Appeals Court Hammers the FCC on inconsistent indecency rulings

On July 16, 2010 by Colin

Appeals Court Hammers the FCC on inconsistent indecency rulings

July 16th, 2010 · Future of public media, PBS, Public Affairs, Public Media ·Edit

Today the States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a decision that found the the FCC’s 2006 decision to punish broadcasters for Cher and Nicole Richie’s “fleeting expletives” was based on vague and inconsistent standards. It is likely that this decision and possibly the upcoming decision on Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals will be appealed to the Supreme Court for decision in the next several years.

The good news is that this decision included a strongly worded rebuke on the FCC’s inconsistency regarding rulings about the same expletives that were allowed in Saving Private Ryan, but disallowed in the documentary The Blues – Godfathers and Sons. This might mean a pause in new findings by the FCC while these decisions are appealed. Meanwhile, broadcasters like Mountain Lake PBS are still likely to err on the side of caution and flag and/or censor expletives and visual materials before airing them. Regardless of the court decisions, Mountain Lake PBS will always be careful to evaluate all the programs that we air, provide viewer discretion warnings when appropriate and move questionable content into late evening slots.

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More Free Web Tools for Everyone

On July 9, 2010 by Colin

This follows from my earlier post about the Ben Franklin Project… use these to save money!

Tools

There are tons of free and good tools online to help public broadcasters (and others) accomplish essential online media tasks such as creating and posting image, audio and video files, having audience share content with one another, and so on. Below are some of the free and easy tools that I have accumulated so far. Please add yours to the list and together we can build an impressive online tool kit for public media.

#0: CMS (Content Management System)

#1: Screen capture as image, video or narrated slide show
These tools record your action on computer screen (whole or part of the screen) and narration. So they’re perfect for creating demo video, narrated slide shows, and illustrated stories.

  • Screenr: can send screen capture video to mobile, too
  • ScreenToaster: can add subtitle and capture webcam images
  • Jing: can’t record webcam

#2: Sharing and collaboration

#3: Image, audio and video editor

#4: Web traffic measurement

#5: Website design

#6: Data mining and visualization

#7: Other useful tools

  • TagCrowd: creates your own tag cloud from any text
  • Wordle: generates word cloud like an art
  • Qualtrics: online survey software
  • CutePDF: creates PDF from any file that you can print
  • Widgetbox: self-service web widget platform
  • Monitter: Twitter conversation monitor
#8: Collections by others

Formulaic documentaries are drowning creativity

On July 8, 2010 by Colin

This is a year-old post from Rick Prelinger, film archivist extraordinaire and the founder of the internet archive He’s going where few dare to tread these days, as the documentary form seems to get more rigid and codified with every passing year. The original post also features some interesting responses.

Taking history back from the “storytellers

“…While there seems to be agreement that the reenactment trend has spread way too far, I think there’s a deeper problem facing historically/archivally oriented docs, and it’s actually something we can help to solve.

Some of the most interesting documentary films take their structures from organic phenomena like the hours of the day, or the trajectory of a river from source to mouth. Others are essays that follow a structured thought process. Still others divide into sequences or parts that need to be understood and compared as discrete units for the film to generate meaning in the viewer. In fact, there are nearly infinite possible documentary structures, of which I think we’ve only seen a small fraction. By contrast, the mainstream documentary focuses on what’s now called “storytelling,” a highly traditional representational strategy that in recent years has come to imply the omnipresence of characters (good and evil), a narrative arc and a conventional act-based structure in which seemingly insurmountable problems are frequently solved.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with storytelling, whatever it may be, and not all stories are bad. What’s wrong is the assumption, which has become not only pervasive but compulsory, that documentaries need characters, that the narrative arc must reign supreme, and that we’re obliged to show people wrestling with and resolving problems. I’ve sat with PBS gatekeepers and heard them refer to programs as “stories,” not films or shows. Ultimately this insults potential audiences by assuming they’re only able to ingest a limited narrative menu. Is it really true that, when it comes to media, “the best surprise is no surprise?”

The vernacular language of documentaries is freezing in place. If I tried to pitch The River today, they’d say “A river? Where’s the story? You need to find characters with great stories who live along the banks.” If I sought money for The Man with the Movie Camera, I’d be sent back to research more about the cameraman’s inner life and emotions, and to find or invent interpersonal (rather than interframe) conflict. Now, there are indeed essay-based makers, like Adam Curtis, perhaps Errol Morris, and many others (forgive my lack of knowledge, but I’m not a Netflix guy). Sam Green is now making a film on utopia that I think is not shrinking from ideas, even though it does follow a few people around. And then there’s James Benning. But it’s just harder to make different work and have it seen. Post continues….

I-phone film-making has arrived!

On June 29, 2010 by Colin

Look out – here come’s mobile film-making! No excuses – the editing application is in the phone!

Rediscovered my favorite site for DIY audio

On June 24, 2010 by Colin

I’ve lamented the loss of Alan Barker’s wonderful site that gave us the technique that worked for our year of shooting at Skatopia. Thank you Alan!

I just remembered the fabulous Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive and REDISCOVERED this lost site.

We don’t agree with his assertion about the DVX100, but we’ve used his mic recommendations for 100’s of hours of verite shooting in extreme conditions.

Check out this great resource from a very accomplished doc sound recordist and producer.

