Without a Yard

To sate my hunger for all things documentary, I trekked to NYC last week to work the kickoff of Docuweeks on the east coast.  In two weeks I’ll be wrapping up Docuweeks in its third & final week in LA.

Once the tingles wore off from meeting the amazing, ambitious & gifted filmmakers (& often their families), interacting with the crew of enthusiastic volunteers & working out of the IFC Centre Theatres, I had a chance to learn about the business of fundraising, filmmaking & distribution (& more importantly Oscar nomination eligibility).

The International Documentary Association has been holding Docuweeks for 14 years, ensuring that the world’s top documentarians have the requisite number of screenings in the City of Los Angeles & the borough of Manhattan to contend for an Oscar nomination. The 2009 IDA ‘Finishing Fund’ grant-recipient, Summer Pasture, is one of the screenings this year; a success story reminiscent of the many talented musicians who’ve benefitted from Austin Music Foundation‘s career-changing ‘Incubator’ fund, which ensured that artists could take their projects to the next level without mortgaging their lives away.

My personal favourite thus far (until I see a new batch in L.A., & handicapping the Finnish flick ‘Steam of Life‘ from my admitted bias for all things Suomi) was ‘Louder than a Bomb‘, a Spellbound-esque tale of rival slam-poetry teams facing off at the Chicago finals.   Strongly encourage you to keep this film on your radar, because it very well may tug at the proper Oscar judge heartstrings & sweep the world in a couple months.

Unfortunately I can’t embed the trailer, but if you check out their website: http://louderthanabombfilm.com/ you can watch 8+minute teaser for the film & get a sense of how compelling these kids’ stories are.

If you’re completely smitted by the pick, the filmmakers are savvy enough to link to a Pay-Pal-enabled donation prompt on their website & are offering tax receipts through a 501(c)3 NGO based in Chicago.  Smart cookies.

Another avenue for film funding came across my interwebs through Kickstarter’s heads up on the in-progress Bob Dorough doc, which is almost done & has a fantastic tiered donation scheme…I chipped in & so should you if you enjoyed School House Rock clips in your yoof &/or are a fan of Charlie Parker & Miles Davis collabs.  The filmmakers have been fantastic at pumping out email updates to the funders, explaining the process, being completely transparent about their financing & licensing challenges.

As documentaries become less of a niche market & more filmmakers start, ahem, documenting the filmmaking process itself, how can artists better use social media, digital video & online funding models to get into more film-loving homes & theatres?  Feel free to comment on your fav doc/fiction film case studies that’ve shown gusto in their business models online.

Thought it might be informative to dust off ye olde bloge to share a quick & dirty summary of the twitter conversations that are happening this weekend regarding the G20 summit (& more often than not, the riots/vandalism that surrounded them).  Despite being smugly camped out in the east end, crazy stuff still managed to go down in my hood, & like many Torontonians I took to the webs to passive aggressively vent:

Overall, Twitter users commenting on the G20 reached 448 million, which will no doubt trickle to over 450 million by tomorrow:

A sample size of 500 most recent tweets referencing the G20 found less than 3% positive, 18% outright negative & a surprisingly large percentage, almost 80%, neutral. This bears true with a simple search reference-check, mainly descriptive comments about the weekend events:

This next stat is especially interesting, & we’ll see more of this trend in RT-momentum as live streaming breaking news becomes the norm on Twitter, & as more users experiment with actual live-streaming video capabilities on their mobile devices. With almost a third of all G20 tweets overall, the power of the “RT” can’t be ignored. For many this weekend, re-tweeted photos (Queen W/Spadina standoff), OHs (over-heard comments)/quotes & descriptions, flooded streams & instantaneously propelled one user’s note into a massive new audience:

And more often than not, that one user’s note that flooded other’s streams wasn’t coming from a high profile journo or media outlet. Only 2% of high authority twitter users were chiming in on the G20, which includes references in RTs:

& if there is any question whether the riot/vandalism overtook the media agenda/online user’s attention span…well, this is the graph of words associated with the G20, most often used ‘Spadina’/'Queen’/'Protester’/'Protest’ & CP24. Kudos vandals – you won the internet.

Big thanks to the Sysomos lads for building the tubes that makes all the pretty piecharts!

Had the pleasure of attending a thought-provoking journalism seminar last night, which was organized by the lovely crews of Samara & Massey College.  The first in a series, the evening’s lecture featured Paul Steiger, former managing editor of the Wall Street Journal and current editor-in-chief, president & CEO of ProPublica.

