copyright mis-education of American students by associating all copying and collaborating with cheating. But when it got sued, it turned to fair use—the right under copyright to use other copyrighted work under certain circumstances. (More on fair use here)… more
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At SXSW, Digital Change at the Podium
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Mar 26, 2008
How are digital tools transforming the production of media? Anyone concerned with the future of public media needs ways and places to assess the rate and nature of change. South by Southwest (SXSW, aka South By), the combined tech-film-music festival in Austin in March, is one such place. Independent filmmakers and distributors flooded to panels discussing how the digital tools and social networking have changed both production and distribution. What last year was gee-whiz, look what we can do, this year was all about technique and strategy. Younger, no-budget filmmakers like Aaron Katz (Dance Party USA) discussed how to make… more
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Telling the Story to Further the Cause – CSM welcomes Visiting Filmmaker Liz Miller
Posted by Bree Bowman on Mar 24, 2008
You’ve just seen a documentary film that told a powerful story, represented an important cause, raised awareness of an issue critical to people’s lives, or offered solutions to make the world better. Now what? The Center for Social Media welcomed environmental filmmaker Liz Miller for a discussion of her new documentary, The Water Front, and on how to strategically use documentary film to extend its story beyond the screen as a powerful advocacy vehicle for complex social issues. The Water Front tells the stories of the residents of Highland Park, MI, a post-industrial town in an economic crisis just outside… more
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Public Media: What, Why and Where?
Posted by Jessica Clark on Mar 23, 2008
I was planning a post about the media activism community for this weekly series on media maps that leads up to the Beyond Broadcast conference, but then I came across this useful visualization of content flow on Dennis Haarsager’s blog, Technology 360. Haarsager, who was just named the interim CEO of NPR, writes: In a meeting with the NPR staff on Friday, I talked about there being three layers that we need to consider. At the top is why we’re here at all as a non-profit. There are surely better formulations, but we make people smarter, better citizens, more culturally… more
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This week’s map: of cats and censorship
Posted by Jessica Clark on Mar 13, 2008
Each week between now and our Beyond Broadcast conference, I’m examining an online media map, searching for the role that public media plays within it. This week’s map is a project of Global Voices. Called Access Denied, it tracks online censorship and anti-censorship efforts of Web 2.0 content around the world. Like many of the new participatory maps, it uses Google maps as a platform. What does this map tell us about public media? Well, if you believe as we do here at CSM that publics are central to creating and sharing public media, this map demonstrates the crucial role… more
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New Media after the Storm - Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster
Posted by Bree Bowman on Mar 13, 2008
It’s been almost 3 years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans and parts of the Gulf coast. How has the region recovered? The Open Society Institute’s Katrina: An Unnatural Disaster uses new media tools to document life in post-Katrina New Orleans and the surrounding region. Most importantly, the project demonstrates how new media can serve as a stepping stone to deeper analysis and discussion of issues like poverty, crisis management and the effectiveness of public policy in our country. Nearly three dozen journalists, photographers and youth media groups received fellowships from the Open Society Institute to collaborate on… more
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Crafting Public Radio
Posted by Jessica Clark on Mar 7, 2008
Etsy—the innovative online marketplace for artists and crafters—is hosting a series of articles on podcasting as a form of DIY creativity, featuring interviews with and tips from independent and public radio producers, ruminations on the overlap between crafting and independent media making, and suggestions for the best podcasts from the Etsy community. Etsy itself has been a case study in how independent producers can succesfully band together to offer their products to a larger audience. In the process, crafters have organized around environmental and consumer issues, creating a recycling project for swapping supplies, and campaigns urging shoppers to buy handmade… more
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Beyond Broadcast: Maps as Public Media/Mapping Public Media
Posted by Jessica Clark on Mar 3, 2008
For the past year, I’ve been tracking the evolution of participatory maps as a new form of public media, a trend I outline in an In These Times story titled “The New Cartographers.” Maps are everywhere these days. The ubiquity of global positioning systems (GPS) and mobile directional devices, interactive mapping tools and social networks is feeding a mapping boom. Amateur geographers are assigning coordinates to everything they can get their hands on—and many things they can’t. “Locative artists” are attaching virtual installations to specific locales, generating imaginary landscapes brought vividly to life in William Gibson’s latest novel, Spook Country.… more
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Public Media—Read All About It
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Mar 3, 2008
The first book chapter to emerge from the Future of Public Media research done at the Center is now in circulation. Participation and Media Production: Critical Reflections on Content Creation, edited by Nico Carpentier and Benjamin De Cleen (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008) includes several essays on the challenges of developing public media in the digital, participatory era. For instance, Nick Couldry talks about how media and political representation are tightly joined. Mark Deuze discusses commercialization of the digital environment, and Josh Lauer cautions us to see current practices in data-mining as new ways to turn consumers into cash cows. Katja… more
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Fair Use on Trial, and Knowledge Wins
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Mar 3, 2008
Chicago filmmaker Floyd Webb wanted to make a movie about a colorful martial arts figure, who called himself Counte Dante (http://johnkeehan.blogspot.com/). The grandmaster of the Black Dragon Fighting Society, William V. Aguiar III, tried to stop him by blocking his access to images of Counte Dante and material from his training video. But Webb had attended an Independent Feature Project panel discussion of the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use. (IFP was a signatory and co-author of the document, which was facilitated by the Center and the Washington College of Law.) Webb knew he had fair use… more
