• Where to read my "Transmedia" series

My three-part series on "Why Transmedia is Catching On" is available here on this blog, and across the world on a network of other sites. Here's a handy directory, in case you want to leave comments everywhere (!)

• The Tribeca "Future of Film" site was first to publish the posts: Part I. Part 2. Part 3.
• Huffington Post ran the series, as well: Part I. Part 2. Part 3
• The Wrap ran all three articles: Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. 
• XMediaLab from Australia ran Parts 1 & 2 in one post, and will add Part 3 soon. 
• Social Media NZ ran Part 1.
• The Reed-MIDEM group has posted Part 1 on the MIPblog, with the other two parts to come over the next month.

• WHY “TRANSMEDIA” IS CATCHING ON (Part Three)

• Tracking the Wild Beast

(Part One of this three-part series suggested that money, creativity, demand and buzz have conspired to bring Transmedia into the mainstream, despite or perhaps because of a testy flame-war within those producing cross-media stories. Part Two profiled a diverse group of Movers and Shakers whose determination and diverse roots are key to the growth of the Transmedia Movement.)

Tracking transmedia developments as they unfold will be complicated, in part because this new entertainment format covers so much ground.

It is a world “where old and new media collide, where grassroots and corporate media intersect, where the power of the media producer and the power of the media consumer interact in unpredictable ways,” says USC professor Henry Jenkins in his book “Convergence Culture.”

To track transmedia, follow the people, suggests author Frank Rose. “The people who are most eager to experiment with new forms of storytelling are for the most part the creators,” says Rose, an editor of WIRED Magazine and author of “The Art of Immersion” which makes engaging sense out of a sprawling story that stars, among others: James Cameron, Jordan Weisman, Elan Lee, Howard Roffman, Ted Nelson, David Lynch, Rand and Robyn Miller, Will Wright, Cliff Bleszinski, Hideo Kojima, Damon Lindelhof, Greg Daniels, Anthony Zuiker, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Molyneux, Sean Bailey, and Charles Dickens (…take that, Little Nell!). Follow them all on Twitter to get a good start.

“I’m extremely eager to see what comes out of Mirada Studios, the operation that Guillermo Del Toro recently founded, with the goal of crossing the line between video games and movies,” said Rose. “I also think about somebody like Christopher Nolan who has announced that he’s planning to do a videogame version of “Inception,” which is, after all a movie that plays almost like a giant cut scene from a videogame.

“I’m also very intrigued by “L.A. Noire” from Rockstar Games. It’s probably one of the major breakthroughs as a combination of games and stories, the blurring of those boundaries. It’s really difficult for people to figure out how to do.”

New research commissioned by Intel Corporation may point the way to a broader understanding of the multiplatform storytelling world. Brian Seth Hurst, CEO of Opportunity Management Company and a contractor on the study, has interviewed dozens of practitioners from media, technology and marketing firms – “the storytelling ecosystem”. His focus is the relationship between the storyteller and the audience.

“The thing is,” says Hurst, “the audience is going to participate, no matter what you do. And so, why not build the participation into the experience from the outset?”

Hurst was part of the team that launched a high-budget multiplatform story called  “Conspiracy for Good” in 2010. Headed by “Heroes” creator Tim Kring, the project counts Nokia as a sponsor and hundreds of collaborators, including Stockholm-based The Company P, which had set a standard for ARG’s with “The Truth about Marika” in 2007. Expect to see more iterations of “CFG” in coming months, along with a new Kring multiplatform project for a major TV network, predictably Top Secret at this point.

Sometimes the cult-like nature of the transmedia elements eludes the mainstream, as in this recent coverage of the HBO mini-series “Year Zero”, based upon the Nine Inch Nails concept album. The associated alternate reality game was not mentioned.

Even more difficult to track are original projects from teams that one might call “transmedia natives.” Two examples are “Vlogger” and “Dreamcatcher.”

Ricard Gras, whose UK-based firm Inter-activa designs virtual-worlds, is in post-production on “Vlogger: The Movie”, a story set online and in Second Life. The project will roll out this fall as a movie, a social media experience and as an environment inside Second Life, where users will have access to additional story-related material, somewhat akin to DVD extras, Gras says.

VLOGGER employs cinematic language derived from Machinima movies that use “gravity-free cameras” and employs an inventive interface to simultaneously display the worlds of the “real” characters and the “virtual” characters. It will be interesting to see how this plays in a theatre.

“It wasn’t like we were reading a textbook and figuring out that transmedia was this new thing that we wanted to be part of,” says producer Josh Shore, who with Anson Phong has launched a multi-year, multiplatform project with an intentional social network called Dreamcatcher.

