Will content evolve into an open-source universe? Here's my arguement, from the September issue of DOCUMENTARY Magazine

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Back in the good old days - productions were like families. People joined together with a common goal - to make a film, and they worked hard to make that goal into a finished film.

As pressure on costs has gone up, and the fees that freelancers earn in reality tv has risen, docu production has become a more complex economic arrangement.

But technology and passion has helped to re-light the content driven world of doc production. Now, thanks to the ubuiqueity of tools, there is a future just around the corner in which the key word is Collaboration. This future is exciting and empowering - and the elements are visible if you look for them.

Remote production teams used to be impossible (we've all fed ex'd tape back and forth to an editor who's been working remotely). That kind of long distance affair makes it difficult to keep a teams vision in focus. But today - net based collaboration tools are on the horizon. Crafty mac users have already figured out that you can hook your DV camera up to iChat and play rough cuts across the net in real time to a partner around the world. And that's just the
beginging. Many of the things that are the staple of current production are likely to change as travel is replaced by multi-camera shooter/producer teams being hired on location. This new form of peer production allows for a larger group of filmmakers to work in a collaboration fashion to help each other achieve their goals. This nascent movement allows a filmmaker in New York to reach out to a filmmaker in San Francisco and request help shooting a west coast interview for a film being completed in New York. That door swings both ways of course.

In the new work of peer production - the edit room will exist in a virtual space, a web based edit platform that invites multiple editors, shared rough cuts, and real-time collaboration among team members.

Every portion of the filmmaking process will move into this shared creative space, with tasks like logging quickly taken up by teams of screener/loggers. www.LogXchange is just one of the remote logging tools that is likely to add fuel to the fire of a remote filmmaker workplace.

At the same time shared storage and distribution on sites like www.Video.Google.com and www.OurMedia.org, as well as www.InternetArchive.org will make low cost, or no-cost storage available to media makers around the world.

The empowerment of a new community of media makers is likely to be scary to some. It does mean that the pond just got bigger. But think about how much time we as filmmakers spend selling, raising money, cutting corners, and thinking about the economics of what we do.

Imagine if we could add to our world the ethos that is currently exploding in the software community - as 'open source' software is created by teams of passionate volunteers. Within this community there is an understanding that work is done for a variety of reasons. Some work is done to fuel one's creative, social, or political passions. Other work is done to pay bills. And lastly, some work is bartered with others to help the community as a whole.

Imagine if you found that D.A. Pennybaker and Chris Hegedus needed a pick up shot of Al Franken's home town in Minneapolis? Would grab a camera, and shoot it for them? Sure you would - you'd be proud to have your name associated with them and their work. You're getting paid - just not in dollars. You're getting paid in karma, in credits, and in pride.

If you think this system doesn't work - just take a look at FireFox, Broadcast Machine, any Blog you like, or any piece of open source software that you use. Creative people create because it's what we do. Rethinking the economics of collaboration is one step toward an emerging world in which documentaries become and even larger part of the editorial fabric of our daily lives. And that's a future worth working toward.

Tonight is the premier of Nat Geo's 4 hour documentary on 9/11. I'm proud to say that the CameraPlanet Archive was a significant contributor to the series, and as such - I can share some insights into the making of the series.

One of the frustrating things about working with archival material is that researches are often so overwhelmed with material that they resort to using material that has been culled for others for similar work. I can't tell you how many times footage researches have shown me vhs dubs of other peoples films and suggest that we contact the same sources and just license the same footage for our films.

My point is - I've gotten to a place where we just routinely turn down requests for footage that has been seen, or used in any of the films we've made or worked on.

So when Towers Productions approached us about using the CameraPlanet Archive as a resource for their series - we made them an unusual offer "if you invest the resources in having a producer look at material that has never been used by anyone before, we'll work as a partner to make sure that viewers will see new images and hear new stories about 9/11." The folks at Towers agreed, and we are the largest single archive in the Nat Geo Series - with almost 70% of the total archival material coming from CPA. This is the way footage should be engaged - with a thorough and careful fresh look at what is available, rather than a hurried approach that presumes that all the known images tell the whole story. Knowing the footage that Towers acquired, I can tell you that viewers will get to see some new points of view tonight - if that is what you're ready for.