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The Alliance for Justice – Changing the Face of Social Justice Advocacy
Posted by Bree Bowman on Mar 3, 2008
For almost 15 years, the Alliance for Justice has been using cutting-edge new media strategies to engage the public to advance the cause of social justice, civil rights and public empowerment – long before these tools became a part of our daily lives. Last week, the Center for Social Media welcomed Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, and filmmaker Glen Pearcy for a public lecture to discuss his newest film, Supreme Injustices and related digital outreach strategies. The film tells the stories behind two recent controversial Supreme Court cases addressing the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education,… more
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Innovation in Focus: The National Black Programming Consortium’s New Media Institute
Posted by Bree Bowman on Feb 29, 2008
The NBPC’s New Media Institute, which held its second training workshop in November, is a vivid example of how public broadcasters can shape the future of public media. NBPC is training professionals in state-of-the-art digital and web tools, to tell powerful stories in new ways. This season’s workshop—held in Jackson, Mississippi, in partnership with Mississippi Public Broadcasting—focused on the culture of the Mississippi Delta region and the impact of American jazz. NBPC formed teams of filmmakers, new media professionals and web designers based on the participants’ interests and experience to work together to create games, podcasts (like ‘Sojuke,’, which integrates… more
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CSM Welcomes Pegie Stark of Eyetrack07
Posted by Alison Hanold on Feb 25, 2008
The CSM was thrilled to welcome Pegie Stark this past Friday and Saturday to speak to American University students about her latest project, Eyetrack07, which explored the viewing habits of readers, and made some surprising discoveries about how people are absorbing information, both print and online. Dr. Stark’s appearance was the second installment of the Center’s Innovator’s Forum Speaker Series. The objective of the project, as the Eyetrack website points out, “…was to focus on differences and similarities in print and online reading. How do print and online readers navigate through the paper or Web site? Do people behave differently… more
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The BigThink Tank
Posted by Bree Bowman on Feb 20, 2008
A new project called BigThink is making it easier for the public to find reliable, credible information on the Internet, as well as allowing individuals to make their expertise heard on important issues. The digital age offers the public an abundance of information, empowering individuals to make informed decisions on important issues, but the sheer volume of content makes it difficult to discern what’s reliable and what’s not. BigThink provides users with “direct, unfiltered interviews” with thought leaders and experts on a variety of ethical, political and cultural topics and offers the public a multi-media platform to respond to what… more
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Center for Social Media to Host Beyond Broadcast 2008
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 19, 2008
June 17—save the date Building on the momentum of this year’s very successful Making Your Media Matter gathering, we’re thrilled to announce that the Center will be organizing the 2008 Beyond Broadcast conference. Over the past few years, Beyond Broadcast has become a can’t-miss destination for innovative media-makers, scholars and policy experts seeking to understand the evolution of public media in a digital, participatory era. The theme of this year’s gathering is “Remapping Public Media,” and we’ll be using mapping and visualization tools to examine shifting forms, functions and fiscal strategies for public media projects. We’ll also be featuring demonstrations… more
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MediaShift: Presidential Participatory Media
Posted by Alison Hanold on Feb 19, 2008
Mark Glaser at MediaShift wrote a very interesting blog yesterday that contains a variety of ideas for the next President of the United States to engage in an open and transparent discussion with the public via participatory media. Some of these exciting ideas include a Presidential blog, a public policy wiki that can play a part in creating a bill before it goes to Congress, live online chats, a money flow chart, and an up to date schedule of who the President is meeting with. These concepts are very exciting considering the growth of meaningful political dialogue online, but it… more
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Remixing Remixes
Posted by Alison Hanold on Feb 18, 2008
While researching videos for Recut, Reframe, Recycle, I was often struck by the meta verse that exists in the user generated content world. Videos that remix are often being remixed, and the dialogue is ever expanding. The Dramatic Chipmunk meme, for example, is an interesting phenomenon. While conducting our research for Recut, we found that there were over 92 remixes of the “original video” (which was actually a remix of a Japanese television show.) Here is the original video: The meme is continuing. I recently came across the Dramatic Lemur: The recent viral success of Will.i.am’s “Yes We Can” video… more
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Immigration Game Highlighted at MYMM Launches!
Posted by Ann Williams on Feb 18, 2008
Today international human rights organization Breakthrough launched ICED! I Can End Deportation - a 3D RPG designed to lead users through the complex process of becoming a U.S. citizen. In the game, you can step inside the shoes of one out of five immigrant teens, each of a different ethnicity and immigration status. The game teaches how immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights to all immigrants. The site also includes supplemental materials for classroom or community organizing repurposing and take actions. On February 7, ICED! lead programmer Heidi Boisvert sat on the Center’s Games for Social Change… more
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Fair Use Question About News Footage
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Feb 15, 2008
QUESTION: Dear CSM, Certain networks will not license ANY footage that has on-air talent (e.g. newscasters such as Howard K Smith or Harry Reasoner). Other networks will license that footage, but only if cleared with the proper talent guilds, and often at a higher rate. But if these newscasts are part of American History, shouldn’t they be usable? I.e. Isn’t excluding their use out of hand unfair to not only the filmmaker but to the historical record? One can claim fair use, but at the possible cost of jeopardizing any future good will and relationships with the networks. Might the… more
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Reliving MYMM08: rapporteur’s report, pics and more!
