AU Center for Social Media - Newsletter

UPCOMING EVENTS

Coming Soon:

Public Media 2.0 Field Report: Building Social Media Infrastructure to Engage Publics --Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report '09


Research fellow Nina Keim and Future of Public Media director Jessica Clark released their most recent field report at the Public Democracy Forum conference in New York last week. Watch your RSS feed of our blog next week as we release it online. If you can't wait and want a copy now, send us an email at socialmedia@american.edu and we'll send you the preview version. The report reviews the achievements of both Twitter Vote Report and Inauguration Report '09 as they used Twitter tools to engage and organize publics.


THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC MEDIA

Future of Public Media Session at SILVERDOCS!

Watch our fun-filled, role-playing simulation that asks a cast of experts to step out of 2009 and project themselves into the public media of the future: It's 2014, and the new titans are Ticketmaster, Google, Amazon and Hulu. Do you know where your public media went? At the SILVERDOCS conference Future of Public Media panel, we threw futurists, investors, business folk and public media programmers and makers together to invent a future in which web media rules. We didn't forget to film the entire session so you can watch it here! Read on to check out the cast of the session here.

CSM: In Good Company

The School of Communications and Center for Social Media were recently the subjects of Mark Glaser's Mediashift blog. The post explored how American University's School of Communications is evolving into an epicenter for the education of new journalists and media makers. Glaser's piece includes video interviews with the Center's director, Pat Aufderheide, as well as SOC Dean Larry Kirkman, Jan Schaffer from J-Lab, Charles Lewis from the Investigative Reporting Workshop and Amy Eisman, the head of writing classes at SOC. Read the article here.

J-Lab's New Report --New Media Makers

Congratulations to our suite partner and ally J-Lab on the release of a new report New Media Makers -A Toolkit for Innovators in Community Media and Grant Making. The report reviews the growing trend of philanthropic organizations increasingly funding media projects. Read the press release or check out the report.

Future of Investigative Reporting Arrived

What happens to the crucial public media role of watchdogging the powerful as newspapers die? Nonprofits have poured funding into hard-hitting investigative reporting through The Center for Investigative Reporting, The Center for Public Integrity, ProPublica and now the brand-new Investigative Reporting Workshop (part of American University's School of Communication). Now the Associated Press--the nation's news lifeline--has agreed to carry these organizations' work. There couldn't be a more powerful stamp of approval for nonprofit news. Read the press release here.

Public Media Showcase: One Economy Corps

This month's Public Media 2.0 showcase features One Economy Corporation, a global nonprofit that aims to increase access to technology and information for everyone, regardless of income. The website hosts a number of toolboxes. While each toolbox contains interactive tools full of valuable information that helps users make lifestyle changes, the resources rarely extend beyond personal improvement. Read more here.

Stranger than Fiction: Beyond Broadcast

At the 2009 Beyond Broadcast conference, hosted by USC Annenberg's School of Communications in early June, attendees from more than a dozen countries worked together to build scenarios predicting the evolution of public service media in regions buffeted by social, political and economic transitions. A week later the future long predicted by Beyond Broadcast organizers arrived earlier than planned, as social media tools became the main source of news on Iran's contested elections. Read more here.

Moz Diaries --Digital Journalism At Its Best

At the SILVERDOCS conference the AFI Digital Content Lab Showcase panel hosted a wide array of innovative ideas. Most noteworthy were the journalistic pursuits of Kit Carson. Kit shared his work on one of his most recent projects, Moz Diaries. In collaboration with filmmaker Tim Johnson, Kit traveled down to Mozambique to document the state of transition of the country since its recent "miraculous" success in the global economic sphere. His choice of record? A cell phone camera. Read more here.

Our Stories DC at SILVERDOCS

SOC's Amy Hendrick attended SILVERDOCS with Brittany Barbour, one of the filmmakers from her youth media project, Our Stories DC. Barbour screened her film and participated in a panel discussion at the festival. (Our Stories DC was funded as one of our Future of Public Media demonstration grants last year.) The panel was made up of five other youth, some of who traveled to the festival from as far as Mozambique. They demonstrated a diversity of experience that has not historically been a part of public media. Read more here.

