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Comment by Bruce Eric Montgomery on September 10, 2009 at 5:46pm

September 8, 2009

Media contact: Susan Bennett, 202/292-6310

NEWSEUM LAUNCHES "THE FUTURE OF NEWS" IN TELEVISED SERIES HOSTED BY FRANK SESNO

WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 — The Newseum is launching "The Future of News," a new 10-part television series featuring lively, cutting-edge conversations with well-known journalists and new media pioneers about the evolution of news reporting in an Internet age.

The initial 10 programs will be hosted by Frank Sesno, award-winning broadcaster and professor at George Washington University. Panelists include NBC’s Ann Curry; The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward; ABC’s Sam Donaldson; Tina Brown, founder and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast; Craigslist founder Craig Newmark; Instapundit Glenn Reynolds; new media critic Jay Rosen; Politico co-founder Jim VandeHei; and Charles Sennott of Global Post.

"The Future of News," produced at the Newseum and distributed by American Public Television, will feature in-depth discussions and debates about traditional news media adapting in a digital world, new media solutions outside traditional news business models, citizen journalists, the future of newspapers, the "digital divide," the speed of news and other topics.

Each 30-minute program will highlight emerging news sources and offer timely tips on how news consumers can navigate the ever-expanding maze of digital information. Touch-screen technology will be used to introduce viewers to Web sites that offer credible alternatives to traditional news providers. In addition, the guests will discuss the role of a free press in a digital democracy.

Video segments produced by the Newseum’s award-winning producers will set up each week’s topic. The Newseum’s vast content, which includes thousands of historic newspapers, photographs and news-related artifacts, will be incorporated into the programs to provide historical context.

"The Newseum is uniquely positioned to lead the discussion about where people will go to find accurate news in the future," said Paul Sparrow, vice president of broadcasting for the Newseum. "This show will be a User’s Guide to News 2.0, bringing together the best and the brightest in both traditional and new media."

"The Future of News," which is slated to air in early 2010, will be available via the varied distribution platforms of public television. The Newseum programming is partially funded with a grant from the Ford Foundation. Additional underwriting is welcome. Funders are entitled to a 15-second acknowledgement at the beginning and end of each show and will be included in all online and print material.

About the Newseum Production Team

Host
Frank Sesno is an award-winning broadcast journalist who formerly served as CNN’s Washington, D.C., bureau chief, news anchor, analyst and reporter. Now a special correspondent for CNN, Sesno serves as director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., where he also is a professor of media, public affairs and international affairs. Sesno has appeared on public television channels nationwide, the History Channel and National Public Radio as an independent commentator. He also hosted the innovative Web/broadcast special "Planet Forward" for PBS and the long-running annual specials "A Public Voice," distributed by American Public Television.

Production Executive
Paul Sparrow is an Emmy Award–winning producer with 30 years’ experience in television production. He came to the Newseum in 1998 and produced "Holocaust: The Untold Story," which was nominated for an Emmy Award and carried by the History Channel. He also was executive in charge of production for "The World at Large," a public television series featuring David Gergen and produced in association with SCETV. Before coming to the Newseum, Sparrow produced more than 300 hours of prime-time network programming.

Series Producer
Susan Brooks Kelly is an award-winning multimedia producer for the Newseum with more than 25 years of broadcasting experience. Before joining the Newseum, she spent nearly 10 years in NBC News’s Washington bureau, working on documentaries, the "Today" show and as production manager for "Meet the Press" with the late Tim Russert.

About the Newseum
The Newseum — a 250,000-square-foot museum of news — offers visitors an experience that blends five centuries of news history with up-to-the-second technology and hands-on exhibits. Within its seven levels of galleries and theaters, the Newseum offers a unique environment that takes museum-goers behind the scenes to experience how and why news is made.

The Newseum is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily and is closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Day. Admission is $20 for adults, $18 for seniors (65 and older) and $13 for youth (7 to 18). Annual memberships also are available. For additional information, the public may call 888/NEWSEUM (888/639-7386) or visit newseum.org.