Posted by Ann Williams on Feb 15, 2008
The rapporteur’s report for this year’s Making Your Media Matter conference is now online. Click here to read the report, written by Kate Schuler, a graduate student in AU’s School of Communication. If you haven’t had a chance to visit the Center’s Flickr site, go now! And if you’re looking to continue a conversation you started at MYMM, you can do just that on our Wiki. You’ll need to register if you haven’t already (it’s the same one we used for the birds of a feather lunch), then click “discussions” to reply to a message or post your own. We’ll… more
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24/7 DIY Video Summit: “A Gathering of the Tribes”
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 14, 2008
Over on the Convergence Culture Consortium blog, Henry Jenkins writes about the 24/7 DIY Video Summit, which took place at USC on February 8-10. He celebrates the riotous overlap between the different forms of do-it-yourself filmmaking highlighted by conference organizers Mimi Ito and Steve Anderson: [The summit] represented a gathering of the tribes, bringing together and sparking conversations between many of the different communities which have been involved in producing and distributing “amateur” media content in recent years. …screenings focused on 8 different traditions of production— Political Remix, Activist Media, Independent Arts Video, Youth Media, Machinima, Fan Vids, Videoblogging, Anime… more
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New field report - Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes
Posted by Barbara Abrash on Feb 14, 2008
Today the Center for Social Media is publishing the first in a series of “field reports” designed to illuminate innovative public media projects: Hip-Hop, Beyond Beats and Rhymes. I completed the research for this report in March 2007, just after the film’s PBS broadcast, but the story of how filmmaker Byron Hurt has worked with partners like ITVS and Firelight films to make his documentary the center of an evolving outreach campaign continues, as his keynote presentation at last week’s Making Your Media Matter conference demonstrated. It sometimes seems miraculous that social issue documentary films – which customarily deal with… more
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Final Word from MYMM: Short Shorts and Hot Platforms
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 8, 2008
This panel on emerging formats and distribution strategies closed out the day with a sexy bevy of case studies of cutting-edge public multimedia projects and the challenges they have faced. Daniel Hartman of See3 and dogooder.tv moderated the panel. Matisse Bustos Hawkes spoke about the WITNESS Hub, which launched in beta form in December. The Hub project hosts human rights video clips uploaded by both amateur and trained filmmakers around the world—their motto is “see it, film it, change it.” They decided that a specific platform for human rights footage was needed in order to protect the privacy of those… more
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MYMM Afternoon Panel: Crossing Cultural Boundaries
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 8, 2008
Frederick Thomas of MHz Networks moderated the afternoon panel on media projects that attempt to bridge cultures and open up new channels of communication. Nenad Maksimovic of AED spoke about two projects: TV Magazine, and CooperaTIVa TV. The TV Magazine project aims to open up inter-community dialogue in Kosovo by examining potential “connectors” and “dividers,” while putting a human face on social issues. The production team serves as mediators and facilitators, opening up space for media teams from each community to work together, and modeling collaborative attitudes. Maksimovic said that in a project such as this, it was more important… more
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Keynote: Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 8, 2008
Keynote speaker Byron Hurt, writer and director of Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, was joined by the film’s community outreach campaign strategist, Sonya Childress of Firelight Media, to discuss how the film has been used to reach out to audiences well beyond its initial airing on PBS. A fan of hip-hop, Hurt was disturbed by the sexist, violent and homophobic content of many artists’ songs. He wanted to make a film that would appeal to and start conversations among other hip-hop fans, and the successful multi-platform, multi-city campaign has done just that. Center for Social Media Research Fellow Barbara Abrash… more
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“Plight Entertainment”: Engaging Audiences With Difficult Stories
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 8, 2008
This morning’s Making Your Media Matter panel addresses a central question for social issue media-makers: how can you keep people watching—and make them care—when your topic is disturbing? Julia Bacha, who co-wrote wrote Control Room, showed a clip from Encounter Point, a documentary film about nonviolent activists in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The film was meant to serve as a platform for these activists, in contrast to the mainstream media’s focus on violence and political maneuvering. “It’s not like we’re trying to force-feed the media with something that’s not newsworthy,” said Bacha. “There have been victories on the ground.” She explained… more
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Live from the Gaming Panel: Documentary Gaming and more
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 7, 2008
Suzanne Seggerman from Games for Change introduced the panel, starting her presentation by addressing fear, talking about how each new media generates resistance in its era. (Voltaire on books: “the multitude of books is making us ignorant.”) She noted that it’s not just “boys in basements” playing games—the average gamer is 33. The MacArthur Foundation is funding research on games, and has found that they are great tools for exploring new worlds and new perspectives, teaching complex problem solving with multiple variables, and testing out new behaviors. Games can “really help systemic thinking,” notes Seggarman. “Situated learning” is another behavior… more
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Welcome to our Revamped Blog!
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 7, 2008
Steady readers of our News from the Future of Public Media blog will have noticed some changes over the past few months. We’ve been doing more reporting on innovative public media projects and related trends and issues. We also recently combined posts from our Copyright and Fair Use blog into the mix, because we believe that intellectual property is a crucial issue in the evolution of user-generated and participatory media-making. In honor of the center’s Making Your Media Matter conference, which starts this afternoon, we’re shifting the blog so that it becomes the main feature on our home page. I’ll… more
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Super Tuesday: Vote. Record. Blog. Map. Upload. Discuss.
