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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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Tags: Cher·content flags·FCC·Indecency Policy·Nicole Ritchie·wardrobe malfunction

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)

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Django

#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

• Delicious: share bookmarks with your other computers or other people
• AddThis: generates buttons or icons that allow users to print, email, and share content via over 50 social network destinations. I use it on this blog (see icons at the bottom of this post).
• Publish 2: used by New York Times and many other media organizations, the tool facilitates collaboration among journalists. A great example of its use in the snow flooding coverage in Washington state.
• Top 10 Apps for Scheduling a Meeting Online
• Doodle: easy scheduling
• Google Groups: share documents, have discussions among group members
• Etherpad: real time collaborative text editing. Used by NPR and WBUR
• Open Atrium: an intranet in a box that allows different teams to have their own conversations. Features: blog, wiki, calendar, to do list, shoutbox, and dashboard

#3: Image, audio and video editor

• Paint.net: image editor for Windows only
• Free Alternatives to Photoshop With All the Bells, Whistles, Filters, & Layers: a list of free photo editors with comparison scores against PhotoShop
• Kaltura open source video: a video editing tool. I haven’t tested it yet since I don’t work with video much.
• Animata: animation editor
• Dipity: tool to create timeline
• Vuvox: timeline creator using photo, audio, video and animation. E.g. Saving Donna’s Brain
• Prezi: zooming presentation editor
• Google Maps: create your own
• FusinCharts: use Flash to animate charts and graphs
• Switch: audio converter Software
• amMap: interactive Flash map

#4: Web traffic measurement

• Google Analytics: can measure web visits by iPhone as well.
• CrazyEgg: visualize visitor data
• Twitoaster: Twitter ranking and stats

#5: Website design

• WordPress: can create not only blogs easily, but also non-blog web pages. Web traffic stats is built in. I would have used it for this blog if I had discovered earlier because it offers more flexibility and usability.
• Jimdo: also offers lots of widgets that can be embedded in a web page
• The Codeless Website: Four Awesome Tools for Creating Cool, No-Tech Sites

#6: Data mining and visualization

• Processing: open source programming language to program images, animation, and interactions
• Flare: data visualization for the Web
• Google visualization API gallery
• Google Chart Tools: create static or interactive charts and maps
• Dabble: online database (free version for up to 15 users and 100k entries)
• Zoho Creator: online database (free version for 2 users, 3 apps and 1000 records)
• Tweet Cloud: cloud of words that your tweets mostly contain

#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

• Tools for News: collection by the Society for News Design (SND)

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….

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

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…