Special thanks to Jessica Berman-Bogdan of Global Image Works/Footage Finders for her endless patience and unfailingly good humor in getting the series made, and to Dan Luskin who worked on our team to pull these never before seen images. And of course, our deeply felt appreciation to Jonathan Towers and Sarah Huisenga at Towers Productions and Michael Cascio at The National Geographic Channel for their commitment to quality and unfailing determination to make these hours the best they could be.

This is a topic that deserves extraordinary respect and patient and careful filmmaking - and this team worked hard to do the right thing at every turn.

Each year about this time, i begin to get emails from reporters interested in 9/11... and in particular my film "7 Days In September".

This year it seems to be starting early - yesturday i did a rather long interview with Tom Paine, on Shire radio. I met him because he was giving away copies of the film on his blog as a prize for a rather silly contest for conservatives, and i wrote him concerned that he was using the film to promote a political agenda. In point of fact he wasn't, and i found his pov pretty nuanced and intelelgent. So i agreed to the interivew, and that was a pretty postive experience as well. Listen for yourself and decide.

With the "March of the Penguins" now at 26m and growing... I figured it was worth both a watch and a think.

So first, the movie. It's a classic National Geographic doc, maybe a classic doc overall. It takes you to a place you've never been, weaves a captivating story, and leaves you with both a greater understanding and a more fully dimensional view of the world. Penguins, it turns out, have a tough life. Who knew?

But that was the pleasant part of the 2:20 I spent at the Regal Cinemas in East Hampton. The other part - the almost 33 minutes - was shear agony. Starting with a creative attempt to blur entertainment and advertising - the "The 20" is 20 min of advertisements... TV show Promo's Ads, and plugs for all kinds of crap. Of course I had to be in the theatre 20 min early to get a seat (no reserve seats) so I was subjected to Cingular, Coke, and Kit Kat ads. Strangely... I found this was the first time I'd been subjected to ads. No Tivo in the theater... it almost felt like TELEVISION!

oh, and far and away the most horrible part was the remake of the "I want to buy the world a Coke ad, that is now remade as "coke chill" - so totally horrible i can't do it justice.

So, irony is that the best Theatrical experience I've had in a while started with 30 minutes of annoying, overly produced, too-lound commercials.

I hope that it's putting a ton of money on the bottom line... because if I have the choice between buying a DVD (that I control, can fast forward, and can OWN) or going to the theater to have my entertainment experience hijacked by marketers and paid commercial messages the film better be pretty darn compelling.

Fake News Abounds, but Vigilance on Rise
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS August 11, 2005

NEW YORK (AP) -- With its official-looking BBC News banner, the Web site looked real enough, but the sick tale it told seemed too preposterous to be true.

''Lion Mutilates 42 Midgets in Cambodian Ring-Fight,'' blared the headline. An article followed about a circus-like spectacle that went awry and resulted in many deaths.

The page was a hoax, but it exploded across the Internet. Soon it was being repeated by bloggers, radio show hosts and a few newspapers. The New York Post published the yarn in its ''Weird but True'' column on May 20.

The episode was another in a string of fabrications and manipulations that may be causing people to think twice about what they read, hear or see on TV.

In recent weeks, Sony Pictures Entertainment agreed to pay $1.5 million to movie patrons duped by advertisements that contained fabricated quotes from a fictitious film critic.

Two reporters at a small newspaper in North Carolina, the Reidsville Review, resigned after a competitor reported that they had made up quotes for a man-on-the-street opinion feature.

The Pentagon was embarrassed after a military public relations office issued a press release containing a quote from an unidentified Iraqi civilian that appeared to have been fabricated. Journalists questioned its veracity after noticing that the quote had appeared in a previous military press release.

There are signs that these fiascos -- and past fabrication scandals involving USA Today reporter Jack Kelley, The New York Times' Jayson Blair, and Stephen Glass of The New Republic -- have led to a more skeptical public.