The site is designed to serve a “psychographic” community interested in the thematic universe of dreams and dream-sharing, which is at the heart of a linear narrative that will be told in a motion comic and animated film called “Illuminated,”  now in development. “We’re looking at how we can build a community around a world view.”

Says Shore: “If you’re open to a participatory community in the digital age, there are a million opportunities.”

Aficionados also turn to specialty sites that cover the field, including the Alternative Reality Gaming Network, featuring current and archival coverage of the ARG community, Power to the Pixel, a UK-based group providing resources and updates; the Transmedia Artists Guild, which hosts a forum for practitioners; You Suck at Transmedia, a thoughtful blog that transcends the irony of its title; and the now-defunct but historically useful Jawbone.tv site. My own Delicious account provides more than 100 transmedia-related links.

Other news to track, as transmedia becomes a reality:

• Investment: The showbiz trades and blogs do cover transmedia news, especially when involving mainstream players or big money. In addition to the DelToro and FourthWall announcements, recent news includes a multi-platform property “The Runner”  involving Brian Glazer and Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment, which has struck a first-look deal with game and comic-oriented Blacklight Entertainment.

• Accessing production budgets.” Says Hurst: “I’m privy to a set of negotiations that is happening with a U.S. network right now, where ancillary stuff will be approximately 10% of the production budget. This is already happening in Australia.”

• Ratings. Ad-supported models depend upon a set of metrics which all parties accept, warts and all. The sheer variety of distribution outlets in a transmedia deployment make the task of measuring participation and impact a daunting exercise. Measurement means monetization, so watch for announcements from the usual suspects, as well as the newer social media tracking firms.

• Tools. Transmedia storytelling requires new content management tools to enable a creative team to track consumers as they interact with content over time and on a dizzying array of platforms, each with its own set of technical requirements. Firms with the most transmedia experience have built proprietary tools. Look for announcements about their productization, which will empower new entrants into the field.

• Discovery. Watch for new transmedia portals, aggregators and discovery engines to emerge as the sheer volume and diversity of projects proliferates in the coming years.

Author Jonathan Franzen has written that “the novel was not simply a genre but an attitude toward that genre.”

“Our state of mind when we pick up a novel today--our knowledge that it's a work of the imagination; our willing suspension of disbelief in it--is in fact one half of the novel's essence."

That’s not bad advice when thinking about the evolution of transmedia as a lasting story format.

A version of this series was published by Tribeca’s Future of Film site. (http://www.tribecafilm.com/tribecaonline/future-of-film/?c=n)

To learn more about transmedia, check out my Delicious account  and slideshare.

• WHY “TRANSMEDIA” IS CATCHING ON (Part Two)

Many Paths to Audience Participation for Transmedia Talent

(Part One of this three-part series suggested that money, creativity, demand and buzz have conspired to bring Transmedia into the mainstream, despite or perhaps because of a testy flame-war within those producing cross-media stories.)

 Leading transmedia talent has emerged from a wide array of disciplines, including technology, indie film, fantasy games, marketing, comic books, videogames, advertising, brand advertising, television production, theme parks, academia, and, of course, the Internet.

What sets each apart is a willingness to embrace meaningful audience participation in the transmedia projects that capture their passion.

 “I think that the idea of participation is one of the key things we are all wrestling with, both fans and authors, movie directors or whatever kind of creative person we’re talking about, says author Frank Rose. 

“Participation raises the question of whose story is it? And, the answer I think is, it’s all of ours. In order to really identify with the story, in some way we have to make it our own.”

Here’s some of what I’ve learned in conversations with a range of transmedia leaders.

Bonds: The Audience is Ready

“We are tapping into a real demand from consumers,” says Susan Bonds, CEO of 42 Entertainment, a company that produces alternative reality games like “Why So Serious?” for The Dark Knight, and Nine Inch Nails’ “Year Zero.” 

“This is something that people want, and so studios are beginning to open up their creative properties to allow people to participate.”

Not only has the company has been pivotal in defining the ARG form, it has been home for key talent. 

Bonds, who is an industrial engineer with gigs at Disney, Lockheed, and Cyan, says that the art form follows the trajectory of the audience:

“In the first half of the decade, it was all about early adopters, the in-crowd playing interactive games, the first to buy the latest technologies. But now, the novelty factor has worn off, and it's about the experience. People are already emotionally invested and aware that all of these things are at their fingertips. Now they know.”

            Early adopters still play a central role in most ARG projects. Check out “Test Subjects Needed”, a scenario that is currently dribbling out on the web and at E3 and Bonnaroo, for which 42 Entertainment is alleged to be the agency. And the client? Wrigley’s Gum.

