public media
Newly Contracted: ITVS Announces Funding for The Truth Will Set You Free
The documentary, by filmmakers Macky Alston and Sandra Itkoff, explores issues of faith, love, marriage, homosexuality, and the Episcopal Church — focusing on the first openly gay Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
“The agents of change in America are the folks who I know to watch PBS,” said director Macky Alston when asked about why public media was the right fit for the documentary. Hear more from the filmmakers of The Truth Will Set You Free in the exclusive ITVS Production interview below.
Learn more about ITVS funding opportunities here.
Public Media’s Women and Girls Lead Campaign Hits PBS Airwaves this Fall
A pipeline of more than 50 documentaries over three years begins in October 2011 with thousands of local events and high-profile gatherings nationwide planned through 2012.
ITVS announced the rollout of major national PBS broadcasts for its Women and Girls Lead campaign on Thursday. The three-year public media initiative will educate, focus, and connect viewers with more than 50 acclaimed documentaries and with nationwide community and educational events through leading partner organizations including Girl Scouts of the USA, CARE, and others.
Women and Girls Lead will launch its broadcasts on October 11, 2011 with Women, War & Peace on PBS. A five-part series executive produced by Abigail Disney, Pamela Hogan, and Gini Reticker. The documentary series examines how women have been disproportionately affected by modern conflict and their unique role in brokering peace.
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Murdoch Meltdown Solidifies the Value of Public Media
By Sally Jo Fifer
ITVS President & CEO Sally Jo Fifer calls on public media leaders to put “new technology to work for a public interest free from the gravity of profit.”
Sally Jo Fifer, President & CEO of ITVS
Information is valuable. It’s valuable to those of us working in public media and it’s valuable to Rupert Murdoch, who started out owning a single Australian afternoon tabloid newspaper and ended up building the $33 billion News Corp empire by acquiring information, often at great cost, and packaging it to maximize profits. Yet for Murdoch, perhaps no information in recent memory was as costly as the phone messages his staff allegedly stole, toppling the 168-year-old News of the World despite a circulation of 7.5 million.
On the surface, it would seem that there could be no two beasts as dissimilar as public media and tabloid journalism. One strives to serve the public with the information and tools it needs as citizens; the other hawks sex scandals, celebrity secrets, and other entertainments.
It might seem like they are the yin and yang of media, defined by their contrasts yet containing surprising elements of one another. Public media, after all, must plumb the public’s obsessions — some dark, some trivial — in order to compete in the media marketplace and serve its audience. And tabloid journalism often invokes “the public interest” in its defense, as the National Enquirer does in ferreting out the untrustworthiness of public figures like John Edwards.
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Filmmaker Johnny Symons on Public Media
Filmmaker Johnny Symons dropped by ITVS earlier this year and described his experience working with the organization as an independent producer of Public Media. His documentary Daddy & Papa is currently streaming free as part of ITVS’s Indies Showcase.
The FCC Report on Information Needs of Communities: A Moment of Truth, Part II
By Sally Jo Fifer
ITVS President & CEO Sally Jo Fifer explores how the FCC’s latest report on media and technology affects ITVS, independent producers, and the public media ecosystem.
Sally Jo Fifer, President & CEO of ITVS
In Part One of this post, I talked about the Federal Communication Commission’s significant report on the impact of technology on the media landscape, ending with the question: What should we do? And how does this debate directly impact ITVS, independent producers, and the public media ecosystem?
Other voices have already chimed in on these questions, including think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, echoing some of the FCC’s findings (universal broadband) and differing on others (restructuring public media funding). However, few are considering the big picture with the work and role of independent filmmakers in mind — despite the fact that the FCC report emphasizes the important role of deeper reporting, storytelling, and media making in our democracy, quoting news directors like Matthew Zelkind of WKRN in Nashville: “Long-form stories are dying because they’re not financially feasible. … It’s all economically driven.”