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which conducts regular polling on attitudes toward the media, said that in 1985 about 84 percent of Americans said they believed most of what they read in their daily newspaper. By 2004, that had dropped to 54 percent.

What isn't clear is whether fabrications have become more common, or just easier to uncover.

These days, an army of amateur and professional media critics have made a hobby out of attempting to discredit news reports and statements by politicians.

Their work has been aided by powerful Internet tools that have made it easier than ever to detect stolen or false material, confirm identities or troll public records.

''Certainly the tools of verification are better and more readily available than they were in the Janet Cooke era,'' said Bill Mitchell of the Poynter Institute, a journalism school.

Cooke was a Washington Post writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story about an 8-year-old heroin addict who didn't actually exist.

The fraud went undetected for months at her paper, even after Washington D.C. police, social workers and other journalists launched a massive search for the boy, but couldn't find him.

''While that kind of fabrication still takes place, the odds of it lasting very long are significantly reduced,'' Mitchell said. ''There is an intense demand for verification. Honestly, I think the current environment is a lot more healthy than it ever has been.''

Robert H. Giles, curator of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, said there is probably less fiction masquerading as real news, but more public attention.

''If you go back a generation or two ago, you could probably find an enormous amount of stuff where stuff was lifted or quotes were fabricated,'' he said. He cited the work of A.J. Liebling, a revered journalist who occasionally embellished feature stories in the 1930s and 1940s with fictitious detail.

''Those days are gone, and I think our business is getting a heck of a lot more ethical,'' Giles said.

Still, there are problems.

In recent years, fake beheadings and kidnappings staged by Internet jokers posing as Iraqi insurgents or have made their way into newscasts.

Dozens of television stations were embarrassed last winter when it became public that they had aired government-produced propaganda videos staged to look like legitimate news reports.

Most famously, CBS' ''60 Minutes Wednesday'' had to retract a report on President Bush's National Guard service after documents at the center of its story were challenged as forgeries.

And, public faith in the mass media has dwindled -- with the exception of the months following the 2001 terrorist attacks, when confidence in journalists briefly soared, said Pew Research Center editor Carroll Doherty.

''It is unfortunate that it takes a tragedy like that for people to see the system working at its best,'' Doherty said. ''When the stakes are high, the press does a good job and the public responds ... It just doesn't come across in the daily barrage of cable shout shows.''

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Blogs and Chat Rooms Pose Risks Despite Coveted Demographics
August 11, 2005 By Kris Oser
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Innovation has its dark side.
That’s what advertisers are realizing about

Sought-after young people flock to chat rooms, but advertisers are wary of out-of-control content.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Innovation has its dark side.
That’s what advertisers are realizing about advertising on consumer-controlled spaces such as blogs and chat rooms. Recently, Yahoo was sued by the parents of a boy who charged his picture was posted on a site by a pedophile in a user-run Yahoo chat room, and State Farm, PepsiCo and Georgia-Pacific pulled their ads. The Los Angeles Times had to shut down a reader-generated comment “wikitorial” feature after child pornography and obscenity were posted.
Yahoo closed its user-generated chat rooms (although the Yahoo-sponsored rooms are still open), but the scandals have brought advertisers face-to-face with their fears.
Is it safe to advertise?
Is it safe to advertise in places on the Internet that are essentially run by consumers and cannot be controlled? How can they protect themselves and their good names when blog and chat-room users are liable to say and post anything? It’s not just pornography or off-color language that worries them. What if consumers got angry about something involving a marketer’s brand, and their remarks got linked to across the Internet? Maybe advertising in such open spaces is not worth the risk.
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I brief lesson in what content created by users may look like (or be already).

So, on monday i went to look at my friend's blog - Girlbomb.com. She is an amazing writer, and i like to see what's going on in the world through her eyes from time to time. So, she's depressed because a friend is sick... and she says she may just go an put stuff on her cat.

Huh?

well Stuff On My Cat is a link - so, because i trust Girlbomb not to waste my time, i click it.

