The following farewell email went out last Friday to the staff of Channel 13, New York’s PBS station. It’s a scorcher.

From Sam Topperoff:

Farewell Address May 21, 2010

Farewells are inevitable. This is mine.

I’ve been here, mostly at WLIW but a bit at WNET as a producer, writer, director for twenty-one years, even though most of you wouldn’t know who I am. I’m the tall old man who ambles through the halls usually deep in thought, or trying to seem so. During two decades at PBS I’ve done some good work and, like most of us I suspect, some stuff I’d like to have a chance to do over.

During the past two years, many, too many, farewell e-mails have come to me in this building. Their tone has bothered me: It was invariably polite, cheerful, brave and tentatively hopeful. Since they were from people who had been fired, young and even middle-aged professionals, it would have been foolish for them to reveal their anger or their pain, and certainly not in their interests to burn any professional bridges when they said goodbye here. I’m free to do exactly that. I’m very old and have put aside enough money while I unburdened amble out the door to 33rd Street . So let me light a small fire in my bridge-burning farewell.

What’s happened at Channels 13 and 21 under the new management has been simply awful, comically grotesque, if indeed so many lives hadn’t been affected. It is the painful result of equal parts ineptitude, insensitivity, and arrogance of gross proportions. If the previous Emperor was a patrician windbag, this ambitious Emperor and his Ministers are bereft of any clothes. They are clever, and that’s about it. The suspenders hold up nothing, certainly not a hopeful future for our public television stations in New York . Many of us, of course, know this, but it feels wonderful to actually hear myself say it aloud.

Who among us could not have “saved” the company through extreme austerity and taking away the jobs of so many good and loyal workers? True leadership would have led us through hard times and transformed the company at the same time. It is one thing to “spin” a web on the stage at Loew’s and then get bailed out by wealthy board members, quite another to come up with brilliant and humane solutions to very difficult problems, but that is what remarkable people with true vision do in institutions under siege. Notice, of all the cut-backs that were offered, none was for reduction of executive compensation to save a few jobs. Do I expect too much? Probably, but forgive me, I’m old and may be slipping.

The fact is I’m worried about the future of the stations to which I’ve devoted my last twenty years; certainly there’s no reason for confidence based on recent management decisions. I remember being stunned at a Trustees Meeting a while ago when Mr. Shapiro compared the NET.ORG he envisioned to the New York Yankees, and 450 W33rd Street to Yankee Stadium, “Home of Champions.” Really. You can’t make this stuff up. (Does that make the Upper West Studio our new, very expensive Yankee Stadium? And where does that leave Mets fans?) Staying with the sports metaphor, he began a recent memo, “Television is a team sport….” Well, if so, on what team does a manager not know the names of each and every one of his fellow team members, or have to hire an outside consulting firm to find out what his teammates really think. Leadership? Really? I guess this is teamwork in the ultra-contemporary sense, and as I said, I’m aged and hopelessly old-school.

The most galling offense and the saddest part of the story is how bleak the future looks for truly “Public” television in this city. On my commutes to work on the E and F lines and occasionally on the Number 7 train, I’d ask people if they watched PBS. Almost no one does. They said there was very little on the air that spoke to their lives. The New York public is not merely the “Upper” East and West sides. It is these “Others” too, millions of them. And during those rare times we do program for this other New York , we do it embarrassingly, in stilted, patronizing “other” fashion. In spite of my left-wing bona fides and my high falutin’ Doctoral degree, I see our general programming for the wider public as elitist and offensive in the extreme. (Not many of us, you realize, can afford those good seats at “The Home of Champions.”) But of course, when stations run on very rich people’s and Corporate money, how could it be otherwise? And when the corporation is directed by those very clever and very ambitious fellows whose careers will float them to good places no matter what, what else could we reasonably expect?

But there is a second station here-Channel 21. How easy it would have been to grow a vast, truly public audience with it. And how inexpensively. Unless of course, we don’t see or care about that audience; unless the “Public” mission is directed by guys who take limos and cabs and never ride on the subway like most New Yorkers. Public television indeed.

So as I walk away I look back over my shoulder at some good work, some wonderful times, and some very fine colleagues. But also in the darkness behind me I see a fire lighting the sky. A bridge is burning. It looks beautiful. There is great contentment in knowing truth…and even greater contentment in saying truth.

See you on YouTube.

Good night and good luck,

Sam Toperoff

I really didn’t mean for these to appear in alphabetical order, but here’s a teaser for fellow student Mark Barroso’s film A Puppet Intervention. When I read about it I thought I knew what I’d see (seen lots of activist puppet stuff living in Philly, Eugene, Berkeley). These have to be seen to be appreciated. Obviously a nice light touch with the filmmaking and some cool verite moments.

“A Puppet Intervention” movie trailer from Mark Barroso on Vimeo.

Hyperlocal ‘news cafes’ are taking the Czech news scene by storm

Why Online Video Fails To Meet Its Lofty Expectations

With television advertising being a $70 billion market and total online advertising weighing in at $22.7 billion for 2009, you can’t help but wonder why online video advertising only represents a $1 billion market. 

In fact, according to the IAB, video advertising grew from $734 million to $1.017 billion from 2008 to 2009 — or 38%.  That’s not bad, but when you consider that total video consumption per month has soared from 10 billion videos in July 2008 to over 33 billion in December 2009 (or 230%), you wonder why the revenue growth hasn’t mimicked the viewership.

For sure, economics tend to trail consumer patterns.  Moreover, the recession and advertising slump didn’t help either.  And yes, the so-called experts might not be all-knowing either, after all.

I personally think there’s more to it than that. 

The Genie is Out of the Bottle

In 2000, I worked at a search engine company.  We gave away our search engines for free and sought to generate revenue via advertising.  The Nasdaq crashed and took down the ad market, after which point we sought to collect licensing revenues for our technology.  With the cat out of the bag, it was impossible to get people to pay for the product afterwards.  Lesson learned: If you give something away for free, you can’t charge for it subsequently.CTD…

An argument that professional content will continue to dominate the audience’s attention and that the likely way it will be paid for is through ads. But will the ad revenue be enough to fund the programming we’re fond of? Maybe a reality show, but probably not Lost, or CSI.

Tribeca looks to expand notion of film festival

By JAKE COYLE (AP) – 6 days ago

NEW YORK — When British director Mat Whitecross was growing up in Oxford, only so many movies screened in his local cinema — and not the intriguing movies he read about playing at film festivals or elsewhere.

Whitecross estimates that 90 percent of the films that were influential to him — such as “Taxi Driver” and “La Dolce Vita” — he watched “on very dodgy, knocked-off VHS tapes” or on TV early in the morning with commercial breaks.

“Better to have seen them that way than not at all,” he says.

Whitecross’ experience guides the ninth annual Tribeca Film Festival, which kicks off Wednesday amid concern that the volcanic ash disrupting air travel in Europe might ground some of the many European filmmakers who were planning to attend.

. In an effort to help films find audiences, movies won’t just be screening in downtown Manhattan.

A new distribution company, Tribeca Film, founded by the festival’s parent company, Tribeca Enterprises, will make a dozen movies — including Whitecross’ directorial debut “sex & drugs & rock & roll” — available on TV by way of video-on-demand in some 40 million homes. A “virtual festival” will also stream eight movies and 18 shorts online for viewers willing to shell out $45.

…ctd

A win-win for indy filmmakers and indy-loving audiences who can’t get to Manhattan (or can’t get a ticket.) Get the films on VOD and watch in your home theater. Now I’ve got to convince my little cableco to sign up!