42 Entertainment plans to apply lessons from its client work to create new and original transmedia content. Bonds would not discuss details with me, telling me to keep my eyes open “later this year.” 

“We’re ready to evolve the business model,” says Bonds. “We've seen that people in the millions and tens of millions will come together for a collective experience. Think of the freedom that this gives you! You can do the work on a smaller scale than a $100 million movie, and you are no longer necessarily held to the traditional ways of starting the work, either business or creative.”

Gomez: Appealing to deep aspirations and fantasies

Jeff Gomez’s “aha moment” came at a young age. “When I was 12 we moved to Hawaii, where I was exposed to what in Japan they call Mangaka, or storyteller . Mangaka has told his story over many volumes of comic books — Japanese Manga — and was granted the responsibility to tell that story in the animated television series, in the toy line, in the feature film, in the prequels and sequels. That was my dream job.”

With Starlight Runner, the company Gomez co-founded in 2000, he’s halfway to his dream. The company extends entertainment properties across time and media for clients with movies (“Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Avatar,” and “TRON”); games (Halo); and products (Coke’s Happiness Factory, Hasbro’s Transformers).

Fantasy role-playing games were Gomez’s first love, leading him to launch a fanzine called “Gateways”, which in turn led to gigs in comic books and videogames.

In the fantasy role-playing scene, “a story was unfolding that could not be told without the participation of my fellow game players, the people who were playing roles in the world of the story I was creating,” Gomez says. “The participation is what triggered deep emotional responses. Storytelling, particularly your character in my story, allowed me to create scenarios that appealed to your deepest sense of aspiration, your fantasies, your desires.”

Like everyone in the secretive transmedia field, Gomez would not reveal his own plans for his proprietary transmedia projects, though it is clear that original production is his dream.

As to the flame war, Gomez knows he’s got “a big red target painted on the back of my ass.” Why? “Whenever you have a band that is really popular in the bar circuit, and it suddenly starts playing arenas, there are going to be some fans of the band who get disgruntled. Because it’s ‘our band,’ it’s not your band.” 

Weiler: Storytelling without Boundaries

Computer editing was the technology that triggered Lance Weiler’s personal digital epiphany, leading to the production of  “The Last Broadcast,” an early digital film. Its website featured ARG-style elements such as 911 calls and fake newspaper items intended to deepen the paranormal mystery story being told in the film. “It was a forerunner to the idea of building and crafting a world around the main story,” Weiler told me.

He describes his approach as “storytelling without boundaries,” an approach on display in his projects like 2006’s “Head Trauma”  and 2011’s “Pandemic”.

He evangelizes this bottom-up, do-it-yourself approach, as in this recent speech at Ireland’s Darklight Festival.

“I think what you see is a major shift from as top-down, permission-based culture to one in which people are experimenting more.” Weiler says that “the audience is actually ahead of the industry, just waiting for storytellers to catch up. Maybe the big story is that the illusion of being an auteur is moving into balance, becoming more of a conversation when it used to be that you were talking at the audience.”

In addition to his own projects, Weiler runs a network called Workbook Project and a roving conference called DIY Days. He consults with organizations like the World Economic Forum, and collaborates with other producers on participation techniques.

European Innovation

“Collapsus” combines interactivity, animation, fiction, and documentary to tell a story about the global energy crisis. The project, which took top honors at the SXSW interactive conference, is the work of Amsterdam-based producer Submarine and director Tommy Pallotta, the U.S.-born director of  “Waking Life” and “A Scanner Darkly.”

Femke Wolting of Submarine ran an interactive exhibition program at the Rotterdam Film Festival for years. “Europeans are ahead of the U.S. when it comes to original cross-platform work, largely because of government-subsidizes and co-productions,” she says, noting that European broadcasters and film authorities have been allocating production funds for “new media” components for longer than their U.S. counterparts.

Pallotta and Wolting are working on an interactive web documentary about propaganda called “Unspeak” and a feature, “Eisenstein in Guanajuato” with British director Peter Greenaway, both of which include multi-platform elements. 

Alexander: Breakthroughs start at the Top

For TV writer-producer Jesse Alexander transmedia breakthroughs can only happen with “a visionary leader at the highest level.” He should know, as a producer and writer on both ABC’s “Lost” and NBC’s “Heroes,” two iconic series that set the bar for content extensions on the web.

“They were special shows,” says Alexander. “We had great timing and money to extend those stories. We're in a different world now.”

