From Jake Shapiro's Blog, NPR

Jackson Mississippi and the New Media Institute

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Last week I was at the New Media Institute in Jackson Mississippi, put on by the National Black Programming Consortium (NBPC) and hosted at Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

NBPC is one of the 5 minority consortia in public broadcasting (the others are Native American, Latino, Pacific Islander, and Asian American), and Executive Director Jacquie Jones pioneered the idea a year ago of putting together a week-long training and convening event for minority media producers focused on technology and new tools and platforms.

I missed the inaugural meeting last year in Boston (in my own backyard at WGBH too), so I was really glad to be able to join for at least a day and a half this year.

PRX was well represented. John Barth came down to co-present a session on reversioning documentary film for radio/podcasting. The Talent Quest got props in a CPB speech, and I helped facilitate a meeting with NPR, PBS and the minority consortia about diversity and collaboration for future public media.

There was a mix of panels and presentations, but the main activity of the Institute was the work of 9 different teams of young producers working with mentors and spending a mostly sleepless week creating digital media projects from scratch for debut and discussion on the last day. Jackson and surrounding areas provided the raw material, and the teams came up with a dazzling variety of projects, from video podcasts, online games, Google earth media mashups, and web-based narratives. The final dinner on Friday featured a raucous final presentation and celebration of the projects (Leslie Rule has posted some of them here on the PBS MedaShift blog).

John and his co-presenter Grant Clark (a producer at BET) talked about the possibilities for repurposing documentary film into audio for podcasting and/or radio. They were given a tough one to start with, Linda Goode Bryant’s “Flag Wars” - a narrationless and impressionistic film about gentrification in Ohio. There are certainly easier examples of films with more two-way interviews, introductions and voice overs that would lend themselves well to an audio-only version, but it was interesting nonetheless to hear a draft version that still captured the intent of the film.

Of course there are excellent examples of audio narrative with no narration - work by Joe Richman (here’s Joe on “The Invisible Narrator”), Jay Allison, Dave Isay among others - but it takes ingenuity and planning and is much harder to achieve with material gathered for another purpose.

Grant and John’s basic point is that there are opportunities for reaching new audiences, cross-promoting film and television releases, experimenting with form, and making use of the extra footage and material that every project accumulates. There are also potential collaborations with radio producers who bring a complementary set of skills.

No doubt documentary film and radio are two very different beasts, but it would be an interesting creative challenge and a potentially a source of valuable new audio work to start reversioning a few.

From Wendy levy's Blog, BAVC

NBPC HOSTS NEW MEDIA SUMMIT and BAVC IS THERE

by Wendy Levy, Director of Creative Programming at BAVC

We’ve been talking and blogging a lot lately about the need for artists and technologists to work together to create meaningful innovation, and toward that end, NBPC hosts an annual New Media Institute, or NMI, (http://www.nbpc.tv/comp/btn/ ) to put minority producers in the room with developers, programmers, locative media specialists, and other industry experts with the goal of exploring multiplatform distribution, and creating content for these new platforms. This year, teams of producers at the NPBC Institute worked on the Mississippi Blues Project (www.bluestrail.org), creating original media assets for web, mobile, and UCG interfaces.

It just took one trip to NBPC offices in Harlem a few months ago for us all to realize that NBPC and BAVC needed to partner up on NMI. BAVC has expertise and resources to share out from our Producers Institute for New Media Technologies last June, and NBPC has a thriving community of minority producers to whom we wanted to reach out in a serious way. Producers at the NMI got training in new media field production skills (from BAVC instructor Yoav Potash), learned how to create a vibrant interaction design for their websites (from BAVC instructor Abigail Rudner), got an inside understanding of user-generated content sites (from BAVC mentor and former Current TV executive Anthony Marshall) and pitched original projects to a panel of reviewers (me included). They heard presentations from Pacific Radio Exchange (PRX) and BET about converting documentaries into audio podcasts, learned about opportunities for more extensive project development from BAVC & AFI, saw sneak previews from upcoming PBS programs, and much more. I was only there for a little more than a day, but the energy and excitement was in every single room (even the slightly cheesy hotel rooms).

Stories have power, and hanging out with these particular storytellers, in Jackson, Mississipi, rocked my proverbial world.

Digital Delta

There are many ways to approach the Delta, what is innovative about this iteration of NBPC’s New Media Institute, is the choice of the digital approach. The feeling that permeates most of our encounters so far has been an expectation that we will treat the textures of history living in the fabric of this culture with a loving desire to capture the truth. In that respect no better group of people could have been chosen to do this work! The mix of ideas and approaches that have been outlined so far, present a very encouraging picture.



Someone said to me yesterday, as we mingled with catfish strips and delicious spinach at the Smith Robertson Cultural Center, “what is amazing about the Delta, is that such riveting music, art, literature and culture, can emerge from such a materially deprived environment.” Well, there is the testament that the beauty of art does not lie in the shell but in the soul within that shell. Welcome to Mississippi!