JMS

Last week I was at the New Media Institute in Jackson Mississippi, put on by the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) and hosted at Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

NBPC is one of the 5 minority consortia in public broadcasting (the others are Native American, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Asian American), and Executive Director Jacquie Jones pioneered the idea a year ago of putting together a week-long training and convening event for minority media producers focused on technology and new tools and platforms.

I missed the inaugural meeting last year in Boston (in my own backyard at WGBH too), so I was really glad to be able to join for at least a day and a half this year.

PRX was well represented. John Barth came down to co-present a session on reversioning documentary film for radio/podcasting. The Talent Quest got props in a CPB speech, and I helped facilitate a meeting with NPR, PBS and the minority consortia about diversity and collaboration for future public media.

There was a mix of panels and presentations, but the main activity of the Institute was the work of 9 different teams of young producers working with mentors and spending a mostly sleepless week creating digital media projects from scratch for debut and discussion on the last day. Jackson and surrounding areas provided the raw material, and the teams came up with a dazzling variety of projects, from video podcasts, online games, Google earth media mashups, and web-based narratives. The final dinner on Friday featured a raucous final presentation and celebration of the projects (Leslie Rule has posted some of them here on the PBS MedaShift blog).

John and his co-presenter Grant Clark (a producer at BET) talked about the possibilities for repurposing documentary film into audio for podcasting and/or radio. They were given a tough one to start with, Linda Goode Bryant’s “Flag Wars” - a narrationless and impressionistic film about gentrification in Ohio. There are certainly easier examples of films with more two-way interviews, introductions and voice overs that would lend themselves well to an audio-only version, but it was interesting nonetheless to hear a draft version that still captured the intent of the film.

Of course there are excellent examples of audio narrative with no narration - work by Joe Richman (here’s Joe on “The Invisible Narrator”), Jay Allison, Dave Isay among others - but it takes ingenuity and planning and is much harder to achieve with material gathered for another purpose.

Grant and John’s basic point is that there are opportunities for reaching new audiences, cross-promoting film and television releases, experimenting with form, and making use of the extra footage and material that every project accumulates. There are also potential collaborations with radio producers who bring a complementary set of skills.

No doubt documentary film and radio are two very different beasts, but it would be an interesting creative challenge and a potentially a source of valuable new audio work to start reversioning a few.

Some more highlights:

The Bay Area Video Coalition’s Producer’s Institute. BAVC was on the scene and helped out with the mentoring too (read Wendy Levy’s post about it here) Their Institute sounds great and the applications for next year’s session just went live, due on Feb 1 2008.

The Producers Institute for New Media Technologies is a ten-day residency for eight creative teams (independent producers or public broadcasters) with a shared goal of developing and prototyping a multi-platform project inspired by, or based on a significant documentary project. The intention of the Institute is to develop socially relevant media projects for emerging digital platforms.

The AFI Digital Content Lab also talked about their process and presented some beta projects coming out of the lab - amazing stuff. You could see everyone in the room start thinking about how to pitch an idea or volunteer as a mentor. Here’s the application.

The AFI Digital Content Lab (AFI DCL) incubates new forms of entertainment programming on digital platforms from idea to audience. Placing the highest value on creative excellence, the AFI DCL pairs design and technology experts with professionals from TV, film, games and an array of programming initiators in an R&D environment to adapt new and existing concepts to digital creation and distribution. In short, we create content for new and emerging digital media.

The 930 Club. Friday night we headed out to a genuine juke joint with a bunch of folks - great band, cheap beer.

Seven Studioz. Goog 411 couldn’t find this place, but after some searching we landed there later that same night to find a warehouse with 3 different DJs in different rooms, including one of the Institute Mentors - Anthony Marshall, founder of Lyricists Lounge and now at Current.tv. I caught my first ever serious crumpin session…

I had signed up for the automatic reminder weeks ago and it came bright and early this morning:

Give One Get One starts today!
From all of us at One Laptop per Child, thank you for your interest in our mission. Today marks the first day of our limited-time “Give One Get One” program. Starting today, when you donate an XO laptop to a child in the developing world, you’ll receive one for the child in your life. The price for the two laptops will be $399, $200 of which is tax-deductible.