A big factor was the 2007-08 Hollywood writers’ strike, which Alexander called “catastrophic,” followed shortly by the global recession. His own series, “Day One,” was killed in 2010, a casualty of the Comcast-NBC Universal buy-up.

“There is no infrastructure to do transmedia, so you have to borrow from lots of buckets to find the resources,” says Alexander, especially for new shows without a proven audience. “So there are a lot of exciting and ephemeral transmedia experiences that market films, TV and games ... but what is the sustainable model beyond six weeks?”

Alexander told me that independent filmmakers and game developers might have an easier path to transmedia than mainstream Hollywood. “You’re not going to see innovation from the large media companies. There’s just no real incentive for them to change it all up.” They have what Alexander calls a “fire-and-forget” model. “It drives you crazy — so much time and money on a transmedia project, and it’s over in six weeks.”

He is excited about the prospects of independent transmedia studio Fourth Wall, founded by pioneer Elan Lee, who has gathered some of the art form’s leading practitioners and raised a large capital infusion to produce original content.

Clark: The Innovation is Other People

“The real innovation of the Internet is other people, not just data,” GMD Studio’s Brian Clark told me, which is what inspired him to co-found IndieWire.com in 1996 and to produce films like “Nothing So Strange, which imagined the assassination of Bill Gates. Since then, he has been busy crossbreeding indie filmmaking, the web, brand marketing and creative services. He likes to think of the web as a production tool, and the outcome as alternate reality games (ARG’s).

“With ARG’s,” says Clark, “you’re writing a work that doesn’t really exist until it’s populated by the audience. The audience’s interaction with it is what creates the moment. You’re hanging cameras around and putting microphones on things and to capture a moment that you’ve created. That is a production technique, and it’s what the web is really good at.”  

Clark calls himself an “experience designer,” placing the focus upon audience participation. GMD typically works with a team of collaborators, both individuals and companies like Mike Monello’s Campfire. Monello’s work ranges from “Blair Witch Project” through this season’s HBO hit “Game of Thrones.” 

GMD’s techniques caught the attention of ad agencies and brands, and “they seem to want to buy,” says Clark, whose work include projects for Sega, Scholastic and Audi. 2005’s “Art of the Heist” employed a wide range of digital and real-world elements that involved half a million consumers in a faux theft of Audi’s then-new A3 car.

Not surprisingly, Clark, who is working on a major 9/11 project, believes that the art form is ready to soar. “Never have I seen more money available for this kind of work. For all the failures we’re talking about with Hollywood and advertising, the taste is there now.”

NEXT: Part Three: Tracking the Wild Beast

A version of this series was published by Tribeca’s Future of Film site. 

To learn more about transmedia, check out my Delicious account and this slideshare presentation.

WHY “TRANSMEDIA” IS CATCHING ON (Part One)

• Part One: Shouting “Fire” in the Theatre 

“Isaac Newton didn't discover gravity, he just named it,” one TV writer-producer quipped during a recent conversation about “transmedia.”

And so it would seem, despite a testy flame war over the term transmedia –– or perhaps because of it –– the “transmedia” movement is catching on across the media business. 

“Transmedia” is shorthand for a grab bag of production and distribution practices and audience engagement techniques that have emerged over the past decade, and when taken together, promise a new kind of media experience.

Along the way, practitioners and pundits have applied many terms to describe this type of production –– interactive or participatory media, cross-platform or multi-platform storytelling, deep or immersive media, experience design, story franchises, sequels, packaging, integrated media, 360 production….the list goes on.

What’s new here is the idea that storytellers can create deeper experiences for their audiences when they unfold a story and its world via multiple venues, and when they invite consumers to participate meaningfully in that world –– especially when they do so from the outset of the project.

Whatever the nomenclature, the transmedia trend is gaining traction, fueled by some observable trends:

• Demand. Today’s audiences expect their media to be social, participatory and customized for every device they use, especially the much-coveted hard-core fans who are especially drawn to properties which let them go them deeper into a story or discover something first.

• Creativity.  The formulaic is giving way to the innovative, as producers, including a new crop of digital natives, compete to engage fans in their stories over time and space with new approaches and on new devices.

• Buzz. Transmedia is becoming the Next Big Thing in both Hollywood and on Madison Avenue with more press coverage, more blogs and websites, more panels at film festivals and commercial conferences and ultimately more pitch meetings.

• Money. Big names in film, television, and games are placing bets on talent with transmedia chops. New studios have been capitalized to produce made-for-multiplatform properties, and proven creative services firms in the space are prepping their own original projects. Marketing dollars now routinely extend anchor properties onto additional platforms.