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 5, 2008
Elections are inherently both public and participatory, so naturally there are scores of related public media projects. In honor of Super Tuesday, here are just a few worth checking out: American Public Media: Select a Candidate: This interactive survey helps users to match their political opinions with those of the candidates, and then join political discussions at Gather.com. YouTube’s You Choose ‘08 Super Tuesday Map: Users can upload and share media related to their local primaries via a Google-powered mapping interface. New York Times Polling Place Photo Project: Users can upload photos of their polling places, capturing “the richness and… more
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Can Nonprofit Funding Save Journalism?
Posted by Jessica Clark on Feb 4, 2008
The February/March issue of The American Journalism Review offers a great overview of a recent question that’s been floating around the journalism and funding communities: Is it time for nonprofits to step up and compensate for the failures of for-profit journalism? The author, Carol Guensburg, profiles a number of current and emerging nonprofit projects designed to produce investigative and issue-based reporting. She notes: Beleaguered journalists who once clung solely to the business model of paid advertising and circulation now recognize the urgency of developing new revenue sources for labor-intensive newsgathering. For some, foundations hold increasing promise as allies in meeting… more
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Innovation in Focus – The Sundance Institute’s DocSource Project
Posted by Bree Bowman on Jan 31, 2008
Launched just a week ago at the Sundance Film Festival, the Sundance Institute’s new DocSource is an online hub that uses the latest digital tools to connect filmmakers, human rights advocates and publics from around the globe supporting a robust international social documentary environment. Cara Mertes, director of the Sundance Documentary Film Program (DFP), notes that DocSource provides tools and content not only for the filmmakers, but for audiences as well, making the important stories behind the program’s international documentary films more accessible and open for public discussion. “I see a new field of human rights documentary emerging, fueled by… more
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Can the Public Catalog the Public’s Library?
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Jan 31, 2008
The “wisdom of crowds” logic has struck the Library of Congress, in a good way. The nation’s library (linked here) is now asking members of the public to identify and tag—on commercial site Flickr—thousands of public domain photographs in its collection. This attempt to use crowdsourcing to expand the value of resources that belong to the public at large is one worth watching. more
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Fair Use Question About Incidental Use
Posted by Michael T. Miller on Jan 31, 2008
QUESTION: Dear CSM, I’m editing a documentary about an aspiring young football player. An interview occurs in a hotel room, where he happens to be watching an NFL game on broadcast TV. In referencing the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in Fair Use, in particular the third class of situations (capturing copyrighted media content in the process of filming something else), and the fourth limitation (the captured content does not constitute the scene’s primary focus of interest), I feel comfortable that when the tv and game appear in the background, it’s fair use. But when the filmmaker captured closeup… more
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Sundance 2008—What’s Public and What’s Just Advocacy?
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Jan 31, 2008
This year’s Sundance Film Festival was chock-full of activist films, wearing their passion and conviction on their sleeves. There was I.O.U.S.A., Patrick Creadon’s travelogue of a small, conservative-tilting band of accountants (including the U.S. Comptroller General) on a nationwide tour to wake us up to the crisis of deficit spending. There was Flow: for Love of Water, Irena Salina’s alarming film about the poisoning of the world’s water supply and the counter-productive schemes of privatized water corporations to manage it. There was Fields of Fuel, Josh Tickell’s paean to biodiesel as a solution to our oil addiction. And there was… more
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Low on Lindens? The sweatshop beckons…
Posted by Ann Williams on Jan 23, 2008
Sundance brought us more than glitz and glamour in ’08. This year, New Frontiers on Main showcased the best of what’s new (and in fashion) for media for public knowledge and action. This year’s must-have accessory? Double Happiness jeans, made by indentured avatars in a sweatshop in the virtual world of Second Life. Avatars (this could be you!) work their factory shifts in exchange for virtual plots of SL property. Customers at Sundance were invited to order their jeans from the sweat shop (choices include skinny leg and “Boyfriend” styles), then watch as a giant printer delivered their order on… more
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Shifting It Around – ShiftSpace Challenges Content Ownership and Distribution
Posted by Bree Bowman on Jan 23, 2008
The internet promises an open information environment, but with control of much online content held by individual website owners, the true “democratization” of information is stymied. A new tool called ShiftSpace is looking to change this by allowing users to add original meta-layers, or “Shifts,” on top of existing websites, helping to craft a fluid public space where users can contribute original content and commentary. By pressing the [shift] and [space] keys, users can see and create new content and commentary. ShiftSpace offers a variety of tools, including the basic ”Notes” and ”Highlights,” which allow users to comment on website… more
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Wu and Cotton mix it up over copyright protection in the digital age
Posted by Maura Ugarte on Jan 21, 2008
There’s a really interesting discussion happening on copyright protections in the new era of YouTube and peer to peer networks. The NY Times organized a debate between Rick Cotton, general counsel of NBC Universal, and Professor Tim Wu from Columbia Law School. You can find it here: bits.blogs.nytimes.com. The debate mainly has revolved around whether strict copyright protections can and should be observed online, whether internet gatekeepers should control and be responsible for copyright protection, and whether fair use is really usable in the unstructured, free-for-all atmosphere of user generated content. The recent report that the CSM released argues that… more
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Open Source Visual History
Posted by Jessica Clark on Jan 21, 2008
For documentarians, the Library of Congress image collections have long served as a fertile source for public domain historical images. But finding the right photo has often meant either drilling down into online collections or wrestling with not-so-user-friendly archival databases. However, the library of record has just taken an interesting leap, announcing a joint project with photo-sharing site Flickr. As Matt Raymond writes on the LOC blog: The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will… more
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Fair Use Goes International
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Jan 17, 2008
American creators who produce for the international marketplace—and that means most documentarians these days—complain that fair use doesn’t cross national borders gracefully. They’re right. But American-style fair use—the right to use some copyrighted material without permission or payment, when the public’s gain is greater than private loss (centerforsocialmedia.org/fairuse)—is becoming more and more popular internationally. Israel has just passed legislation reforming its copyright law (read Hebrew? Here it is: http://www.knesset.gov.il/privatelaw/data/17/3/196_3_1.rtf. If not, the English is at http://www.tau.ac.il/law/members/birnhack/IsraeliCopyrightAct2007.pdf) . It has lifted entire the U.S. fair use language. It has then gone one important step further, avoiding the onerous and counter-productive legal… more
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Social Networks: Democratic or Downright Devious?