So a quick paypal link later and I’m the expectant owner of one of these super cool machines, and glad to know I’m sending one off to someone in the developing world. It would be cool if somehow that created a pen pal relationship of sorts at the same time, I’d love to be able to track the journey of the other laptop and the kid(s) who end up using it.

I’m not sure what I’ll do with the one we get, but if I had the means I’d buy one (two) for everyone in my family.

Home sick with the flu, what better time to edit together leftover footage from the Talent Quest announcement?

Out of over 90 minutes of tape I grabbed about 10 minutes of reactions from some public radio industry types, prompted in stellar fashion by the one and only Maxie Jackson. Maxie is Senior Director Program Development at WNYC, he was a Talent Quest judge, helped us plan the project, and generally has been a big PRX friend from early days.

I left out some racy stuff from the post-party, Glenn doing karaoke, Al in the elevator shooting the breeze with Pat Harrison (President and CEO of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting), and some Rebeca antics. If I find myself home sick again some day I’ll compile that into another highlight reel.

We announced winners of the PRX Public Radio Talent Quest at the PRPD conference in St Paul last month. It was a fantastic event and bookends the debut of the project in Austin Texas back on March 1st.

It was a real thrill to see our three winners up on stage introducing themselves to an influential industry audience of stations, networks and funders. They knocked it out of the park. Make sure to catch Glynn’s finger-pointing moment with CPB president Pat Harrison.

I haven’t been blogging in a while, partly because I’m a bad blogger and also because I’ve been a traveling madman for what seems like months now.

I’m just back from a week in Moscow Russia where I was invited as a consultant to the Ford Foundation’s Media/Arts/Culture (MAC they call it) workshop where program officers from all of Ford’s MAC offices around the world (Indonesia, China, India, Vietnam, Egypt, Brazil, Nigeria, Russia, US) convene and reconnect. This is evidently an annual gathering and the first time it’s been in Moscow. I was there doing triple duty as a MAC US grantee, a former Moscow resident (1993-1995), and a guest speaker on PRX, Internet and social/public media issues. A big thanks to Orlando Bagwell and all the Ford folks for including me in this remarkable gathering.

Moscow is a boomtown these days, and certainly earns its standing as the world’s most expensive city. What used to feel like a sliver of wealth and ostentation in the 90s is now a thick coat of shiny new real estate, shops, restaurants, fancy foreign cars and ubiquitous advertising for luxury goods and vacations for a growing and ambitious middle class. There’s still enough Soviet dilapidation and neglect at every turn to remind you of the pace of transformation under way.

The theme for the meeting was “freedom of expression in a networked communications environment,” in a framework developed by Andrew Puddephatt for a broader project that is worth learning more about here.

With a nod to others pioneering this approach, Andrew divides up the global media environment into four stackable layers: physical (like fiber optics, broadcast towers, telephone lines); Connectivity and Code (packet switching, operating systems, http), Applications (software, sites, services access/creating/finding); and then Content (documentary films, radio pieces, music, text, etc). These four layers are then influenced by three drivers of change: Technology; Politics, Regulation and Governance; and Economics and Markets.

This ended up being a helpful starting point for my PRX presentation, because a lot of Ford’s MAC effort is funding content of various kinds, but PRX is an example of how to have an impact at the applications layer and there’s lots more work to be done there. Ford and other foundations could support more open source software projects that intersect with media access and distribution, encourage more civil society organizations to adapt web 2.0 approaches to their online presence, and help develop new networks of their own grantees that cross disciplines and geographies.

There was an excellent discussion of copyright, remix culture and intellectual property, including a screening of Good Copy/Bad Copy which I highly recommend watching and sharing. Ford has to strike a careful balance in supporting creators and their careers while generally advocating for open access to knowledge, creativity and culture.

