PART IV: Recommendations
Nonfiction films that present social issues are being viewed in record-breaking numbers. These successful films tend to fall into one of two camps – they are usually either highly charged partisan stories aimed at inspiring true believers or they are entertainments.
Partisan films are available on both the left and right, reaffirming the opinions of believers. Entertaining films that deal with social issues tend to lack any context for the social issues being presented (little attention to poverty in “Mad Hot Ballroom,” no rationale for prostitution in “Born into Brothels,” no mention of global warming changing the environment in “March of the Penguins”). These are simply good stories, well told. Such stories can be powerful, and these projects fill a need, but they are no substitute for documentaries that cause large numbers of people to reflect, discuss and change their behavior or work to eliminate the causes of social problems on a systemic (and not just individual) basis. Such social issue media documentaries are still being made today, but against great odds and in rapidly diminishing numbers. As video becomes more and more omnipresent in our lives, we face a grave danger if the stories we are told are only those that reaffirm our pre-existing ideas or make us feel good (or even feel good about feeling bad). If we are to have a healthy and robust civil society, we must find a way to use media to build bridges, to prompt reflection and discussion, and to promote social change across ideological divides. Social issue media is capable of doing this, but only if all the stakeholders recognize the problems and work together to find solutions. Thoughtful, journalistically and artistically sound documentaries face a perilous future. It is clear that if documentarians producing these films are going to succeed in transitioning to the new media landscape, they will need significant coordinated assistance.
Hold a Summit to Define New Measures of Success
It is difficult to foresee substantial progress in the near term unless a significant number of social issue media stakeholders – underwriters, producers, broadcasters and outreach institutions – come together and establish new measures of success for these projects. Column inches and eyeballs are harder to attain and of less value today even when they are attained. What should the new measures of success be? We recommend holding a summit, perhaps under the auspices of the Center for Social Media, to work toward defining success in this new media environment and achieving industry buy-in to the new measures of success.
Experiment with Coordinated, Non-national Release
It is unlikely that PBS is going to lower its expectations that programs draw a large audience in the prime-time slot. There is too much at stake in the present media (and political) landscape to expect bold departures from PBS’s cautious broadcast strategy. However, as more and more stations make the switch to digital terrestrial television and increase the number of channels (and programs) they offer, it is an opportune time to work out a strategic, coordinated, non-national release strategy for social issue media projects. We recommend establishing an office (at PBS or a public television station) that monitors reactions to releases and builds not toward one measurable mass audience, but toward measurable masses of audiences with staggered and monitored releases across the country. American Documentary has made significant strides in this direction with its series “True Lives.”
In this emerging era when individual buying habits and preferences can be tracked with great precision, corporations are increasingly reluctant to spend their advertising dollars to reach people who have no interest in becoming consumers of their products. Similarly, philanthropists are increasingly reluctant to spend large sums trying to reach community members who are not receptive to the messages delivered in specific social issue media projects. As Susan Conner, of the Lumina Foundation, told us, “Carriage is no longer assured. Everyone must plan around it...we need to reconceive our distribution as niche rather than mass market and package for the audiences we want to reach and use appropriate delivery.” The social issue media community in general needs to adjust to the fact that most projects will never reach a national audience through existing channels. However, it is our belief that as an industry, we can use the new and forthcoming tools of communication technology to create a public out of many disperse publics. Ironically, to bring citizens together around social issue media we can use the approach of those who are increasing our fragmentation. We can use the data-mining tools of narrowcasters and niche marketers (using information technology to develop dossiers of habits and preferences and needs). But we need to do so not for individuals, but on a community-wide basis; that is, we need to apply a narrowcasting approach (rather than broadcasting), utilizing multiple, customized formats and numerous planned face-to-face meetings to reach whole communities selected according to their demographic, economic, political and civic engagement profiles. Creating such data-rich community profiles by aggregating information from public sources can increase the efficiency with which social issue media projects are distributed and outreach campaigns are waged. For individual projects, we need to weave together a collection of appropriate communities ready to address the social issue covered in that media project and by weaving enough of them together, create a significant, not-quite-national public audience. Admittedly, it would be an audience that is not necessarily viewing and discussing the program at the same time or viewing it via the same technological platform, but an audience that is sufficiently large and one whose members are ready to address important social issues in their communities.
Establish a New Institution to Provide Technical Support for Members of the Social Issue Media Industry Community
Just as National Video Resources was born in 1990 to help documentarians make the shift in the then-burgeoning VHS marketplace (and deal with the drop in revenue from lower institutional sales), it is time to create a new institution to help social issue filmmakers with the even more pervasive and overwhelming changes going on in the media industry today.
