COMMENTARY: Thank you to the organizers of BaKaFORUM. This has been an extraordinary four days, both hopeful and daunting. Hopeful, because we’ve seen stories that expose oppression and exploitation and others that celebrate triumphs of the human spirit. Daunting because the problems we face remain enormous in scope and diversity. Exposing problems doesn’t solve them, but it can help. And, like no time before “now,” technology allows wide access to tools storytellers can use to reach large audiences.
Sustainability is a “hot” topic in terms of the natural world. The pun is intended because the ecology of media also is changing dramatically. The“cool” medium of TV remains important because of its wide availability to viewers and role as the economic engine that powers other media in legacy organizations. In countries with histories of generous support for public broadcasting, the shift in emphasis to public “media” signals the inevitable change that new technology requires. We are somewhere in the middle of a dramatic transformation. The new ecology requires professional communicators, producers, storytellers, to find a place for the grassroots storytellers.
In my former work life as a TV news executive “convergence” became a buzz word in the mid 1990s. I’m happy to report I have not once heard the word used here. But be careful that the convergence fallacy is not just being called something else. That is to say, the imperative to cross platforms really needs to be understood beyond the idea of just repurposing content. Obviously, there are many here at BaKaFORUM who understand this, with great sophistication, and have found ways to cross platforms effectively. For example, Connecting People Across Conflict Borders, a French Web based production about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began on the Internet and was later produced as a TV doc. We should also not forget that the large screen hi-def, 16:9 format, conveys a different message from the one we get on an iPhone. Younger colleagues seem to know this intuitively.
With all the material available at our fingertips, on YouTube, much of it is not worth watching; yet we remain fascinated with the instant availability of what we do want to see. Legacy “broadcasters” and creative entrepreneurs have an opportunity to tame the elephant in the middle of the room, if they can use the meaningful content on YouTube by serving as an effective gatekeeper and guide. The elephant I refer to is a sustainable economic model to support outstanding story telling. We saw two approaches to this at BaKaFORUM, in terms of helping navigate educational content with EduTube and EduTube Plus.
In certain areas of the USA–and probably elsewhere that I don’t know about–new partnerships between grassroots producers and established media are developing in daily journalism. I recently attended the Journalism That Matters (JTM) conference in Seattle, on the campus of the University of Washington. JTM brought together legacy news organizations, print and broadcast, with hyper-local entrepreneurial websites and blogs. The best local websites gain credibility by being connected to legacy media. The legacy partner gets the heartfelt local connection that coming from within a community provides. And as we’ve seen at BaKaFORUM–it’s about connecting and cooperation.
Irv