Other presentations and discussions included the challenges of supporting contemporary art in transitioning countries where ambiguous and ‘edgy’ ideas can be seen as threatening to emerging national identities; the idea of sustainable artist spaces; a screening of the excellent documentary Miss Gulag about Russian womens’ prisons; a view into the Arab media revolution where where 200 channels of satellite TV across the ideological spectrum are shaping new realities; a moving performance by Palestinian singer Kamilya Jubran; and site visits to Ford’s very impressive local grantees, including a peek at the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art and some exceptional dance and musical performances at converted factory/art space “Fabrika”.

Of course there’s a particular resonance in discussing freedom of expression while in Moscow, which in the last several years under Putin has seen a consolidation of media and political control and a disturbing trend of violence against journalists.

The journalist and Carnegie researcher Masha Lipman was a guest speaker and gave a very compelling and discouraging update on the state of Russian media, basically boiling down to total control of national television (the three network heads meet with Kremlin staff each week to set the agenda) and a sophisticated stance towards other semi-independent media outlets that are ultimately rendered politically irrelevant. The internet is open, but she says there’s a small Kremlin army that publishes stories, blog posts and generally invisibly seeds lots of pro-government information all over the place. And Putin has something like 80% popularity and in general the population is apolitical and resigned to the current configuration as long as the economic benefits continue. Here’s a really good piece by Masha on the attitudes of the Russian middle class, and for more gloom and doom read Remnick’s great piece on Kasparov in last week’s New Yorker.

I also went to visit the Fund for Independent Radio (FNR), an energetic group of radio folks who are doing some very PRX-y things with college and community radio stations around the country. They recently launched “Podstation” as a site to showcase new storytelling and documentary work. We’re discussing ways to work together with some help from Charles Maynes, and American indie radio producer deeply embedded over there.

Friday night a convergence of radio worlds took place, when we managed to gather the visiting Kevin Klose (NPR president whose son works in Moscow with a college friend of mine) with Greg Feifer (NPR’s Moscow correspondent and yet another college classmate of mine), Charles Maynes (aforementioned indie producer and FNR link). Kevin was in town in part to attend the opening of the Russian rendition of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia. Our friend the hardest working documentary filmmaker ever Robin Hessman (who ran Russian Sesame Street in the 90s and is currently making a film about Russia’s “Pepsi Generation”) interviewed Stoppard and managed to get us tickets (thanks Robin!) to the opening performance on Saturday. So, quite a bit hung over, I spent my last day in Moscow attending most of the the 8 hours or so of this epic play, and though I confess that some of the rapid Russian dialog about the competing philosophies of 19th century intelligentsia totally passed me by, it was an inspiring and fitting final experience nonetheless.

(left to right: yours truly, Charles Maynes, Kevin Klose, Greg Feifer)

[on the blog post title, "Moscow Doesn't Believe in Tears" was a very popular Soviet film of the early 80s and also a film that all Russian language students are always made to watch.]

A spate of cool job opportunities have popped onto the radar in the last couple weeks. Let me know if you’re interested and I’ll put in a good word!

• Media Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is undertaking a project to comprehensively study the new/citizen/social media landscape, including reflection on its reach, implications, impact, and ecosystem, and charting an agenda for research and action moving forward.

This is a big opportunity for someone. Berkman is bursting at the seams with big ideas, important projects and interesting people, and this is a new Fellow position at the nexus of the citizen/social/public media scene. You’ll be rubbing elbows with fellow Fellows like Dave Weinberg, Doc Searls, Dan Gillmor, and Ethan Zuckerman among many others, and an all-star faculty and staff. Plus PRX is down the street and ready to scheme on all sorts of things.

• Bay Area Business Development Director for Miro

  The job isn’t posted on their site yet but the Participatory Culture Foundation is looking for a bizdev director. PCF is an up-and-coming nonprofit tech group behind Miro, the free open source video player that used to be called the Democracy Player. It’s a great tool and the team is sharp and trying to do something ambitious.