American Public Television
American Public Television (APT) has been a leading distributor of high-quality, top-rated programming to America’s public television stations since 1961. Among its 300 new program titles per year are prominent documentaries, dramatic series, how-to programs, children’s series and classic movies, including "Spain … on the road Again," "Rick Steves’ Europe," "Worldfocus," "Globe Trekker," "Simply Ming," "America’s Test Kitchen From Cook’s Illustrated," "Lidia’s Family Table," "P. Allen Smith’s Garden Home," "Murdoch Mysteries," "Doc Martin," "Rosemary and Thyme," "Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison," "Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti" and "John Denver: The Wildlife Concert." APT also distributes to international channels through its APT Worldwide service. In 2006, APT launched Create™ — the TV channel featuring the best of public television’s lifestyle programming. For more information about APT’s programs and services, visit http://www.APTonline.org.

Comment by Karen E. Pride on August 8, 2009 at 11:12am

Greetings. I facilitate a drop-in group called the Chicago Independent Artists Network (CIAN). We meet on the second Tuesday of the month at Wishbone Restaurant, 3300 N. Lincoln Blvd., near Belmont/Ashland, from 7-8:30 p.m.
NEXT MEETING - TUES., AUG. 11.
The Network consists of student and professional filmmakers, writers, musicians, actors, videographers, photographers, caterers, artists...anything to do with creative arts. Our mission is to keep you creative people working in Chicago through networking opportunities. If you're interested, please contact me at ciankaren@gmail.com. and check out the Facebook page.

Comment by carey lundin on January 16, 2009 at 1:07pm

CitizenKate.TV has been tapped to be the official People's Correspondent for Vote for Change, a site created by Shepard Fairey, creator of the Obama Hope poster and Inauguration Poster.

We will be interviewing people from every strata of life: what is your hope for change?

In addition, Citizen Kate, in the spirit of Obama's Be The Change public service day, will do her Be the Hug campaign.

Kate will try to facilitate and film people who are diametrically opposed to each other hugging. Because peace starts with a hug.

Look for her dispatches daily from the inauguration on www.citizenkate.tv, on youtube.com/citizenkate2007 and theuptake.org.

Citizen Kate is sponsored in part by HD Flip Mineo Cameras and Tarina Tarintino jewelryl

Comment by Denise Dorman on October 29, 2008 at 12:55pm

Did everyone see the article in Editor & publisher today that CNN is starting its own wire service?

Comment by Bruce Eric Montgomery on September 28, 2008 at 3:28pm

The Summer Ain't Over Just Yet! Let's Meetup and talk Convergence!

Museum of Contemporary Art, Tuesday, September 30, 5:30-8 pm

Join me for the last Tuesday on the Terrace, of the season of free evening jazz concert on the MCA's Anne and John Kern Terrace overlooking Lake Michigan.

Enjoy cocktails while listening to Chicago's finest jazz musicians, hosted by local radio personalities.

In addition to a buffet dinner, Puck's cafe also offers other picnic options, perfect for those who prefer to relax on the sculpture garden lawn.

http://www.mcachicago.org/programs/event_detail.php?id=22

Comment by Bruce Eric Montgomery on August 28, 2008 at 12:40pm

August 27, 2008
On the Convention

New Media Stream Into an Old Tradition

By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/27/us/politics/27web-seelye.html

DENVER — The musician Will.I.Am, who produced the hit video “Yes We Can” about Barack Obama, calls the Democratic gathering here the first “batonical” convention.

That’s not botanical, as in gardens, but batonical, as in baton and the passing of: The Democratic National Convention is the first in which people are passing on enormous amounts of information to friends, who are in turn passing it to more friends, mostly by way of YouTube, the superhighway’s video conveyer belt, which didn’t exist during the 2004 convention.

Will.I.Am, who is a hip-hop artist with the Black-Eyed Peas, made his observations about the new media during a panel discussion today not far from the Pepsi Center, which is a showcase for how the new media is mixing with — and altering — old politics in an age of declining attention from the big television networks. It also shows how the new media can help the party reach audiences unfiltered by the old media.

This convention was ushered in with a text message last weekend to millions of supporters telling them that Mr. Obama had picked Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. as his running mate. It is to close with another giant texting session Thursday night at Invesco Field at Mile High, in which the 75,000 people in the stands will be asked to send text messages to their friends and family about their experience (plans for a mass-scale phone bank have been downsized, if not scrapped, because of fears it could crash the phone network; besides, some people are uncomfortable cold-calling strangers).

The convention has jazzed up its communications in several ways, all because of advances in technology that are expanding the audience way beyond the reach of television and newspapers.

For one thing, it has added an online component to its popular in-house studio, a glassy, cluttered, jam-packed hub just off the convention floor where elected officials can hook up with their local radio hosts or television anchors back home. Both parties have had something similar in the past, but this year, the Democrats’ nerve center, called Studio’08, features computers with Wi-Fi so that pols can also do online chats with their constituents.

