In the past, indieWIRE has served three different audiences ... and not particularly well, I might add. Professionals look to indieWIRE to cover the "indie biz" as comprehensively as possible. Consumers, from film fanatics to occassionally just fanatics, see indieWIRE as a glimpse into thriving world of independent film. The prosumer audience (call them "the emerging indie filmmaker") is looking for indieWIRE as a resource, a native guide to the landscape. We try to scratch all three itches (as people frequently want more than one of them scratched), but scratching them better and more distinctly is a big part of what's driving the thinking of the "new indieWIRE."

Example: once upon a time, a list of film titles from our box office tracking made an interesting little alcove to supplement the business data of the box office chart. Now it is a list of every speciality film that reported at least one screen of theatrical distribution since May 2003, hiding even more data underneath it (from "how much do you want to know about 'Donnie Darko'?" to "what's the scoop with TLA Releasing?") It makes a clumsy (at best) professional research tool (as you get the story on every speciality film that hit the circuit if you know where to dig) and it makes a clumsy encyclopedia to independent films and the story of how they emerged from the thriving indie scene for cinephiles.

The new indieWIRE is, in great part, us finally establishing a framework to do both effectively and intuitively for a few more years before it starts to feel overgrown again. On launch, it might appear far less dramatic than this, too: the weight of 9 years of archives is hard to escape despite the new ways of getting to them.