From Interactivism to Transmedia

I’m excited about all of this activity because for more than 20 years, I have helped artists and companies develop new forms of storytelling across many platforms (movies, music, TV, PCs, CD-ROMs, game consoles, mobile phones, set-top boxes, the Web). The programs I created at the American Film Institute attracted true believers who were fervently trying to reinvent Hollywood in the wake of the digital revolution, a movement that I called “interactivism.”

Which is why I joined a transmedia panel at May’s Digital Hollywood. Whereupon, I immersed myself in the vigorous online fight over “transmedia” nomenclature, definition, and turf.

The hubbub dates to the April 2010 decision by the Producers Guild of America (PGA) to authorize a new credit – “Transmedia Producer.”. This credit was drafted primarily by Jeff Gomez, CEO of New York-based transmedia consulting firm Starlight Runner.

Sides were quickly drawn between supporters and detractors of the PGA move. Advocates believed that the credit provided legitimization and would stimulate more multi-platform production. Opponents felt that PGA’s definition was too narrow, and left out many forms of cross-platform projects. Among the most vigorous opponents were producers of Alternate Reality Games or ARG’s.

“Why do we have to define it yet?” asks indie filmmaker Lance Weiler. “Why can’t we just continue to experiment?”  Because, says TV writer-producer Jesse Alexander (“Lost” and “Heroes”), “You have to give it a name so people can talk about it. Isaac Newton didn't discover gravity, he named it.”

Anger finally erupted at the 2011 SXSW interactive conference in March, and then spilled onto the public Internet where a flame war ensued. Take a stroll through some of the posts and comments to decide if the fight matters, or if it is/was a tempest in a teapot:

• A history of tweets on the topic by Londoner Rachel Clarke, using the new Storify tool.

• A play-by-play rundown of the fight from 4D fiction.

• A blog post by Steve Peters, veteran producer of alternate-reality games, in which he swears off the use of the word.

• Another by Atlanta-based designer Brooke Thompson, railed against Hollywood “snake oil salesmen”.

• The #antitransmedia hashtag which Peters established on Twitter as a rallying point for critics.

• A Flickr image that features the word “anti” spray-painted over Wikipedia’s transmedia entry.

• An April Fast Company post entitled ‘Seven Myths About Transmedia Storytelling Debunked’  by USC Professor Henry Jenkins, who had pioneered the term back in the early ‘00s. Jenkins said, “Companies are laying claim to expertise in producing transmedia content. But many using the term don't really understand what they are saying.”

• A May Facebook post by GMD Studio’s Brian Clark, in which he parsed the competing tribes and contended that their real distinction was who had creative control. This conversation drew hundreds of comments and has been reposted by other bloggers in several countries.

Ironically, this online kerfuffle has only heightened Transmedia’s buzz, helped to spotlight the breadth of the movement and fed into a deepening appreciation within all segments of the entertainment community that transmedia is the Next Big Thing.

PART TWO: Many Paths to Audience Participation for Transmedia Talent

To learn more about transmedia, check out my Delicious account and this slideshare presentation.

• OBJECTIVELY SPEAKING

I’m taking to my keyboard to deconstruct just why two recent news items seem to have stuck in my brain, pressed my nostalgia button, and maybe even roused my conscience.

Item #1 concerns the recent appearance by The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace.

After Stewart asked Wallace if he believes that Fox News is "exactly the ideological equivalent of NBC News," Wallace responded, "I think we're the counterweight. I think they have a liberal agenda and we tell the other side of the story."

Item #2 involves the debut of the New York Times “Sunday Review” and the death of the Times' venerable “Week in Review” -- in which “opinion journalism" replaces news, according to the Times Public Editor Arthur Brisbane, an old-school watchdog type. 

Quoting email correspondence, Brisbane concludes that we live in “an age where the ratio of news to opinion in American journalism as a whole is falling.”

Oh my! All this talk about journalism has hurled me back to my roots as a recovering member of an ancient fellowship known as “activist journalism."

Journalism was passion I discovered in high school and continued college in the late 1960’s. Along the way, journalism delivered most of the lessons I learned about American society, power, and social change.

Before the Great News Maw

As I reflect back, I guess I’m stunned at how far different the conversation feels today, the Era of the Great News Maw, by which I mean the 24-hour torrent of information, personality, gossip and opinion that spews forth from TV, cable and the web.

For my generation, journalism had transcended its grubby origins to become something noble, provided that you could play by the rules.

Establishment Consensus & the Myth of Objectivity

One needed to stay within the bounds of the Establishment Consensus, an ideology conveyed by journalism schools and editors by means of the Myth of Objectivity.

