Update from The National Conference for Media Reform

Thousands will convene this weekend in Boston to share ideas about the future of media, technology, and democracy at the 2011 NCMR. ITVS Marketing & Communications Manger Steve Goldbloom is at the conference and will be providing updates on BTB.

Greetings from Boston! The NCMR kicks off bright and early Friday morning with a live broadcast of Democracy Now with Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales. After the show, the panels begin and they don’t stop until Sunday.

The conference — which includes activists, media makers, educators, journalists, artists, and policymakers — has been broken down into themed tracks that will guide the weekend’s discussions. From Policy and Politics to Journalism and Public Media; from Media Makers, Culture and Arts to Technology and Innovation, there will be lots of interesting news to relay on BTB over the next few days.
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Tags: boston, interactive, ITVS, national conference for media reform, PBS, public media

Independent Producers Get Hooked Up Digitally

Producers and filmmakers convened in Boston last month for the annual CPB/PBS Producers Workshop. The program, started 10 years ago by veteran WGBH producer Judith Vecchione, has trained more than 190 producers from some 40 states, and ITVS has participated in every class since the beginning. ITVS’ Senior Programming Manager, Richard Saiz, spent an entire day giving feedback to producers at the workshop. Matthew Meschery, Director of Digital Initiatives at ITVS, was also on hand. He co-facilitated a workshop on new-media and filed this report.

From the Producers Workshop in Boston

This was the first time I had attended the Producers Workshop in any capacity and it was also the first year they designated an entire class on the broad subject of new media. I was thankful for being invited and thankful that the Workshop’s Director, Judith Vecchione, WGBH, and CPB recognized new media as an integral part of a producer’s training in working with public television. Oh yes, and I was thankful for the air conditioning in the WGBH building (I had forgotten just how humid New England can be in the summer).

The session was co-facilitated by myself, Dave Peth, interactive producer at WGBH and Dan Sonnet, interactive producer for PBS. We decided to structure the first part of the session as an overview, covering a wide range of topics from trends in trans-media storytelling, to social media (a formal debate of the pros and cons of Facebook and Twitter), to digital distribution, to games (you’d be surprised how much documentary producers know about digital games). We then spent the latter half of our three-hour session discussing some new media projects that the producers were working on. Projects ranged from a role-playing game to an episodic web series, to a user-generated content campaign. It was exciting to have producers share their ideas with us and their peers so openly and accept honest and constructive feedback considering this is a relatively new discipline for all of us.

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Tags: boston, CPB, digitial media, documentary, judith vecchione, matthew meschery, PBS, producers workshiop, wgbh