A message from ITVS President & CEO Sally Jo Fifer 

Each year, as ITVS embarks on a new season of Independent Lens—the single largest series for independent voices on public or commercial television—we find ourselves along with public television audiences marveling at the powerful storytelling of independent producers.

Independent producers spend years of their lives investing in dramatically different stories but all with the common thread: real voices coming forward that would otherwise go unheard on hard issues that would otherwise be ignored.

Sally Jo Fifer, President & CEO of ITVS

Unlike the commercial world of commission-driven programming, our pipeline pulses with public interest stories that originate with independent filmmakers. Our job—with the help of peer panels of filmmakers and public television programmers—is to create conduits for these stories on the dozens of platforms in the blended media space of broadcast and social networking.

It’s this bottom-up approach that earned six out of the nine PBS 2012 Emmy Awards, and it’s the same approach that has produced perhaps the most exciting Independent Lens lineup to date, ready to go on a new night, Mondays at 10 p.m., with renewed interest and support from stations thanks to your help and support. We are pleased to have kicked off of the IL season—with the two-night special presentation of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women and Girls Worldwide. A pillar program of the ITVS-led Women and Girls Lead public media initiative, Half the Sky has already broken our records on reach—but the real story is about engagement. For those of us working in the public good, media impressions are nice, but what we’re really after is supporting citizens to get involved. Continue reading →