Regardless of a reporter’s own beliefs, she was obligated to play fair, and to quote individuals whose positions “balanced” each other within the frame of the story. Typically, we were urged to find sources within a fairly narrow definition of worthiness. (Two points of view were usually sufficient, since everyone knew that there were only two sides to every debate.)

All of which conflicted with the world that we were living through in the 60s, a time of great social and political upheaval. It became impossible for many of us to believe that there was a credible “side” in debates over civil rights for blacks, the morality of the Vietnam War, or equality for women, to name but a few issues.

Louisville, Kentucky, was where I my struggle began – it was my mother’s hometown, where we moved after years of the gypsy life of an Army family.  Not long after we arrived, I managed to become both editor of my high school paper and president of the junior class.

My popularity was sealed by an act of hair rebellion. 1965 was the year when every kid wanted to look like the Beatles. Our principal, a former Marine, would have none of it, requiring “normal” haircuts. I led a mass march across the street to a barber shop where 37 of us had our heads shaved in protest. And then wrote about it in the newspaper. Which was promptly banned. My first lesson in activist journalism.

Establishment 1 – Nick 0.

By the time I became editor of the University of Louisville’s “Cardinal” campus newspaper in 1968 I had a mission, to use the paper to radicalize a sleepy and largely commuter student body.

I had the skills to pull it off too, having interned that summer at the Louisville Courier-Journal, one of the top papers in the U.S. at the time. I co-authored a multi-part series on “drug use in Louisville,” that landed on Page One, in part because of colorful but anonymous drug tales by the children of Louisville’s elite, including the daughter of the publisher.

We expanded the Cardinal’s editorial pages, columns and snarky jabs at the Establishment and attracted a gaggle of countercultural writers who helped me make the paper a lightning rod. The paper became an advocate for the feeble but earnest new left movement on campus and around the country.

At one point we turned the whole paper over to the Black Student Union, which had occupied the administration building. During spring break I reported from inside a sit-in on the campus of the University of Chicago. I reviewed “Hair” on Broadway.

April Fool

What got me briefly suspended, however was not politics, but rather our April Fools’ Day edition that featured a front-page banner headline that read: “Dean of Students Bans Publishing Fuck.”

The incident triggered an editorial in the Courier, which decried our  “juvenile out-house humor” that was unworthy of the “public trust” granted to the sacred profession ­– you get the drift.

The next year I took over the yearbook, which I transformed into a series of high-gloss investigative journalism magazines modeled on Esquire and New York, and relegated the head-shots and club photos to a single final issue. We published stories about the defense ties of the University’s Board of Trustees.  

More than anything, I wanted to cover Washington, and so I applied for an entry-level reporter slot at the Washington Post. I did not get the job. I later learned from friends at the Courier that my college escapades had consequences, namely in the person of Executive Editor Norman Isaacs, whose son Steve Isaacs was then Managing Editor of the Post. I had been blackballed from mainstream journalism, or so it seemed at the time.

Instead, I became editor of something called the College Press Service, a daily news service syndicated to college papers.  To compete for that job, I flew to D.C. in May, 1970, a week after the killings at Kent State University, which had been part of a student protest of the Nixon Administration’s invasion of Cambodia.

My future employer booked me to appear on a national news show, produced by National Educational Television, the forerunner of PBS. Students like me were intended to “balance” the Administration talking-head, in this case Elliott Richardson, Undersecretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. He was calm and level headed. I was not, screaming such memorable lines as “Why are you killing your sons and daughters?”

The next day I was asked to produce a story on deadline. My subject was the persecution of the Black Panther Party, and I got an interview with a local member. I did not include a representative of the police, the Justice Department or the FBI. A pattern was fixed. I was an activist. I was a journalist. No reason not to combine the two. Mainstream media had blackballed me, after all. (Sound familiar?)

I covered the White House and the Congress during that turbulent year, and helped organize conferences for student editors, including a summer-long workshop held in Manchester, New Hampshire, home of the Union-Leader, edited by arch-conservative William Loeb.

Commie Hippie Youth

Our project was to create an underground newspaper in Manchester, an effort that earned a very prized Union-Leader Page One headline: “Commie-Hippie Youth Get Out of Our Town.”

Another conference we convened in Hollywood was called “Look what the Done to My Brain, Ma!”, and featured left-wing media analysts like Herb Schiller as well as a range of student radicals including the Quebec Liberation Front, Black Panthers, Gay Liberation Front, Radical Feminists. This was not your father’s journalism.

After the year-long CPS gig I stayed in D.C. splitting my time between political activism and “new media.” 1971 marked the introduction of small-format portable video, a bulky but revolutionary way to get real television into the streets. 