What sets ProPublica apart from many up and coming online news outlets (or MSM using citizen journalists to round out their roster of writers), is its success rate partnering with mainstream media outlets (NYTimes, Washington Post, NPR, PBS, 60 minutes, etc) at the early stages of investigative journalism or at the final hand-off/distribution stage.  They are able to undertake ambitious research from their “independent, non-profit newsroom” thanks to a foundation grant, which sustains the basic operating costs, and are now looking to create a more sustainable financing model with various funders and small individual donations.

For example, last summer ProPublica investigated the high rates of re-hires among negligent nurses in the state of California, and paired up with the LATimes to expose the lax oversight in tracking potentially (& often fatal) staffing decisions.  Between the two outlets’ teams, they researched every Californian nurse disciplinary case from 2002-08 (over 2,000) and revealed that the average lag-time on action by the Board of Registered Nursing was over three years, & many cases were left forgotten.  One day after the story was published, Governor Schwarzenegger replaced almost every member of the Board, citing the newspaper & online organization’s coverage as bringing the issue to light.

Examples abound of long-form investigative journalism affecting change by exposing negligence, corruption and fraud – so the question isn’t exist/disappear…but one wonders if only addressing the shrinking budgets/staff of MSM, a larger issue is unaddressed – our shrinking attention span. (Insert obligatory ‘Google makes us stupid‘ link, &/or pop-stat used by many UX’ers that the average user’s attention span is now whittled down to 5 seconds)

Encouragingly enough for online news outlets, yesterday the Pew Internet & American Life Project released new online news usage data with internet news listed above print and radio in popularity, with 61% of Americans reading news online vs. 50% reading a local paper & 17% reading a national paper.  Of the online-ers 1/3 were reading on their mobile device.  But when we say ‘reading’ are people really reading?

One ProPublica fact that threw me was the proud statement that they’d launched an iPhone app and had a Blackberry version in the wings.  While I’m the first to strongly encourage clients to reach their audiences on as many platforms as possible, eschewing the ‘If you build it they will come’ attitude & instead respectfully joining communities that are interested in your offering, silver-bullet-izing the mobile platform for long-form journalism cannot jive without major mods.

In the same way we couldn’t create a hit radio programme walking into a studio & recording a ‘Simpsons’ script – reading a full-length long-form investigative piece on a 3”x2” screen is a tough slog for the online crew.  Are there any online outlets doing a good job of serializing content so that it’s broken up into manageable mobile-friendly chunks, while also grabbing the audience’s attention with cliff-hanger-style endings every couple days, or embedding multi-media content to supplement the copy?  Any way to use audio to create subscription-based podcast versions of the stories – if there was ever a sustainable online revenue model for journalism, it might be long-tail-able via iTunes – or at least worth a shot…

There’s a particularly startling epidemic happening in the online world, which I’m noticing mainly in Toronto of late.  It might just be the 2.0 version of the classic Canadian tall poppy syndrome, but this strain is turning out to be stronger & scarier than swine flu.  Victims are compelled (nay, forced?) to gush out unnecessary mea culpas, fall on their twittering swords & hide in abject terror of the virus reappearing.  It disguises itself as a ‘transparency’ inoculation or an ‘authenticity’ booster shot, but there is only one diagnosis for the unfortunate malady-stricken online risk-takers – they’ve been bitten by social media schadenfreude.

Now I’m the first to grab the popcorn when things get spicy on the political scene, and don’t get between me and my indierock drama…BUT when it comes to jumping down people’s throats in an online/professional context…I get a little…empathetic.  By the luck of astrologically-aligned-nerd-stars, my salty slangly casual language whilst pitching bloggers, writing content & generally floundering through life has not put in me in this position.  According to the law of averages, until I am drafted to the WNBA, I will soon play the role of the  ‘social media practitioner’ or ‘community member’ receiving a thorough ego trouncing from the peanut gallery.  {In fact, if those web gremlins continue to highjack a lovely microsite/app-project we’re eager to seed/launch I might be in this position early next week }

We all make mistakes.  If we’re doing right by our clients, we aren’t just going through the same-old super-safe motions developing & executing campaigns.  Ask any stellar standup comedian.  Some jokes kill and some jokes bomb.  That’s life.