Why? Because the future of social issue media is not clear. And it is also not clear which institutions are in a position to offer substantial assistance during this time of transition. Most existing institutions are either defending their position in this sea of change or struggling to find stability. We believe that the industry would benefit greatly from the creation of a new institution that is unencumbered by existing contracts or commitments. This new institution would serve funders, producers and distributors who are focusing on thoughtful, inclusive social issue media that supports civil society, builds bridges across social divides and encourages deliberation and positive social change.
For funders who do not have media specialists on staff (other than perhaps their communications staff), this institution would serve as a public media liaison to producers and projects. The staff of this office would help match the programmatic interests of numerous nonmedia program officers with the content of proposed social issue documentary projects. Producers rarely have the skill set to communicate efficiently and successfully with nonmedia program officers, and nonmedia program officers at foundations rarely have the skill set to evaluate confidently the suitability of a proposed documentary project, its budget, the qualifications of the production team, the effectiveness of the distribution plan and the professionalism of the outreach components. The liaison officer would make this process much more efficient and less onerous for all parties involved. The office would serve as a buffer between the grantor and requesting grantee. This office might have a relationship with Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media (though media grantmakers have much less need for this kind of assistance). The goal would be to help nonmedia grantmakers fund documentary projects more effectively in order to increase the dollars available for film projects and to make the process more efficient and successful for all parties involved.
For producers, this new organization would act as a national, nonbroadcast production service. As PBS’s Coby Atlas noted, “A filmmaker can’t do multipronged projects with outreach and Web and podcasts and more. They don’t care about that stuff either. They only care about making a good film. They need another enterprise supporting them to do all the ancillary work.” Reaching audiences efficiently, effectively and demonstrably will be key to social issue documentarians’ success in this transitional marketplace. Although over the next few years broadcast will still form the core of all activities for social issue documentary projects, the nonbroadcast components hold the prospect of demonstrating effectiveness, increasing reach beyond traditional public television viewers, and generating revenues via new distribution paths (which will lessen the burden on philanthropic funders for future projects). As we stated earlier, it has become virtually impossible for social issue documentarians to maintain a broad, professional staff in this new media environment. Therefore, skills needed to produce not only a successful film but also simultaneously an enhanced DVD, downloadable video versions, cell phone/iPod versions, supporting Web sites, outreach campaigns and contractual relationships with numerous distributors are far beyond the capacity of these overextended staffs. And while presenting public television stations sometimes offer these services, they rarely do so for social issue media projects. For that reason, we recommend that committed foundations unite to establish a nonbroadcast production service that will perform these functions for appropriate social issue media projects. The service would also earn a share of revenue for materials distributed and reduce its dependency on full philanthropic support.
Partisan films are available on both the left and right, reaffirming the opinions of believers. Entertaining films that deal with social issues tend to lack any context for the social issues being presented (little attention to poverty in “Mad Hot Ballroom,” no rationale for prostitution in “Born into Brothels,” no mention of global warming changing the environment in “March of the Penguins”). These are simply good stories, well told. Such stories can be powerful, and these projects fill a need, but they are no substitute for documentaries that cause large numbers of people to reflect, discuss and change their behavior or work to eliminate the causes of social problems on a systemic (and not just individual) basis. Such social issue media documentaries are still being made today, but against great odds and in rapidly diminishing numbers. As video becomes more and more omnipresent in our lives, we face a grave danger if the stories we are told are only those that reaffirm our pre-existing ideas or make us feel good (or even feel good about feeling bad). If we are to have a healthy and robust civil society, we must find a way to use media to build bridges, to prompt reflection and discussion, and to promote social change across ideological divides. Social issue media is capable of doing this, but only if all the stakeholders recognize the problems and work together to find solutions. Thoughtful, journalistically and artistically sound documentaries face a perilous future. It is clear that if documentarians producing these films are going to succeed in transitioning to the new media landscape, they will need significant coordinated assistance.
Hold a Summit to Define New Measures of Success
It is difficult to foresee substantial progress in the near term unless a significant number of social issue media stakeholders – underwriters, producers, broadcasters and outreach institutions – come together and establish new measures of success for these projects. Column inches and eyeballs are harder to attain and of less value today even when they are attained. What should the new measures of success be? We recommend holding a summit, perhaps under the auspices of the Center for Social Media, to work toward defining success in this new media environment and achieving industry buy-in to the new measures of success.
Experiment with Coordinated, Non-national Release
It is unlikely that PBS is going to lower its expectations that programs draw a large audience in the prime-time slot. There is too much at stake in the present media (and political) landscape to expect bold departures from PBS’s cautious broadcast strategy. However, as more and more stations make the switch to digital terrestrial television and increase the number of channels (and programs) they offer, it is an opportune time to work out a strategic, coordinated, non-national release strategy for social issue media projects. We recommend establishing an office (at PBS or a public television station) that monitors reactions to releases and builds not toward one measurable mass audience, but toward measurable masses of audiences with staggered and monitored releases across the country. American Documentary has made significant strides in this direction with its series “True Lives.”