Posted by Jessica Clark on Jan 15, 2008
Andrew Leonard at Salon provides an intriguing preview of Georgetown historian Bryan McCann’s forthcoming history of modern Brazil: “The Orkut Rule,” writes McCann…”holds that, wherever possible, Brazilians will avail themselves of the possibilities of digital media to create subcultural niches and cross cultural networks in ways that defy traditional social hierarchies and the existing national cultural canon.” … McCann’s fascinating exploration of how culture circulates in Brazil places the Orkut phenomenon, with all its anarchic energy, in the context of a nation in which mainstream cultural production is predominantly subsidized by state largesse. Petrobras, the huge state-owned oil company, alone… more
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The New Media Hits New Hampshire
Posted by Jasmine Touton on Jan 11, 2008
Two days before 30 American University students arrived to fan out across the Manchester, NH Primary-land and film 3 to 5 minute mini-docs on the youth vote’s interaction with the 2008 Presidential election, a San Francisco-based television network set up a storefront to do the same thing. Current TV, a progressive television network created in 2005 by Al Gore and targeted at young people, sent out “collective journalists” to produce an alternative kind of coverage of the New Hampshire primaries. The network typically uses viewer-created content, 3 to 5 minute “pods” uploaded by Current.com audience members and voted onto their… more
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Takedowns of Online Video—”We Haven’t Seen Any Problems”? Look Here
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Jan 11, 2008
While my colleague Peter Jaszi and I were at the Consumer Electronics Show last week talking about our latest study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video , we pointed out that more was at stake than business models. When online video platforms take down perfectly legal video because a content holder says there’s use of their copyrighted material in it, that’s private censorship. And the issue isn’t just this generation of happy-go-lucky video makers, either. What’s at stake is the evolution of the emerging participatory culture. What representatives of content holders usually say is, “Our filtering techniques… more
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Ford Foundation Public Media Grantees Driving Innovation in the New Year
Posted by Bree Bowman on Jan 8, 2008
With the start of the new year, the Ford Foundation’s Future of Public Media Initiative grantees, an alliance of leading nonprofits, continue with the work and initiatives that shape the face of public media for the future. Below are some of the projects that they have been working on: Public Radio Capital is using PRC’s newly capitalized Public Radio Fund for short-term financing of radio acquisitions and is managing confidential transactions to expand public radio services in several top media markets. Link TV is collaborating with the Russell Foundation and the One Nation organization to launch the One Nation Online… more
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Online Video and Copyright in Vegas
Posted by Bree Bowman on Jan 7, 2008
By Pat Aufderheide, Center Director The International Consumer Electronics Show, a huge and sprawling conference that takes up a major chunk of Las Vegas real estate every year, is primarily about the business of gadgets. But right underneath the froth about the latest Wii are big issues of culture and power. The subject of digital rights management (DRM)—techniques used by contentholders to control access to their content—is one of the hottest. Peter Jaszi of the Washington College of Law’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and I had the privilege of presenting our research, Recut, Reframe, Recycle at the… more
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Some thoughts on public media in the new year
Posted by Jessica Clark on Jan 2, 2008
Scrolling through a backlog of “best of 2007” posts in my Google Reader, I ran across this gem, recommended by blogger and freelance Web designer Jason Kottke. In My Language by Amanda Baggs—an autistic woman who posts her work to YouTube under the name silentmiaow—is a short film that effectively explains how her repetitive, tactile gestures represent a holistic form of communication with the larger world. The first several minutes of the film present her moving and humming in what she terms her “native language.” In the film’s second half, she uses a voice synthesizer linked to her keyboard to… more
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The True Cost of DRM: What Can’t We Do Now?