COPYRIGHT AND FAIR USE

Getting Legal at SILVERDOCS

Peter Jaszi and Pat Aufderheide had fun presenting on the panel, "The Legal 411 on Film and Media in the Classroom." The SILVERDOCS conference now has a thriving strand of panels directed at teachers who use audio-visual material in the classroom and who work with kids who make video. One of the teachers' biggest headaches is understanding their rights under copyright. Can students upload their videos to YouTube? Are they permitted to clip out material from commercial (and encrypted) DVDs? Can teachers post clips onto their electronic teaching platforms? Aufderheide and Jaszi were able to help them clarify. Read more here.

Who's Plagiarizing Now?

Copyright protectionists decry copying as theft and plagiarism-and let's just acknowledge here that sometimes it is. The well-funded efforts of copyright owners' organizations to promote this message, though, has thoroughly confused many people about their fair use rights. So there's a certain pleasure-what the Germans call schadenfreude -in discovering that a major Canadian research organization plagiarized an American lobbying group's report. Read more here.

Fair Use Bunker Scene

Have you seen Electronic Frontier Foundation Board Chairman Brad Templeton's remix of the popular meme "the bunker scene" from the 2004 film Downfall? In this version, Hitler is trying to stop people from making remixes by invoking the DMCA. (Meta enough for you?) EFF's article When Fair Use Is Fairly Difficult describes what technical contortions Templeton had to go through to use his fair use rights. For more clarity on what your fair use rights are, click here.

Fair Use Question of the Month: Free Legal Advice for Fair Use

Every month the Center for Social Media answers a new question concerning fair use. This month's question deals with getting free legal advice for fair use and the advantages of reading our Codes before doing so. Read more here.

EVOLVING DOCUMENTARY

SILVERDOCS Wrap Up

The SILVERDOCS conference and film festival this year turned out to be a great success. We were very impressed by Sky Sitney's outstanding programming of the film festival and Diana Ingraham's expert planning of the conference. Read Center's director Pat Aufderheide's favorite film highlights here and associate director Alison Hanold's complete conference overview here.

'How Green Is Green?' Panel at SILVERDOCS

On June 18 SOC Professor and lead author of our recent publication Code of Best Practices in Sustainable Filmmaking Larry Engel participated on a panel discussing green filmmaking with co-directors of No Impact Man, Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein. The panel was led by Amy King, a longtime Silverdocs associate. It started with a clip from No Impact Man, a great film about Colin Beavan and his wife, Michele. The film traces the family's year-long effort to create no carbon, or at least keep it to a bare minimum. Read more here about Larry's experience on the panel here.

Lioness Making an Impact on Legislation

The new film -->Lioness shows how a documentary positioned at the centerpiece of a strategic outreach campaign can shape an issue on the public agenda and have a direct impact on public policy. The National Defense Authorization Act for the Fiscal Year 2010 was approved by the House Armed Services Committee last week. Included in its recommendations is a section titled "Recognizing Service Women Who Have Participated as ''Lionesses'' During Operations in Iraq and Afghanistan." Read more on this policy here. For more on this trend, read media fellow Barbara Abrash's research on Social Issue Documentary: The Evolution of Public Engagement here.

Media That Matters Festival

This month, Alison Hanold attended the premiere of the ninth annual Media that Matters festival, presented by Arts Engine. The festival is comprised of 12 short films with a social justice focus. The entire festival is available online. The films are various in their genres - some documentary, some narrative, some PSA, and even one "docu-music video." You can watch all the films here. Keep an eye out for the festival as it will be traveling across the globe with stops in Seattle, Rome, Detroit, Philadelphia, DC, and more. View the Events Calendar.

The Prenups Release

Center for Social Media is proud to be a co-sponsor of The Prenups: What Filmmakers and Funders Should Talk About Before Tying the Knot. Developed by Active Voice in close collaboration with independent producers, funders, foundation affinity groups, scholars, and issue experts - including us - this peer-to-peer resource is designed to improve communication and collaborations on social-issue media projects. Take a look!