A left-wing think-tank called the Institute for Policy Studies hired me to raise hell about cable TV, which was coming to the cities.

Portapaks and Video Freaks

We used community organizing to alert the population to cable TV as a political issue, and by extension, to the power of the media. Along the way, I made friends with a gaggle of video freaks, a mixed bag of activists, hippies and storytellers were trying to get their short programs seen in any way possible.

I started making tapes too, covering political demonstrations from the inside, as well as more personal topics. I cofounded one of the country’s first so-called “community video centers” in Washington, D.C., a storefront production and training center designed to prepare citizens for the coming of cable television and public access. Ironically, the largest funder was the foundation created by the founders of the Washington Post.

While waiting for the grant to arrive, I spent the summer of 1972 in Miami, where I began producing freelance reports for a radical radio network, affiliated with a much-loved album-rock radio station. Because our reports were carried on radio stations that were licensed by the FCC, we made every effort to provide balanced points of view in our coverage.

The Big Fig Leaf

Gaming the System of Consensus Objectivity was easy: just use the Big Fig Leaf technique.

And yet, the System kept surprising me, namely via the legend of Watergate, in which two Washington Post reporters brought down a corrupt government. As vividly portrayed in Alan Pakula’s “All the President’s Men,” the conflict revolved around their use of sources, especially those without attribution and probably an ax to grind. I identified with Woodward and Bernstein, two guys who managed to defy the overall system by bending without breaking the rules.

But my die was cast as an outsider. I had moved on, not only from mainstream journalism, but from print.

The dream of using cable’s public access channels as a viable medium was a naïve failure. While certain communities managed to support the channels and their adjunct access production centers, viewership was low and funding was sporadic, most of it coming from city governments, foundations, the newly created National Endowment for the Arts, and sometimes from the cable operators themselves. Few examples emerged for self-sustaining business models.

Pioneering video groups like TVTV focused upon public television, which had was organized and was receiving federal subsidies through the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

The Ideology of Op-Ed

PBS at the time was a classic Establishment Liberal institution, nurtured by foundations like Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller, and very nervous about permitting unfiltered perspectives from counter-cultural rabble like the video movement. Stations in New York, Boston, and San Francisco created units that served as vetting portals for innovators, both artistic and journalistic.  

But many of us argued that television, particularly public TV, should be required to systematically give much more of its airtime, facilities, and funding to independent producers. We envisioned a kind of “op-ed” page that did not get hung up on objective reporting. As an article of faith, we insisted that balance should come over the entirety of the channel – in this case, PBS – and not always within a single show.

I organized 20 alternative video producers into the “Coalition for New Public Affairs Programming” and began to lobby Congress, PBS, CPB and influential foundations. Our testimony and other efforts swayed committee chair Lionel Van Deerling from San Diego to amend legislation to require public TV to broadcast independent film and video, and strongly urged its funding. Soon funds were from CPB and the Ford Foundation, among others, and in 1977 I was awarded the first “Indie” award from the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers for my efforts, along with director Barbara Kopple, for her Oscar-winning film “Harlan County U.S.A.”

Live from the Front Lines

In 1978, following the nuclear disaster at Three Mile Island, several dozen producers came together to create innovative coverage of the mass demonstration at the U.S. Capitol Building. Not only did the production involve a mix of indies and moonlighting network news personnel, Nuclear Power: The Public Debate became the first indie use of the PBS satellite system to distribute live programming to stations around the country. We raised the money and cleared the stations in a week. “The future of  television tip-toed into your living room yesterday” wrote Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales in a positive review.  

Ironically, we worked very hard to include “diverse” points of view in that program, even though we were covering an event that had a point of view. I interviewed National Review publisher William Rusher and a Troskyist spokesperson for preroll segments that were interspersed with the live coverage.

Trying to Fix Public Broadcasting

That same year I read a front page story in the New York Times announcing a new Carnegie commission to study public broadcasting.

The foundation was concerned with the failures of the ten-year-old public TV system, especially its lousy business model and its political vulnerability. New technologies like cable, pay TV, home video and teletext also presented challenges.

Carnegie hired me to study independent production. From this work I proposed a new “Center for Independent Television,” intended as a well-funded access point to the system for independent production.

I stayed on to write the text of the full report, and then co-authored a follow up report. Ironically, the system ignored most of the Carnegie recommendations, except for the indie idea. With the founding of the Independent Television Service (ITVS) a top-flight indie organization was created. From my perspective, it exemplifies the idea that television with a point of view can be viable and credible. Indeed, one of its most successful series was called “P.O.V.”, e.g.,  “point of view.” These days, ITVS programming consistently earns more awards than any other on public television.