A few other sound resources I’ve used (and each has good used equipment):

Trew Audio: I’ve rented from them and like their reviews and white papers. They gave us a great rate because we were independent, knew what we wanted and treated them (and their gear) professionally.

Professional Sound Services, NYC – not to be confused with PSC that make sound gear… these guys rent gear and make custom cables among other things. Seems like they’ve added training to their mix.

Finally, though audio is not their sole specialty like the others, Talamas Broadcast in Boston is one of the friendliest and most issue free rental houses anwhere. It’s enough to make me think up stories to go shoot in Boston! Also check out their white papers… like how to check Back Focus… if you don’t know what that is and you’ll be shooting professionally, you’d be wise to read this paper.

Enjoy!

How sorry are you that newspapers are dying? Dan Gillmor ain't.

On June 16, 2010 by Colin

I worry about not having a nice inky newspaper to read over Sunday (or any) breakfast, but Gillmor takes aim at the big, greedy side of the media conglomerates. He sees web-based journalism replacing (and maybe doing a better job than) the old model. I wonder, though, if there’s no editor to screen and vet the material and uphold some journalistic standards, how can we have the same trust in the stories? Would Woodward & Bernstein have the same credibility today if they broke the Watergate story on a blog? Food for thought.

Journalism monopoly was also a market failure,

Eroding newspaper business models represent markets that are working, not just failing

More than one speaker at today’s Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism has used the expression “market failure” to describe the eroding business model of local newspapers. Perhaps they’ve picked up on the FTC’s Federal Register Notice describing the purpose for this months-long initiative, in which economists say that “public affairs reporting may indeed be particularly subject to market failure.”

There’s some truth in this, even though it’s far too early to assume that current trends will lead over the long term to less trustworthy information in the public affairs realm. (I believe the opposite, but the jury’s definitely out on this.) Framing the issue this way also buys into the mythology that we had a Golden Age of Journalism with ample public affairs reporting; even the biggest daily newspapers rarely covered governments outside several core jurisdictions in their markets.

For the privileged few journalists who lived in that era’s once-warm embrace, and especially for their employers, professional life was almost perfect — because that was an era of fabulously profitable monopolies and oligopolies. The public affairs journalism was real, and sometimes brilliant work that made a huge difference in local and national affairs. But relatively speaking to the available financial resources, it was a typically a modest spinoff of near-absolute market power the journalism companies boasted in the communities they claimed to (and sometimes did) serve.

But there’s another way to look at the media marketplace of those days. And from several other perspectives it’s safe to say that current trends amount to the overdue correction: that the pined-after Golden Age was in key ways itself the era of market failure.

If you were a local business that wanted broad reach into the community, you essentially had to pay the extortionate and always-rising display advertisement prices newspapers charged or the equally extortionate broadcast rates local TV affiliates could command. If you were an individual trying to sell a car or household item or rent out a spare room, you paid absurdly high prices for classified ads.ARTICLE CONTINUES…

Vivian Schiller announces One Big Online Platform for Public TV and Radio

On June 14, 2010 by Colin

Vivian Schiller of NPR trumpeted the new “one-stop” platform for your public media fix every day… I’m not sure how this will relate to individual station sites or feed visitors back to them… we’ll see. I don’t see myself going anywhere but NCPR for the In-box, nor anywhere but MLPBS for the latest Mountain Lake Journal from Thom Hallock… but I see how it all looks. I also notice that longtime PBS distributor NETA is not named as one of the collaborators, even though they distribute more regional and local TV content than APM or PBS.

Image courtesy of PMP Partners

NEW YORK — The country’s five silos of public radio and television are spilling into each other with a joint program that will allow them – and eventually the public itself — to build apps, stations, websites and other media services combining audio, text and video content from every public radio and television outlet in the country.

NPR president and CEO Vivian Schiller appeared at Wired’s Disruptive by Design conference Monday morning to announce the new Public Media Platform, a partnership between American Public Media, National Public Radio, Public Broadcasting Services (PBS), Public Radio International and the Public Radio Exchange distribution network.

Over the next six months, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting will spend about $1 million to develop a working prototype of the platform, with NPR leading the charge

ARTICLE CONTINUES…

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Skatopia hits PBS… Brewce & Laurie Video Interview

On June 8, 2010 by Colin

Laurie House and Brewce Martin of Skatopia are interveiwed by Thom Hallock of Mountain Lake Journal about Skatopia: 88 Acres of Anarchy. The movie will be playing June 11 at 11PM at the Lake Placid Film Forum.

Athens Film Festival Photos – Better late than never

On June 7, 2010 by Colin

This is an older post that I forgot to put up… oops!
We had a fantastic pair of screenings in Athens, OH. Sold out twice. Here are some images.

Athena Theater Marquee

Out front of the classic Athena Theater courtesy David Hooker

Skateboard Museum Display in theater lobby

Selections from Skatopia's museum

Brewce Martin and mom, Pat

Brewce Martin's mom Pat came out

Brewce and his date Susie

Brewce brought a high school sweetheart - Susie

If you don't know about Lance Weiler… you should!

On June 6, 2010 by Colin

Lance Weiler, visionary filmmaker and DIY distribution expert, gives an overview of his highly inventive and cutting-edge distribution strategy for second feature Head Trauma. Lance reveals how he used no cost online tools to create huge buzz around the movie and how he expanded the audience for his film through multimedia remix cinema events and Alternate Reality Games.