  We are a non-profit (like mozilla) and are looking for someone who is tech-savvy, passionate about our mission, and good at building relationships. There’s an opportunity to join and help build a very exciting organization that could change the face of mass media.

• American Archive 1.0 Initiative Manager
  

  The American Archive is another big idea that is just taking shape, overlaps in interesting ways with the Digital Distribution Consortium, and is gaining momentum as a possible system-wide investment.

  American Archive 1.0 will serve the American public by preserving, exhibiting, and sharing the enduring programming produced and distributed by the public broadcasting system. The Archive will make use of emerging technologies to allow access to this content by educational and cultural institutions, public broadcasting stations, and the general public.

  CPB seeks an Initiative Manager to consult with key stakeholders within the public broadcasting system to determine and build consensus for the overall purpose of American Archive 1.0. Tactically, the Initiative Manager will consult with experts within and without the public broadcasting system to develop a blueprint for the implementation of American Archive 1.0.

• Program Officer, General Program, MacArthur Foundation

  MacFound is into all sorts of important and exciting things, which I would say even if we weren’t already a grantee. Plus this job would get you working alongside the one and only John Bracken.

  This position is currently focused on implementing grantmaking initiatives in three areas – the New Ideas Initiative, Arts and Culture in Chicago, and grants to effective and creative smaller institutions. The Foundation is looking for someone with diverse professional experience, and the ability and willingness to adapt to shifting priorities and responsibilities.

  The New Ideas Initiative was launched in 2005, by the Trustees and President of the Foundation, to actively identify emerging issues important to society where the Foundation may make a catalytic investment in the early stages.

The Round 3 entries in the Public Radio Talent Quest are now live.

You can get to them by clicking on a contestant’s name over in the right hand column of every page, or from the home page of the site.

On this round we asked each contestant to interview someone of their choosing and also to be interviewed by a local public radio station host.

Our seven semi-finalists did a fantastic job with their interviews, as you’ll hear for yourself.

As with previous rounds we’re inviting the public to vote and comment, and the top popular pick will essentially get “immunity” from being kicked off the island for the next round when we whittle it down to 5 finalists. Those 5 will have one more challenge before we pick our three winners, each of whom gets $10,000 and is paired with a producer/mentor to create a pilot show for public radio.

Please help spread the word about Round 3 so the hard work of April, Chris, Anne, Al, Rebecca, Glynn and Chuck gets the attention it deserves.

The Center for Social Media, with help from PRX, has released Public Radio’s Social Media Experiments: Risk, Opportunity, Challenge (download PDF), a report and survey that looks at a variety of projects underway at stations.

From my forward to the study:

I believe public radio can play a transformative role in participatory media. The Internet enables interactions and connections that can greatly extend the educational and cultural goals of public service media. Public radio brings considerable strengths to bear – a large and loyal audience, strong brands and programs, and a local presence in communities across the country.

While new platforms are enabling content creators and new intermediaries to connect with audiences – and audiences with each other – far beyond the physical boundaries of local broadcast spectrum, local public radio stations remain the primary point of contact for most of the nearly 30 million people who tune in to public radio every week.

In the first decade of the web even the most ambitious stations had an online presence that was barely a fraction of the reach and relevance of their broadcast service. Station websites have often acted as informational supplements to broadcast offerings, with occasional examples of unique content and some interactive features such as message boards.

While there are many disruptive aspects of new media and technology, including a new mingling of geographically defined communities and self-selected interests, stations now face new opportunities and incentives to engage the public online.

There are obstacles – limited resources, the biases of the broadcast business, unfamiliar rules of engagement. But the same low barriers to entry that enable remarkable digital innovation also make it possible for stations to make relatively low-cost experimentation part of their strategy going forward.

I do believe public radio can have a transformative role on the web, but it’s far from clear that it will seize the opportunity without some fundamental changes that go far beyond the current level of innovation. Earlier this week I was at a meeting partly about the FCC’s upcoming full power non-commercial FM radio station licensing window, but also exploring ambitious new models for operating stations with a web presence as the driver of strategy. More on that soon.