Labor Visions

My final reminiscence is in the area of Labor Journalism, a concept that almost nobody thinks about any more. In 1982 I helped Larry Kirkman create the Labor Institute of Public Affairs (LIPA), a wholly owned production unit of the AFL-CIO, e.g., the American labor movement.

This was the Reagan era of union-bashing and anti-labor policies. LIPA was about media that would fight back, in order to energize labor’s base and to provide at least a sliver of “balance” to the overwhelmingly pro-business messages shoved at America.

Oddly enough for an avowedly partisan organization, we bent over backwards to create fairness, even if we did use the Big Fig Leaf ploy to do it. The point is, we felt we had to try, in part because we needed to attract mainstream journalism talent to host our programming, including people like Daniel Schorr, Marie Torre, Daniel Zwerdling.

 Our biggest-budget project was the $14 million “Union, YES” advertising campaign. This was effective propaganda, created with the help of Madison Avenue.

But a LIPA series called “America Works” was balanced enough to run on many public television stations. Unabashedly portraying the lives of ordinary workers (who happened to be in unions), the series used documentary techniques that humanized labor’s messages.

“CableLine” was an experiment to prototype a labor cable network. We mimicked the content-vertical channels that were defining the new “500 channel” cable model.  The network, which ran on cable systems in major markets, offered labor-themed documentaries.

“Laborvision” was an originally produced and very conventional weekly news magazine. If anything, it was too bland, because we felt we had to prove that we could operate within the prevailing standards of fairness.

I can tell you one thing: those shows were dramatically less biased than anything coming from either Fox or MSNBC these days, much less the Internet, and we were a political organization that practiced “message discipline.” My how times have changed.

Our newsreader, a freelancer with CNN credits, made sure that the prose was fair, if not strictly balanced. Weekly roundtable discussions featured unedited views from journalists who covered economics and politics for mainstream publications. They were not in the employ of our program, unlike today’s cable news outlets. We rarely featured politicians as guests, and never as editorialists.

Though interest in new media continued after I joined the American Film Institute in 1990 – it was the era of desktop video and then, of course, the Internet – in truth, I became voiceless within the confines of an organization in service to lots of masters in the mainstream media.

While students at the AFI were urged to find and use their voice to tell stories, I wasn’t. The blogosphere heated up, with millions of voices now being heard, first in print and then, thanks to YouTube. Mine voice was not among them.

Unwatchable News, Unforgettable Documentaries

Thusly have I arrived at the two news items about journalistic objectivity, and somehow I just wanted to explode because:

—I can barely stand to watch any newscast.

— I find network newscasts and PBS to be leaden and dreary affairs aimed at a demographic that is even older than me.

– CNN is a bit more tolerable, especially during a crisis, especially during an international crisis. If I’m energetic, I’ll click around to try and find the BBC. During the Arab spring, I got used to Al Jazeera, which, like Hillary I find is more fair and balanced than any U.S. channel.

— Fox News is a stomach-turning mouthpiece for the most venal and sensationalistic aspects of the paranoid right, and I can’t leave the channel on for more than a minute without hating myself and the world, even though I know I should try if only as a matter of self-preservation.

—I can no longer watch MSNBC either, even though I have similar politics. Why? The Great Maw of Cable forces these otherwise very smart professionals to talk down to the audience, to endless repeat, repeat, repeat. And to fixate on the minutiae of inside-the-beltway politics until I just want to scream. I usually switch to Turner Classic Movies after about 15 minutes.

—I still subscribe to several physical newspapers, and I consume vastly more news than ever, thanks to my iPad, RSS feeds, great apps like Zite , and Twitter, which allows me to benefit from the curatorial insight of hundreds of smart people I’ve never met, many of them reporters and editors.

--- Most days I watch more nonfiction video on my computer, iPad and iPhone than on my television. The web brings me content that’s always on and always on-demand. I don’t even have to remember to set my DVR. I control what and how I watch.

— Perhaps not surprisingly, after all these years, I find that the most consistently credible and challenging information on television comes from documentaries, particularly those broadcast by ITVS, Frontline, HBO, Link TV and a few other sources.

A good documentary sidesteps issues of “balance” and “objectivity” in favor of depth and empathy. The filmmaker is telling a story, and to do so requires bringing the audience into the real lives of real people. Whether the form is “verite” documentary, which goes inside a special world, or a news-narrator style like “Inside Job,” documentary is an art form that provides perspective, intelligence, and meaning.

Which is what I wanted out of journalism all along, I think, even though I probably didn’t know it.