Posted by Michael T. Miller on Jan 1, 2008
Few consumer electronic technologies have been more contentious than Digital Rights Management (DRM). With companies like Apple and AOL offering DRM-free music, will this protection become a thing of the past? And now that movies are becoming easier to download, how is DRM being applied? These issues and more were recently addressed by panel on Digital Rights Management at the annual Consumer Electronics Show. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO THE PANEL Moderator: Paul Sweeting, Content Agenda Panelist: Patricia Aufderheide, Ph.D., American University Panelist: Russ Frackman, Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLC Panelist: Jonathan Lee, MediaDefender, Inc. Panelist: Ian Rogers, Yahoo! Music… more
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Audio From Innovators Forum Now Available- Featuring Pegie Stark of The Poynter Institute
Posted by Michael T. Miller on Jan 1, 2008
Dr. Pegie Stark, co-director of The Poynter Institute’s Eyetrack 2007, recently gave a captivating speech as part of the Center’s Innovator’s Forum Series. She discussed the institute’s new findings from its landmark study in which more than 600 people from 18 to 60 years old were tested to see how they read the news both online and in print. The study included two tabloid newspapers, two broadsheet newspapers and two news Web sites in four U.S. cities, and followed readers’ eyes as they viewed more than 300 specific elements, including captions, headlines, graphics, briefs and much more. Stark discussed participants’… more
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New Study Shows Mashups and Remixes Could Be Using Copyrighted Material Lawfully
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Jan 1, 2008
When college kids make mashups of Hollywood movies, are they violating the law? Not necessarily, according to the latest study on copyright and creativity from the Center and American University’s Washington College of Law. The study, Recut, Reframe, Recycle: Quoting Copyrighted Material in User-Generated Video, by Center director Pat Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, co-director of the law school’s Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property, shows that many uses of copyrighted material in today’s online videos are eligible for fair use consideration. The study points to a wide variety of practices—satire, parody, negative and positive commentary, discussion-triggers, illustration, diaries, archiving… more
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Congress reframes reporters—none too soon
Posted by Jessica Clark on Dec 21, 2007
The Citizen Media Law Project notes that Congress just passed a Freedom of Information Act reform that broadens the definition of “a representative of the news media” as follows: [T]he term ‘a representative of the news media’ means any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience. Note the language “of potential interest to a segment of the public”—a definition that echoes the Center for Social Media’s description of public media. In this… more
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St. Clair Bourne, Making Public Media One Film at a Time
Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Dec 17, 2007
By Pat Aufderheide St. Clair Bourne, a masterful African-American filmmaker, has died at 64. He made some 45 films in his career, constantly reaching past boundaries of ignorance and fear to tell compelling stories, and was working on a history of the Black Panthers when he died. He told the story of Gordon Parks on HBO, and that of John Hendrik Clarke and Paul Robeson, among others, on PBS. He found parallels between civil rights conflicts in the U.S. and the Irish troubles. He was a founder of “Black Journal,” one of the pioneering news programs of a fledgling public… more
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Writers’ Strike Roundup: We’re not all on the same (web) page
Posted by Jessica Clark on Dec 8, 2007
“They’re dancin’ on your f**king grave and they keep the resids.” It’s one of the cleaner refrains from Tenancious D’s “Rockin’ the WGA!” video—the latest in a string of short YouTube clips posted by the Writers Guild of America. The much-publicized standoff between striking radio, television and film writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers has thrown the dynamics of our shifting media landscape into high relief, revealing how debates about public issues are now conducted across multiple digital, print and broadcast channels. Denied their usual mainstream platforms for more than a month now, striking writers and… more
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George Stoney Visits American University
Posted by Michael T. Miller on Dec 7, 2007
In the fall of 2006 The Center for Social Media brought NYU professor George Stoney to screen his insightful documentary How the Myth Was Made: A Study of Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran before a packed class of students and visitors at American University’s School of Communication. Stoney, a pioneer of documentary filmmaking, was director of the National Film Board of Canada’s Challenge for Change project and is considered to be the father of public access television. He is also the director numerous documentary films including All My Babies and The Uprising of ‘34.Read what Professor Stoney shared with… more
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Internationalization of Fair Use at Sheffield Film Festival
Posted by Bree Bowman on Dec 3, 2007
By Pat Aufderheide, reporting on a panel she chaired at the Sheffield Film Festival on international issues in licensing for documentary films. Licensing can become private censorship, if filmmakers are kept from quoting critically important work to make their own. On the panel, producer Julie Goldman spoke about the astonishing rapidity of the adoption and success of the Documentary Filmmakers’ Statement of Best Practices in the U.S. filmmaker Michael McMahon described filmmakers’ work to reform Canadian copyright law to expand “fair dealing.” Italian filmmaker Gioia Avvantaggiato described a growing European movement to assert the “right of quotation.” Lawyer Matthew Cummins,… more
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Center Launches 2007-08 Innovator’s Forum
Posted by Ann Williams on Dec 3, 2007
The Center for Social Media welcomed Wikipedia general counsel Mike Godwin as the first speaker in this year’s Innovator’s Forum, a series designed to bring public media leaders to students in SOC’s Weekend Program. In his presentation, Godwin warned against a conservative counter-revolution that would increase government regulation of the Internet, thereby jeopardizing the openness of the online environment. The American Observer covered the event – read the article here. more
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CSM at IDFA: Reconstructing Public Media
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 30, 2007
Here’s a report from CSM Media Fellow Neil Sieling, fresh off the plane from his recent trip to the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA): In late November, some 3,000 filmmakers, distributors, television commissioners and other funders descended upon Amsterdam to help the IDFA celebrate its 20th anniversary and participate in a series of sessions on future trends in the quickly changing world of documentary media. Peter Wintonick of the Center for Social Media’s partner organization DocAgora helped to co-organize three evening sessions at the IDFA Forum — a market for international co-financing of documentaries. The sessions were titled “Now… more
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Ford Foundation Grantees Changing the Face of Public Media
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 30, 2007
As the year comes to a close, the grantees of the Ford Foundation Future of Public Media initiative, an alliance of leading nonprofits, continue to redefine the role of public media by forging new models and practices for the future. Here are some of their latest initiatives: PRX launched a new social network site for over 50 youth radio groups participating in its Generation PRX program, bringing the latest digital technology to public radio. Native American Public Telecommunications attended NBPC’s New Media Institute (NMI), where they produced a project on the diverse background of the delta region. The project, produced… more
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Online Political Forums – MySpace, or Theirs?