Go ahead - follow along at home. Stuffonmycat.com

Well, it's pretty funny. (i'm a fan of the pizza boxes, the house of cards, and the cat in the ski cap...but you'll have your own). So, i show the site to my 7 year old Murray. He LOVES it. We spend 20 minutes looking at every picture... till there are no more.

Then, on Tuesday... he comes home from camp and says "Hey dad, let's look at Stuffonmycat.com" Yes, he said 'dot.com' - really.

Now at this point, someone at Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon should be concerned - because we spend another 20 minutes on the site... there are new pictures up submitted by users. And he's telling his friends.

And - for the first time in 15 years - i'm wishing i had a cat, just so that i could excersize my creativity (and competitive nature) and one-up those cat picture wanna-be's.

So here's the question - does StuffOnMyCat.com count as content? If yes - what does it mean that people are willing to contribute content for free. If no - then what is content. Interested your your POV on this...

Things change. Trends, markets, consumer behaviors.

Sometimes things change before our eyes, and we still don't seem to acknowledge them.

So even as the very nature of media is evolving, changing, and becoming something entirely new - there is still this sense that things are the same.

They aren't.

Take sneakers.

I remember as a kid having a pair of Converse. Pretty cool. Liked them a lot. But in realm of sneakers... that was pretty much it as i recall. Black or white, take your pick. Why would anyone want anything else.

Had i told my parents that my dream was to open a 'sneaker store' they would have laughed. Black or white?

Flash forward. Footlocker. Finish Line. Sports Authority. Niketown. Sneaker Stores !!!

But what came first, the many styles and brands - or peoples need for more choice, or marketers who were able to convince us we needed a billion kinds of sneakers? Hard to say... these things evolve.

Which brings me to - content.

Today, the idea that there is going to be high quality content for Astronomy seems kind of far fetched. TV networks are MASS media. Big crowds gather to watch BIG shows. So narrow niches like Astronomy, or Opera, Or Slow Foods, or any of the millions of focused personal passions seem unlikely to be able to support a media outlet.

Sneakers.

Audiences evolve. Editorial voices emerge. Distribution technology mature. And the economics underlying all of this are re-engineered to support the changing tastes of content consumers and creators.

Chris Anderson's telling of the Long Tail is part observation, part prediction, and, interestingly, part engineering. Because by putting out in the universe the idea that content can have a long shelf live (and a long economic shelf life) he empowers a generation of content creators to think about their work in a less disposable way.

Amazon then buys Custom Flix (a 'burn no demand' dvd publishing company) hence putting in place the long tail resources to turn their hungry content search engine into a demand satisfying engine.

Is Amazon "Footlocker" for content? Sure, why not.

If so - who's making the sneakers?

Why not us?

My Guest Blog From Todays MediaCenter Morph.

Many thanks to Andrew Nachison for inviting me to Guest Blog.

MY THOUGHTS ON 'CURRENT' TV:

Current's debut week has gotten some tough reviews. Why? TV critics aren’t technologists. They tend to respond to what’s in front of them, not the potential, challenges and long-term significance of new paradigms in programming.

That’s fine - but let’s take a moment and give Current its due.

Al Gore’s “Current” vision is relevant and important both in its use of content and technology. We need to look past the network’s opening day difficulties. Three years ago, Al Gore looked out on the media landscape and saw a change. As he explained it back then, there were two forces on the horizon that would impact media deeply and profoundly. The first was technology; the tools to make media were going from specialized and expensive to ubiquitous and cheap. The second was an uneasy sense that more and more people were being disenfranchised by media organizations that were talking to themselves rather than to their audiences.

How do I know this is what Gore was thinking? Because he said so - to me and others working in the emerging areas of user-contributed content and audience-empowered media.

What he didn't say (but what I thought at the time) was that he also had just had an intensely personal and deeply painful experience being in the white-hot center of the media universe. You don't have to have run for president to figure out that the current state of mainstream media is deeply in need of a re-think. But, I suspect that Al has to have thought at least once or twice about the coverage of the election, the recount, or about the barely-considered Supreme Court decision that effectively elected a President and has had a profound impact on our democracy.