So on this turkey weekend eve, let’s be thankful that there are social media peeps still taking risks, let’s remember that when this happens with ad campaigns we think it’s unique & quirky & let’s consider the embarassment of riches we have in terms of attending awesome events.  Before you pile on to critique someone going out on a limb or trying something new or having an opinion…ask yourself if you really want to end up like these dudes:

*Massive full disclosure – A staffer at Social Media Group is my basketball bud & I have been known to enjoy cheap soft-serve ‘ice cream’ with Refresh Events‘ founder.

What do KISS, IKEA & Muslim women have in common? Unfortunately there’s no snappy punchline, it’s just an excuse to weave a nerd narrative through a bunch of interesting news stories.

I’m sure by now you’ve got your Oshawa B&B resos, relieved to hear the city’s glam-rocker residents’ KISS ARMY allegiance wasn’t in vain. The band ran a straightforward prove-how-much-you-love-us online contest, which was styled like a petition, requiring city residents to submit email addresses, & promised a concert for the winning city (regrettably it was a KISS concert).  After the band announced the winning city, they published a tour schedule that did not include Oshawa. Now, it doesn’t take Columbo to examine a tour schedule & discover a gap that is geographically & schedule-wise able to accommodate a ‘secret’ show or ‘by popular demand’ second night in a venue (Hello Wilco, Welcome to Massey Hall x2!).  Nonetheless, the interwebs’ hyper hypos have an irrepressible impulse to stretch their harnesses.  The city was up in arms, thousands joined Facebook protest groups, locals became ‘representatives’ on news outlets, fansites heaved & a PR maelstrom ensued.  Can’t completely blame unnerved fans for their reaction, but it proves that an online ‘petition’ campaign banking on engaging region-specific communities must reach all stakeholders clearly, consistently & concurrently – online & in ‘public’/mainstream media messaging – or face the wrath of multiple red-dye-tongue-waggings.

From KISS to kisses, The Times’ Freakonomics blogger Steven Dubner references gay rights kissing protests in Salt Lake City (or ‘IRL’ – in real life) in a fantastic quorum post called ‘How Much Do Protests Really Matter?’.  It’s a great long piece that highlights some of the most effective protests throughout history – & puts the KISS KRAP, ridiculous IKEA font fiasco & the ultimate online overreaction of #AmazonFail (of which Shirkey’s blushing reflection is the best) – into perspective.  Kent State, this ain’t. Aside from totally dismissing the online flareups, what can be gleaned from recent issues that’ve made their way into the mainstream?

One positive example of addressing consumer concerns straight-on is the triage-style response from Tim Horton’s to their comp’ed coffee clusterfritter.  After being accused of supporting anti-gay groups, HQ calmly, widely, publicly stated otherwise, while explaining the franchisee relationship & corporate values in a balanced manner.  Though they’ll go down in Twitter history as being ‘too slow’, realistically a major multi-national addressing an online issue centered on a (not ideal ideologically…) backwoods charity BBQ in less than 48 hours (counting weekend days…sadly the downside of our email era is expectation to check 24/7) is approaching impressive.

Finally, last Sunday’s NYTimes magazine on women’s issues had a special ‘The Medium’ column on Feminist Hawks by Virginia Herrernan. It illustrates how ‘motherhood’ issues (for lack of a better word…) can be repackaged, re-purposed & emailed for protest campaigns under new auspices.  In this case an anti-Afghan outlook was wrapped in women’s rights.  Herrernan tracked a popular email petition propelled by pundits such as David Horowitz that sought signatures supporting persecuted Muslim women, but stated military aggression was the solution to women’s liberation.  “This material is expected to help seal Horowitz’s general case for the war on terror, though he has not yet changed the name of his cause to, say, the war on misogyny.”

It might be hard to assign a #fail to online protests writ large, but the summer months brought a new level of inane chatter that could be called out & calmed down as the temperature drops & leaves begin to fall.  Creating online communities, sharing fact-checked/substantiated information & organizing IRL events is one of the strengths of the internet.  Our creative communities’ ongoing successes in subverting negative legislative/funding changes & presenting a strong case for supporting the arts is my favourite example of combining social networks, multimedia & the power of assembly to affect legislative change & public discourse.  Maybe revisiting the history of protests & learning from past well-informed, organized, thoughtful participants, will remind us of this.  You’ve been assigned Whingeing History for first period, first semester – enjoy the final days of summer, kids