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 28, 2007
As the nation awaits tonight’s online CNN/YouTube Republican debate, Center Research Director Jessica Clark reflects on the changing nature of electoral engagement in a digital age. Her cover piece for In These Times explores the implications, both good and bad, of the online offerings of digital participatory platforms like YouTube and MySpace that are used to interact with voters and help candidates to vie for public approval. These digital forums and debates bring the promise of democracy, but as Clark’s article demonstrates, there are also pitfalls to these new models. Clark provides a concise overview of how the public has… more
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Participant-Observation and the Future of Public Media
Posted by Jessica Clark on Nov 23, 2007
Social Networks, Web 2.0, the “semantic web”—these are all unexplored territories for media scholars more accustomed to the terrain of broadcast, print, and even regular old hypertext. But a new generation of researchers are donning their virtual pith helmets to report back from parts unknown, providing accounts of platforms, spaces and practices that might support future public media. Here’s a short list of notable projects: Digital Ethnography: Kansas State University professor Michael Welsh is working with his students on an ethnography of mediated culture. In the process, he’s created a set of provocative and popular YouTube videos that harness old… more
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A Tale of the Twin Cities
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 19, 2007
MinnPost is a new online news project that provides professional-quality journalism focused specifically on the Minneapolis area. Launched just a week ago, the project differs from the broader, more general reporting of larger newspapers by providing its readership with important stories from its own community, as well as original reporting on national and global news. The site is representative of an upsurge in digital media projects tied to a particular community or region. Joel Kramer, editor and CEO, views the MinnPost initiative not as competition for larger, mainstream papers, but instead as a supplement to their work. As newspaper resources… more
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The Audience as Shareholder
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 16, 2007
By Pat Aufderheide At the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival, we heard enormous excitement about the grassroots stakeholder-and-outreach model that U.S. filmmakers have pioneered—because the European public service TV model is declining. Sandi DuBowski, there with Parvez Sharma to show Jihad for Love about gays and lesbians in Muslim cultures, spoke on panels about turning your audience into your grassroots fundraisers and then—once the film is done—making them ambassadors and organizers. Someone who had already internalized that lesson is Franny Armstrong, who courageously brought a roughcut of her new film Age of Stupid (a.k.a. Crude), about global warming. Armstrong has managed… more
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Washington Post Foreign Editor Keith Richburg on International Journalism in a Digital Age
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 14, 2007
On November 12, the Center for Social Media welcomed Washington Post Foreign Editor Keith Richburg, the last of the four speakers of the “Foreign Correspondence and the Future of Public Media,” to discuss the evolving role of international correspondents in the digital age. The series — led by American University Professor Bill Gentile, Assistant Professor and Artist-in-Residence in the School of Communication — also included Nancy Youssef, the former McClatchy Newspaper Group bureau chief in Baghdad; Jonathan Landay, McClatchy national security and intelligence correspondent; and Kevin Klose, president of National Public Radio (NPR). Mr. Richburg echoed the concerns of past… more
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One Laptop per Child: a Tool for Truly Public Media
Posted by Jessica Clark on Nov 14, 2007
Between now and November 26, the One Laptop per Child project will send one of their portable computers to a child in a developing country for each one purchased in the U.S. and Canada. This is the first time that the lime green laptops—which come with a bonus year of T-Mobile HotSpot access for those of us living in the world of Borders and Starbucks—are available to the general public. Though they may look like toys, the laptops are built to withstand high heat, humidity, sand, and drops. Energy efficient (the units can be recharged by solar panel or a… more
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Right wing politicians claim fair use in political campaigns
Posted by Alison Hanold on Nov 13, 2007
Right wing bloggers and MoveOn recently joined forces to protest Fox News Channel after the network sent cease and desist letters to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. These cease and desist letters came after Mr. McCain used footage from a Fox News clip in one of his campaign advertisements. The advertisement uses 19 seconds of a 90 minute debate Mr. McCain’s lawyers claim he is within the rights of Fair Use. Learn more about it here. more
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Celebrating the Storyteller: Center Honors 20 Years of P.O.V.
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 9, 2007
For the past two decades, the PBS documentary series P.O.V. has helped to put a human face on issues from around the globe, leading the way for today’s independent media- and filmmakers by forging new forms of storytelling in public media. In celebration of the series’ 20th anniversary, The Center for Social Media released its latest publication, The View from the Top: P.O.V. Leaders on the Struggle to Create Truly Public Media, which features interviews with P.O.V. executive directors who have guided the project through its last two decades. Their stories reveal a project driven not only by social concern… more
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Blocking public media on public lands?