So I think it's easy to see why Al feels like maybe it's time the media should change a bit and become more diverse and inclusive.

Does this mean Current has a political agenda? Well, if by “political” you mean to embrace our democracy and invite a wide-ranging collection of views, then I'd say yes. That's freedom. During my conversations with the Current team (back then called indTV), I lobbied for something akin to "open-source TV," an inclusive and adventurous programming mix. I was pleased to turn on the network on its opening day and see Deepak Chopra right up against a piece about Paris Hilton.

Now the critics have been fast to poke at the Current network with a pointy stick. The Houston Chronicle ran a 400-word column about Current going black on Monday night for 20 minutes. Please... that "new network has opening night tech problems" is not news. The fact of the matter is that Gore's prominence is a double-edge sword for the fledging enterprise. It generates tune-in, buzz, press interest and drive-by viewers. But it also asks a brand-new network to look like it's fully conceived when it's very much a work in progress.

Let's take an “innovation inventory”:

- A television network that invites its audience to send in finished video segments. Never been done before. (Yes, the show I created for MTV Unfiltered certainly was the genesis of that, and Al has been generous in his praise of our early work - but we did six shows a year, not one a week. As an order of difficulty, he's raised the bar dramatically.)

- A network for young people that dares to think that 22-year olds are interested in something other than music videos and Girls Gone Wild. Current’s programming is uneven, and it's hit or miss as to whether or not a segment will keep you watching, but the idea that an audience under the age of 30 will tune in to nonfiction is to be applauded, embraced and encouraged.

- Current is based in San Francisco. Not New York, Not LA. It has a whole new vibe, with a different kind of staff and a unique POV. Yes, CNET is there, but Current is most certainly NOT a tech network.

- Current is a network that has GOOGLE on air. Has everyone forgotten that Google Video is happening? That Google's traffic is earth shattering? That Google understands how to attract, serve and advertise to niche audiences? These guys are scary smart, and they’re not hanging around the water cooler at ABC or even CNN. They're chilling at Current. I bet they’ve figured some stuff out, like they're not going to start their own TV channel. I bet they'll test some stuff with Al’s channel.

- Hmmm, what about those iPod guys? Yeah, APPLE. Oh, they're not a media company, are they? They just own the platform for podcasting (iTunes), the device (iPod) and the tools that are empowering a generation of media makers (Final Cut Pro, Sound Track, Garage Band, Motion, iMovie, IDVD). And once again I ask... where does Steve Jobs go when he wants to talk about video? Over to Al's house.

To recap:

The Negatives: The format is a bit all over the place, the packaging is too smooth and slick (making the user content look too handmade in comparison); there are too many ads (the network has my TiVo working overtime); and sometimes the diversity of subject matter turns the channel in to a melting pot of non sequiturs.

The Positives: No one has ever served an under-30 audience with nonfiction subject matter; inviting users to contribute is brave, forward-thinking, inevitable and will result in some real honest- to-goodness surprises; and partnering with Google, Apple, Sony and others will create some genuinely new tools and formats as audience members get up off the couch and begin to engage in the media conversation that is taking place.

So, Current has challenges - hey, it's a start up - but for all the ink being spilled about blogging, vlogging, podcasting, tagging, wiki's and other evolving participatory media forms... Al, Joel Hyatt and team have plunked down real money and not a little bit of their personal credibility to be first.

For media professionals interested in understanding where media is going, watching the evolution of Current is instructive, maybe even essential. For the staff of Current, embracing the production realities of the nascent user-content universe will be frustrating and at times will seem impossible. But they'll do it, because the alternative is to become another me-too network. Al didn't commit himself to making something average - he's shooting for extraordinary. In today’s media environment, you can't say that about many people.

My vote on Current: Stay Tuned for sure.

As you may know from reading things in this space over the past few months, i'm pretty convinced that media production is going to move to a collaberative model. And so we've been mining our years of documentary and film experience to start to build media tools that make peer production easy. Our lastest is LogXchange - and it's free.

