ITVS President Sally Jo Fifer

Recently someone asked me, "What’s an independent producer?" Coming up with a concise answer was surprisingly challenging. Putting together a definition didn’t seem that complicated when I began working in this field 25 years ago. But, of course, the media environment has changed radically since those halcyon days! Media is now mobile and instantaneous. The sprawl of images and sounds coming from our televisions, radios, video games, VCRs, DVD, CD and MP3, portable players, computer screens, digital displays, ATMs, telephones, PDAs, and beepers blur our ever-multiplying media experience. It might be more appropriate to ask: “Where is the independent— now a needle in an electronic haystack?”

But let’s deal with the initial question: What is an independent? The independent producer has been around since the beginning of time. The indie works outside the system, without permanent affiliation with a particular institution, business interest, perhaps even a particular country. Nonetheless, independents are usually deeply connected to their communities. Independents are motivated by a passion for truth telling and an instinct for humanity. The independent endures varying degrees of economic uncertainty, even cultural marginality, as the price for preserving artistic or journalistic integrity. In some parts of the world, the price the independent pays for holding on to that integrity is much greater than marginality: It can be censorship, exile and imprisonment.

Although the global network of independents is united by common principles and common aims, the topographies of financial support and access to audiences vary widely around the world. To be an independent producer in the United States means to believe single-mindedly in the importance of one’s story, to have a decent appetite for fund-raising and to have the patience to navigate the waters of broadcast and distribution.

The independent producers are resilient—agile enough to change as required to cope with the challenge of capturing the attention of a fickle and fidgety public that is prey to those who throw lions into the amphitheater and pundits spouting jabberwocky onto the news. Descendants of storytellers from every age, independents are using film and electronics as the palette of these times.

Being an independent producer means possessing the ability to ride change as an opportunity—and to do so before the change becomes obvious to everyone else. Independents instigate change, not optimize the status quo. Independents focus on renewal—new strategies, new thinking and new technologies.

Independents innovate. And innovation is what’s needed as we sort out how and where our work will be accessible in the digital age. And we must address this quickly while there is a chance to participate in determining the answer. Yet independents have been nomads from century to century—how can we now actively participate as a force in the digital age as independents did with ITVS and PBS a dozen years ago?

The birth of public television was part of an entire ecology of independent public media institutions that has evolved over the last 36 years. And it’s a system that includes media arts centers, associations, festivals, PBS and respected funders, like the Ford, Rockefeller and MacArthur foundations, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and ITVS. But the world has changed dramatically over those 36 years—it’s a world of globalized media, shifting political and economic alliances, and accelerating production of technologies. And it is not clear how the public media ecosystem, so often a sanctuary for independents, will be maintained, much less nurtured, in the 21st century.

So what is the role of the independent producer in the digital age? Where will we find the independent producers and public media programming? Are the two inextricably tied together? Should they be—for the health of our society? Some of these questions will be explored at the Digital Independence 2004 conference in San Francisco, from January 30 through February 1.

Most Americans recognize the value of the independent voice, the free agent, the cultural entrepreneur. We generally agree that being able to tell one’s own story is good, that a multiplicity of viewpoints is necessary, that innovation and experimentation are admirable attributes, that local stories and grassroots approaches offer freshness and authenticity. The what and the where of independents can be in no one else’s hands but our own.

—Sally Jo Fifer