President's Message

December 5, 2009 download PDF version	1/13/10 - Video from December 4, 2009 event, Public Access 2.0 = You(r) Tube, held at at Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Video links follow in 3 parts.
Part 1: http://blip.tv/file/3073211
Part 2: http://blip.tv/file/3053977
Part 3: http://blip.tv/file/2986324

Happy Holidays!

Welcome to New Members and greetings to all.

How do you think of the Internet? What is its relationship with television? How are they used together now – and how might they be? What values will inform the new media landscape?

These are some of the thoughts swirling in my mind after attending our NYFVC December event “Public Access = You(r) Tube” at Manhattan Neighborhood Network. You soon will be able to see the provocative discussion thanks to new Board Member Betty Yu, Director of Community Outreach & Media at MNN, www.mnn.org, who produced the event and arranged for it to be videotaped.

Marie Regan, filmmaker, Professor of Film and Electronic Arts, Bard College and new NYFVC Board Member moderated the discussion deftly, elicting ideas relevant to producers, activists, technologists and citizens.

“How was the event? I so wanted to attend but was feeling sick and overwhelmed with work,” said a student of mine at Columbia Journalism School the next day. She wants to use the Internet to report her documentary – to tap into the collective wisdom of the crowd and the community of interest around her topic.

Panelist Anne Jonas, Community Outreach Coordinator for the Participatory Culture Foundation, highlighted how her organization www.pculture.org helps create local and topical community video websites. Founded in 2005 in Worcester, MA, PCF’s distributed board and staff live in San Francisco, Paris, New York and elsewhere.

Their open source software may be downloaded at www.getmiro.com. Anne cited three example of its use in community video websites: http://vermontcam.org/; http://www.mediasanctuary.org/; http://cctvcambridge.org/; and http://medfield.tv/.

Participatory Culture’s efforts to democratize video hosting are elaborated at www.mirocommunity.org. One senses that PCF and Miro’s work is just beginning. Their website states:

"In partnership with the Knight Foundation, we will soon launch several sites focused on specific cities and towns, curated by public media organizations: WNYC for New York, WDET for Detroit, BAVC for San Francisco, and others. We are seeking additional partners in other cities and towns that have a strong local connection and strong media experience. Interested? Contact anne@pculture.org. That’s Anne Jonas."

Panelist Nan Rubin, director of Special Projects/Technology Planning for WNET.org, and MNN board member, cited www.archive.org as an important pioneering video and image preservation site. She talked about how people identified people in photos and videos that had been posted online. In the process, communities of interest developed.

Since 2003, Nan Rubin has been Project Director of Preserving Digital Public Television, funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information and Infrastructure
Preservation Program (NDIIPP). She oversees a team based at WNET, WGBH –TV in Boston, the Public Broadcasting Service, and New York University, which is building a model preservation repository.

It was hard enough to preserve analog video – think of all the format changes that have occurred since the founding of public television. As anyone knows who has experienced the change from shooting videotape to recording video on P2 cards, you have to plan your workflow – and your archiving. Her advice: plan for preservation from the start of any production – not as an afterthought.

Searching www.ptvdigitalarchive.org, I found her May 2009 paper entitled “Is There Life After Broadcasting?” She writes, “In a culture that expects broadcast media to be available whenever it chooses, the notion of a video archive takes on new meaning: not as a gatekeeper to accessing older content, but rather as a guardian protecting that content and keeping it vital. Unlike videotape, it isn’t enough to close a digital file and put it on a virtual shelf.” Read the full paper at http://www.thirteen.org/ptvdigitalarchive/files/2009/10/internat-preservation-news-spring-2009.pdf

Nan spoke about the need for producers to provide metadata – words to accompany video images – so that programs may be easily searchable. She mentioned one growing standard for doing it, pbcore: http://www.pbcore.org/

Nan said that innovative opportunities abound at the intersection of the Internet and television but that existing public media and public access media need to explore them creatively.

Dorothy Thigpen, Executive Director of Third World Newsreel, a long-established alternative media arts organization that helps people of color to produce, disseminate and independent film and video to advocate for social change, talked of TWN’s current featured program at www.twn.org: PRIMETIME: Fighting Back Against Foreclosure, a 23-minute documentary produced in their workshop training program, which looks at two women affected by the sub-prime mortgage crisis and through them shows the disproportionate impact of the foreclosure crisis on communities of color. It’s an example of the need for diverse perspectives to be brought to bear upon critical issues facing our communities.

Zenaida Mendez, Director of External Affairs at Manhattan Neighborhood Network, is chief negotiator for MNN’s franchise renewal process. She said that MNN is not currently receiving funds from Time-Warner Cable of NYC as it is negotiating terms for renewal. She noted that broadband revenue from cable-provided Internet connections has never been included in fees for public access.

Zenaida is working nationally on media policy to protect Public Access through the Alliance for Community Media http://www.alliancecm.org/. Mentioning the Comcast purchase of NBC/Universal and the company’s record in Philadelphia of fighting public access, she said that channels for Public, Educational and Government use are being threatened nationally as cable companies compete with telephone companies over broadband. She noted that the ACM website not only features innovative ideas from public access centers but also a campaign to urge Congress to support the Community Access Preservation Act HR 3745.

During the question period, legendary NYU professor of film George Stoney, NYFVC & MNN Board Member, said, “Community Access is what we should be calling it, rather than public access, don’t you think?”

What do you think? Explore the websites listed above and watch MNN’s videotape of the discussion, and come up with your suggestions for future NYFVC programs to examine our changing media landscape.

Thank you to NYFVC Board Members David Callahan and Andrea Traubner who organized the reception, and Donna Cameron who became a studio camera operator when one was needed at the last moment, and Alexa Coyle who provided much needed support as our administrative assistant.

To all, Happy New Year 2010

Howard Weinberg
President, NYFVC