Posted by Jessica Clark on Nov 7, 2007
In late October, the Society for Professional Journalists joined with 18 other journalism advocacy organizations to protest attempts by the Department of the Interior to limit photography, filming and audio recording on the properties it administers. New rules would restrict the activities of documentary filmmakers, citizen reporters and others not officially recognized as “journalists” by the interlinked federal agencies who manage public parks, forests and federally owned lands. Reporting would be restricted to “breaking” events like wildfires or public appearances of newsmakers; commercial mediamakers would be charged fees. The journalism groups have submitted a letter of protest to the Department… more
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Get to The Point
Posted by Jessica Clark on Nov 5, 2007
It’s not always easy to tell when a piece of media makes a difference. It may move viewers; it may woo critics. Outreach plans are hatched and audiences are measured. But the question of impact often goes unanswered. A new social network, The Point, helps to bring results to the forefront. It allows groups to gather around a particular issue, and when they reach a critical mass, members are notified to act. “The tipping point of an ultimatum is the point at which the cost of a group action becomes greater to the target than the benefit of their offending… more
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Foreign Correspondence and the Future of Public Media – Challenges in a Digital Era
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 2, 2007
Newspaper foreign correspondents have traditionally been the public’s eyes and ears internationally, but emerging digital platforms are changing the way we transmit and receive news. The Center is sponsoring the “Foreign Correspondence and the Future of Public Media” speaker series in October and November, led by American University Professor Bill Gentile, Assistant Professor and Artist-in-Residence in the School of Communication. The series brings in experts in the field to discuss how new trends will affect international news coverage, and how digital public media can fill in the gaps. The speakers have included Nancy Youssef, the former McClatchy Newspaper Group bureau… more
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Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction
Posted by Bree Bowman on Nov 1, 2007
Center Director Pat Aufderheide’s new book, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction is now available! Hear what others are saying: “This is the first book about documentary I’ve encountered that tackles its identity, history, evolution, and major controversies enjoyably and in brief. I marvel at how much ground Pat Aufderheide covers and the clarity she brings to documentary’s many functions, paradoxes, and contradictions. Maybe religion alone has more.” — Michael Rabiger, author Directing the Documentary “A vivid survey, Aufderheide’s book reminds us how crucial content and purpose are to the power and appeal of documentaries. When other films help us… more
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Crisis management in the Web 2.0 era
Posted by Bree Bowman on Oct 31, 2007
Public media have often served as a lifeline during times of community or national crisis, offering audiences breaking updates, informed perspectives, and information about how to seek help in emergency conditions. But what can media-makers do when an unexpected disaster directly impacts their ability to reach the public? The San Diego fires have revealed the potential that Web 2.0 tools hold for disaster and crisis management. Through multi-media online tools, media-makers were able to provide the San Diego community with crucial information, uniting and empowering community members, and redefining the ways in which public media can help manage crisis and… more
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Ford Foundation Initiative – Fostering Experimentation for Tomorrow’s Public Media
Posted by Bree Bowman on Oct 30, 2007
The Ford Foundation’s Future of Public Media initiative brings together an alliance of leading nonprofits whose work forges the public media structures and projects of tomorrow. The group continues to introduce new, experimental practices that redefine the role of public media in the future. Here are some of the projects that they’re working on this month: Native American Public Communications is partnering with Mary Riepma Ross Media Arts Center on the VisionMaker Film Festival, which includes a series of short, viral videos discovered through social networking sites, giving online content an offline venue. Link TV will broadcast Chahinaz: What Rights… more
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Electronic Frontier Foundation Guidelines bring common sense to online video content protection
Posted by Bree Bowman on Oct 30, 2007
The Center has endorsed a sensible and much-needed set of guidelines from the Electronic Frontier Foundation for managing the use of copyrighted material in online video. Online video has become territory for First Amendment brawls, as content companies have demanded “takedowns” of videos that use some copyrighted material—even when it might be perfectly legal to do so under fair use. The EFF guidelines bring back a little common sense into the process of assessing what is and isn’t fair to freedom of speech under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by establishing best practices that include: Tweaking service providers’ content… more
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ProPublica – A Breath of Fresh Air?
Posted by Bree Bowman on Oct 23, 2007
As news publishers across the nation struggle to meet budgetary demands, cutting investigative journalism programs from their repertoire along the way, the launch of ProPublica, announced earlier this month, is being met with great anticipation. Describing itself as “an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest,” ProPublica plans to maintain a staff of 24 leading journalists dedicated solely to practicing investigative journalism with impartial reporting standards, promising to “[produce] journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those with power to vindicate the trust placed… more
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Storymapping, Mapumentary and More
Posted by Jessica Clark on Oct 4, 2007
2007 may well be heralded as the “year that put maps on the map.” Free tools for mapping and visualizing have exploded online, and a wide range of amateurs, nonprofits and media outlets are harnessing these new technologies to make public media. The Center for Digital Storytelling is a nonprofit organization “dedicated to assisting people in using digital media to tell meaningful stories from their lives.” Their StoryMapping initiative matches up communities and individuals with tools like MapBuilder and CommunityWalk—interfaces that make it easy to create customized Google or Yahoo maps. One StoryMapping project, Placemeant features a map of narratives… more
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Braving the New Frontier - Ford Foundation Public Media Grantees breaking new ground
Posted by Bree Bowman on Oct 1, 2007
In an initiative funded by the Ford Foundation, The Center is part of a group of nonprofit organizations with a common goal: to push forward into the future of public media. Here’s what some of our partners are up to this month: PBS Foundation is launching PBS WORLD, a 24-hour, fully packaged, turnkey digital broadcast channel featuring an array of non-fiction programming. The project fuels public broadcasting’s digita