Why Free? The thing about logging is it's a thankless job. If you've ever made a documentary, a tv program, or non-fiction project, you know that. But shared effort - and teamwork make it easier. And the web makes that possible. We call it Peer Production.

At the heart of any team is shared information. And as fellow filmmakers, we've struggled with excel spread sheets, table layouts in Microsoft Word, and even a few filmmaker home-brew databases.

But what we figured out is that logging needs to be simple, team oriented, and free. You should be able to have multiple loggers working from anywhere in the world. Field teams should be able to add quick field loggs from a hotel room. And producers and editors should be able to search, print, and share information across a project and around the world. So LogXchange is built as a shareable free solution, now and always.

Logs are secure, private, and can't be seen by anyone you don't give permission to.

And you can back up your data by downloading the information in a text file anytime you want. We want this to be a tool that any filmmker can use - and one that encourages peer production in film.

In the future, we plan to add other features including centralized video upload, filmmaker clip research, and marketplace features to help you find a shooter, an editor, a composer, or an animator. (EditXchange is live now - others coming on line shortly).

So logging is a great application for us share - and if you like it, feel free to share ideas for new features and peer solutions that you think would help advance the emerging peer production community.

I'd love feedback, ideas, and suggestions.

By Saul Hansell - The New York Times
For two decades, media company executives and advertisers have been talking about creating fully interactive television that would allow viewers to watch exactly what they want, when they want it.

It looks like that future may well be by way of the computer, as big media and Internet companies develop new Web-based video programming and advertising that is truly under the command of the viewer. As Americans grow more comfortable watching programs online, Internet programming is beginning to combine the interactivity and immediacy of the Web with the alluring engagement of television. More

The thing about Jerry Della Femina is that he likes to stir things up. Cause trouble. Be controversial. And truthfully, that's part of what i've always liked about him. A bunch of years ago i produced a tv show with he and his wife Judy - and the whole idea was that they were willing to break the rules and ask celebs the questions that were impolite, even aggressive. While we haven't spoken in a while, i've always admired his independence, creativity, and willingness to stick his neck out.

So I didn't pick up The Independent expecting Jerry's column to be anything less.

I won't bore you with my retelling of it - the summary is his proposal that all of the luxury travel to the Hamptons (the Jitney, Luxury Liner, nightclubs, etc) stop and search all Arabs (or Muslims as he swaps the terms) so that no one bombs the Hamptons. Read Jerry's Ink for yourself.

I read this - and i see the future of our country flash before my eyes. We're about freedom, but it's ok to profile anyone we think might endanger us. We're about free speech (after all Jerry can print his newspaper) but if anyone criticizes our government, or the president, well then - let's profile them as well. Oh, and what about wealthy advertising exec's who've move out to the hamptons and made a career out of tilting at windmills. I'm pretty sure that there are some old money Hamptonites who'd call Jerry a credible threat to their way of life.

You see - Jerry - freedom isn't a switch you can turn on and off. And it's been turned on for you in a way that has resulted in very comfortable life. So when a young Pakistani, or Indian, or Arab, or Turkish young man gets off the bus in East Hampton... he arrives with all the promise of a country that is open to allow anyone (even a carpetbagger like you) to speak your mind. And once we tell him that freedom doesn't apply to him, well then - we've lied to the world about what WE believe in. And we've created an environment that sows the seeds of hate for not just this generation, but future generations.

Don't get me wrong. I hate being searched at the airport. I hate taking my shoes off. But i like being able to write in my blog that the movie about the President called "First Daughter" with Michael Keaton, Forest Whitaker, and Katie Holmes was a bomb.

I don't want the words 'bomb' and 'president' to get my post flagged by the Secret Service. And btw - Jerry - neither do you.

The world is a complex place. And the issues that we face aren't simple. For a country of immigrants to become ethnocentric is bizarre. And when people like Jerry - first generation success stories who've made their millions by embracing freedom of speech - decide that they can discriminate against people and think it's funny. Well, that's just downright frightening.

It's not about "profiling" it's about freedom. And no one knows more about freedom that Jerry Della Femina.

Jerry - i hope you don't mean what you wrote. it wasn't funny.