BAVC Producer's Institute

Associate director Alison Hanold and media fellow Barbara Abrash spent a few days in San Francisco at BAVC's Producer's Institute working with documentary filmmakers to build out their outreach campaigns this month. You can read Alison's takeaways here and Barbara's here.

OTHER NEWS

POV's Upcoming Season

As close partners and huge fans of POV, we're excited to announce the upcoming season which will be aired on PBS stations all over the United States. You can see the entire season schedule here but we want to highlight three films in particular that shouldn't be missed.


The Reckoning release

On July 14th our friends Paco De Onis and Pamela Yates' new film The Reckoning will be aired nationally on PBS. -->

The Reckoning follows dynamic International Criminal Court Prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo and his team for 3 years across 4 continents as Ocampo issues arrest warrants for Lord's Resistance Army leaders in Uganda, puts Congolese warlords on trial, shakes up the Colombian justice system, and charges Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir with genocide in Darfur, challenging the UN Security Council to arrest him. It is not yet in distribution so don't miss this chance to see it on PBS's P.O.V Series July 14th. Check your local listings here for more details.
Watch the trailer.

New Muslim Cool release

On June 23rd New Muslim Cool was aired on PBS stations nation-wide and now it's available online to watch in its entirety for free! Watch here now. Puerto Rican-American rapper Hamza Pérez pulled himself out of drug dealing and street life 12 years ago and became a Muslim. Now he's moved to Pittsburgh's tough North Side to start a new religious community, rebuild his shattered family and take his message of faith to other young people through hard-hitting hip-hop music. But when the FBI raids his mosque, Hamza must confront the realities of the post-9/11 world, and himself. Produced in association with Latino Public Broadcasting (LPB) and the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM).

The Way We Get By release and theatrical run

Another film in POV's lineup is The Way We Get By. This award-winning film begins as a seemingly idiosyncratic story about troop greeters --a group of senior citizens who gather daily at a small airport to thank American soldiers departing and returning from Iraq. The film quickly turns into a moving, unsettling and compassionate story about aging, loneliness, war and mortality. Filmmakers Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly participated in this year's Producer's Institute at BAVC where they developed an interactive resource site which allows friends, family and supporters of the troops to continue their mission of caring for veterans. The site is currently in development and will launch in conjunction with the national television broadcast on November 11. Before airing on PBS, the film will have a theatrical run with a premiere at New York's IFC Center on July 17. If you're in the New York area, we highly recommend you check it out!

AIR +Third Coast at PRPD

On September 15-18 , join the Public Radio Program Directors Association and the Association of Independents in Radio in their third annual Public Radio Programming Conference in Cleveland, OH. The gathering is the largest national industry conference focusing on programming. Third Coast organizers Johanna Zorn and Julie Shapiro will develop special sessions designed to appeal to both producers and programmers, and bring their signature to celebrating the best in audio craft. Register here.

Work In Progress Screening Washington DC, July 10

Join Docs in Progress for a screening and feedback session for the following films:Back Up! concrete diaries (15 minute excerpt)by Monique Hazeur and Nijla MuminSidewalks, street crossings, corridors, and hallways are hostile territory where women and girls experience verbal assault from men on a daily basis. How are women fighting back and defining their own personal and public spaces?Keeping the Kibbutz! (60 minute rough cut)by Ben Crosbie and Tessa MoranAn examination of the challenges of a community in transition from the perspective of members of an Israeli kibbutz who are facing the inevitable end of their communal living experience.Visit the website at http://www.docsinprogress.org for more information.

Reel Grrls New Doc Film

Reel Grrls, a Seattle based production company, just released a new short doc titled A Generation of Consolidation. The film can be viewed online in its entirety at www.generationofconsolidation.org. A Generation of Consolidation was created by high school students who are working to stop further consolidation of media corporations. It has won awards at the Seattle Independent Film Festival and the Seattle International Film Festival. These student filmmakers have harnessed the power of documentary film to make their voices heard. While they fight to keep multiple channels of mainstream media alive, they in turn create informative engaging media themselves. Watch the film here.