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News from the Future of Public Media
Public TV’s Future at Silverdocs
email discuss Posted by Patricia Aufderheide on Jul 1, 2008 at 4:59 PM
Will public TV survive into an era when everyone is a digital native? That was the question of the day at a panel I chaired at the conference the Silverdocs film festival (aka SILVERDOCS AFI/Discovery Channel Documentary Festival) hosts every year. Answer? Probably, with some work.
PBS’s John Boland believes PBS is not only ready but in the forefront of change, with in-place deals for iTunes and other digital distribution for independent work. The Center for Asian American Media’s Steve Gong believes that public broadcasting’s so-called “minority consortia”—representing five federally-designated ethnic categories—are becoming essential interfaces to America’s emerging “majority minority” culture.
But Ernest Wilson, dean of the Annenberg School at University of Southern California and a board member of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, tub-thumped with a dire message: Defend and adapt or die. He fears that complacency both within public broadcasting and among its viewers and listeners will let it languish in an era where there is too much information and too little good stuff. He wants a more interactive focus and much more public awareness and mobilizing to raise the profile of the service at a time when all of broadcasting’s future is murky.
Panelist Katy Chevigny, cofounder and CEO of Arts Engine, one of the most creative media arts organizations in the U.S., showed how public broadcasting is one, but only one, of the distribution opportunities for Arts Engine’s makers both professional and amateur. Arts Engine runs the Media That Matters Film Festival, an online, year-round showcase for amateur work on important issues.
Panelist Paula LeDieu, a cofounder of UK production company Magic Lantern, which specializes in interactive work, spoke about her work with UK broadcasters also facing a digital challenge. “The key word is interactive,” she said. This is the biggest hurdle for broadcasters, used to “shoveling content” to the masses. Whether at public broadcaster BBC, private broadcaster Channel 4, or The Guardian newspaper, she has found that the cultural shift required to move from one-way to two-way communication is enormous. Nonetheless, she reports remarkable success with limited experiments.
Audience members, mostly independent producers, eagerly sought tips on how to start designing interactive projects. Among them was Nonny de la Peña, whose “Virtual Gitmo” on Second Life, an interactive exploration of the terms of imprisonment at Guantanamo, received a lot of attention at Silverdocs.
They also wanted to know why there are so many public broadcasting stations with so much duplication. Here’s where the moderator stepped in to point out that public broadcasting’s decentralized, highly local nature—an artifact of its Congressionally-mandated design in 1967—provides a too-little-used opportunity for stations to truly engage with local publics of all kinds.
Discussion
Someone should let Boland at PBS know that iTunes is just another distribution channel. While it’s definitely a new wrinkle for PBS (and a good one), it’s not interactive, not complete and it’s not locally relevant. And ironically it’s being presented in a media environment even more crowded than cable TV.
LeDieu really gets it. It’s all about the cultural hurdles, the changing of the minds, either by persuasion or by termination. Technology is the smallest part of the problem.