Independent documentary filmmakers work outside of the newsrooms and stations whose decline and challenges the FCC report describes. Yet their role in long-form storytelling — in digging deeper into immigration through films like Welcome to Shelbyville or capturing the soldier’s experience of the battlefield and returning home in Hell and Back Again — continues to grow alongside their capacity and ability to innovate with new media: games for Garbage Dreams, The Revolutionary Optimists and Half the Sky; interactive experiences for The Way We Get By and Deep Down; interactive online chats and screenings; and the list goes on. The fact is, these professionals already work in the shifting space between commercial and non-profit media, moving back and forth between worlds.
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Think Win-Win: Charles Meyer on NCME and Community Cinema
Executive Director of the National Center for Media Engagement (NCME) Charles Meyer outlines his organization’s recently announced partnership with ITVS’s Community Cinema.
In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Stephan Covey’s fourth habit encourages, “Think Win-Win.” As Covey points out – and as we’ve discovered in our community engagement work with public media at NCME – Win-Win is a frame of mind that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions that are mutually beneficial and satisfying. In other words, solutions that grow a bigger pie. That’s what effective collaboration is about, too. And collaborating is a key behavior among those with an engagement ethos.
There’s no better example than our new “win-win” partnership with ITVS and its highly successful Community Cinema program. In just six years, Community Cinema has expanded to more than 100 communities across the country, producing more than 2,500 screenings and welcoming over 150,000 participants. Its commitment to bringing communities and local organizations together through the featured documentaries aligns perfectly with NCME’s CPB-funded mission to support public media in working collaboratively with their communities to discover, understand, and address community concerns.
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Vote for ITVS’s Women Lead Panel at SXSW 2012!
SXSW Panel Picker allows the community to have a significant voice in programming conference activities for SXSW 2012. Make your voice heard by voting for our Women Lead Panel which will focus on public media in the 21st Century. Vote now! Thanks.
Women are transforming the landscape of public media through innovation, audience engagement and new forms of storytelling. Our proposed SXSW panel, Women Lead: Public Media in the 21st Century, presents women as innovators and collaborators and will examine how multiple stories told through both traditional and digital media can work in concert to illuminate issues, create sustained, global conversations and invite the public to get involved.
The entry point to the conversation is our new public media initiative, Women and Girls Lead– an unprecedented campaign that activates public television and radio producers, social media strategists, interactive and game designers, and multiple NGO partners committed to affecting change for women and girls around the world. Watch, listen and interact with a variety of content created for this campaign and hear from some 0of the leading women in their field about their experiences working in a 21st century media environment.
Click here to vote for ITVS’s Women Lead Panel at SXSW 2012.
The FCC Report on Information Needs of Communities: A Moment of Truth for Public Media: Part I
By Sally Jo Fifer
ITVS President & CEO Sally Jo Fifer responds to the FCC’s significant report on the impact of technology on the media landscape.
Sally Jo Fifer, President & CEO of ITVS
How will 21st century media serve the public interest and local communities? That’s the question a number of recent reports have tackled, most significantly the summer publication of the Federal Communication Commission’s 465-page The Information Needs of Communities.
In the report, the FCC takes a hard look at what’s happening on the media landscape and provides a deep context for today’s transformation, referencing the words of Founding Fathers and Google executives alike alongside a huge mine of data and myriad anecdotes about court reporters, carrier pigeons, camera phones, and just about everything else under the sun.
It’s a semi-monumental report that raises many questions with few answers. But the way it asks the questions tasks all of us to put our heads together — and our resources and goodwill — to figure things out. And fast. As the report reminds us: “Americans need to at least come together around one idea: that democracy requires, and citizens deserve, a healthy flow of information and a news and information system that holds powerful institutions accountable.”
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A New Web Series from NBPC
The National Black Programming Consortium has introduced a new web series called Black Folk Don’t — an anecdotal idea and concept based on negative stereotypes.
You can find the trailer for NBPC’s new series below…
What Does Public Media’s Future Look Like?
Co-managing Director of Public Media Company (PMC) Ken Ikeda talks about the “race to reengage future audiences,” and its effect on public media.
As part of BTB’s ongoing mission to curate news and opinions on public media, we have called upon key players to share their take on the evolving environment. Over the next several weeks, BTB will be rolling out their thoughts and ideas, adding to the conversation on public media’s role now and in the years to come.
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