In this emerging era when individual buying habits and preferences can be tracked with great precision, corporations are increasingly reluctant to spend their advertising dollars to reach people who have no interest in becoming consumers of their products. Similarly, philanthropists are increasingly reluctant to spend large sums trying to reach community members who are not receptive to the messages delivered in specific social issue media projects. As Susan Conner, of the Lumina Foundation, told us, “Carriage is no longer assured. Everyone must plan around it...we need to reconceive our distribution as niche rather than mass market and package for the audiences we want to reach and use appropriate delivery.” The social issue media community in general needs to adjust to the fact that most projects will never reach a national audience through existing channels. However, it is our belief that as an industry, we can use the new and forthcoming tools of communication technology to create a public out of many disperse publics. Ironically, to bring citizens together around social issue media we can use the approach of those who are increasing our fragmentation. We can use the data-mining tools of narrowcasters and niche marketers (using information technology to develop dossiers of habits and preferences and needs). But we need to do so not for individuals, but on a community-wide basis; that is, we need to apply a narrowcasting approach (rather than broadcasting), utilizing multiple, customized formats and numerous planned face-to-face meetings to reach whole communities selected according to their demographic, economic, political and civic engagement profiles. Creating such data-rich community profiles by aggregating information from public sources can increase the efficiency with which social issue media projects are distributed and outreach campaigns are waged. For individual projects, we need to weave together a collection of appropriate communities ready to address the social issue covered in that media project and by weaving enough of them together, create a significant, not-quite-national public audience. Admittedly, it would be an audience that is not necessarily viewing and discussing the program at the same time or viewing it via the same technological platform, but an audience that is sufficiently large and one whose members are ready to address important social issues in their communities.
Establish a New Institution to Provide Technical Support for Members of the Social Issue Media Industry Community
Just as National Video Resources was born in 1990 to help documentarians make the shift in the then-burgeoning VHS marketplace (and deal with the drop in revenue from lower institutional sales), it is time to create a new institution to help social issue filmmakers with the even more pervasive and overwhelming changes going on in the media industry today.
Why? Because the future of social issue media is not clear. And it is also not clear which institutions are in a position to offer substantial assistance during this time of transition. Most existing institutions are either defending their position in this sea of change or struggling to find stability. We believe that the industry would benefit greatly from the creation of a new institution that is unencumbered by existing contracts or commitments. This new institution would serve funders, producers and distributors who are focusing on thoughtful, inclusive social issue media that supports civil society, builds bridges across social divides and encourages deliberation and positive social change.
For funders who do not have media specialists on staff (other than perhaps their communications staff), this institution would serve as a public media liaison to producers and projects. The staff of this office would help match the programmatic interests of numerous nonmedia program officers with the content of proposed social issue documentary projects. Producers rarely have the skill set to communicate efficiently and successfully with nonmedia program officers, and nonmedia program officers at foundations rarely have the skill set to evaluate confidently the suitability of a proposed documentary project, its budget, the qualifications of the production team, the effectiveness of the distribution plan and the professionalism of the outreach components. The liaison officer would make this process much more efficient and less onerous for all parties involved. The office would serve as a buffer between the grantor and requesting grantee. This office might have a relationship with Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media (though media grantmakers have much less need for this kind of assistance). The goal would be to help nonmedia grantmakers fund documentary projects more effectively in order to increase the dollars available for film projects and to make the process more efficient and successful for all parties involved.
For producers, this new organization would act as a national, nonbroadcast production service. As PBS’s Coby Atlas noted, “A filmmaker can’t do multipronged projects with outreach and Web and podcasts and more. They don’t care about that stuff either. They only care about making a good film. They need another enterprise supporting them to do all the ancillary work.” Reaching audiences efficiently, effectively and demonstrably will be key to social issue documentarians’ success in this transitional marketplace. Although over the next few years broadcast will still form the core of all activities for social issue documentary projects, the nonbroadcast components hold the prospect of demonstrating effectiveness, increasing reach beyond traditional public television viewers, and generating revenues via new distribution paths (which will lessen the burden on philanthropic funders for future projects). As we stated earlier, it has become virtually impossible for social issue documentarians to maintain a broad, professional staff in this new media environment. Therefore, skills needed to produce not only a successful film but also simultaneously an enhanced DVD, downloadable video versions, cell phone/iPod versions, supporting Web sites, outreach campaigns and contractual relationships with numerous distributors are far beyond the capacity of these overextended staffs. And while presenting public television stations sometimes offer these services, they rarely do so for social issue media projects. For that reason, we recommend that committed foundations unite to establish a nonbroadcast production service that will perform these functions for appropriate social issue media projects. The service would also earn a share of revenue for materials distributed and reduce its dependency on full philanthropic support.