“This is a one-stop shop,” Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri said cheerily as she prepared for a satellite television interview. “I can do talk radio here, I can do satellite feeds, I can do on-line stuff, I can do actualities. It’s very convenient. It makes it simple to talk to people at home — and it’s a great way to get around those nasty ads. People can actually get real information if they just take a little energy and click a few times.”

With its steady stream of politicians on the airwaves and online, Studio’08 also helps the Obama campaign counter the heavy media presence of surrogates for Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee. So far, Studio’08 has transmitted more than 200 satellite interviews to 90 media markets.

Also new this year is a Web site www.demconvention.com that shows the first live high-definition streaming of gavel-to-gavel convention proceedings, using the same new Microsoft platform that made its debut at the Olympics. The site offers a complete Spanish-language simulcast, for the first time.

The site features its first daily convention Web cast, which previews that night’s program and serves up convention tidbits — snippets of Michelle Obama’s video in advance, for example — and includes “by the numbers” tallies, like the gallons of coffee made and miles of cable laid.

Speaking of numbers, the log of credentialed bloggers this year has more than tripled, to 120 from 35 in 2004, the first year they were allowed in.

And bloggers now have a rotating position on the podium, just as print and television reporters have. The convention has also created a state blogger corps, giving credentials to one blogger from each state, a system that has irked many who felt it unnecessarily limited their number.

But Google, DailyKos and others are sponsoring a “Big Tent” within a short walk of the Pepsi grounds where hundreds of bloggers are sitting shoulder to shoulder at long tables and pounding on their keyboards and taking video of each other most of the day and night. It cost them $100 for a space for the week. It’s air-conditioned and does not involve security lines: the only line is for media types who are not blogging but coming in for a look. They have to sign in at a table marked “Traditional Media,” not the most welcome group in bloggerland.

Typical of the material being sent back home are postings (“Live from Denver!”) by Brian Rothenberg on ProgressOhio.

“Through the use of state-of-the-art Internet and cell-phone technology,” his promo says, “Brian is providing live interviews with Ohio delegates and party officials which we are posting on our website for you to see and get an insiders’ view of the convention not provided by the TV hosts, newspapers or other blogs.”

The convention also has its own blogging team. The 2004 convention had a blogger too; the difference this year is that there is a team and it also posts lots of videos (remember — YouTube did not exist four years ago).

All of this is backed by a huge online communications team that includes dozens of volunteers. On Monday night, they used several cameras to record Ms. Obama’s speech, said Chris Hughes, 24, a co-founder of Facebook who has brought his social-networking skills to the Obama campaign and is now its director of online organizing.

They put her speech up on YouTube in two or three hours and sent it out by e-mail early the next morning to millions of Obama supporters. The hope was that many of them would forward the speech to other friends.

“We weren’t just pushing information out, but getting people to post it to their profiles,” Mr. Hughes said during an interview in the convention hall. He said that major speeches like hers can become extremely popular, as did the race speech that Mr. Obama delivered in Philadelphia in the spring. That 35-minute-long speech remains the most-watched video of the Obama campaign on YouTube.

“It’s not just YouTube, but all these networks make it easier for people to share information, and video is probably the best medium for that,” Mr. Hughes said. “This is all so integral to fundraising and organizing. Having good video has made a difference, and so has having the resources of Facebook and MySpace and MyBarackObama too. Half the delegates here have MyBO accounts.”

This is the kind of activity that Will.I.Am meant when he talked about batoning. At the panel discussion, which was sponsored by the Huffington Post, he searched for a metaphor to describe the differences between what he said was the passive, old media and the engaged new media.

“You watch old media on the couch,” he said. “This new media is horse material. You travel and you tell people and it’s like Paul Revere.”

Comment by Bruce Eric Montgomery on June 20, 2008 at 8:24am

Journalism 2.0: What's the next step for news wires?

By Brendan Collins

Well, I can't say I didn't see this coming a mile away.

The New York Times reports that on Tuesday the Associated Press eased off their initial threat to evil, quote-stealing bloggers worldwide. Last Friday, the AP issued an ultimatum to the blog Drudge Retort (not to be confused with the Drudge Report), asking them to withdraw seven specific posts that included AP quotations. They cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in their request. It all sounds fairly reasonable until you realize that the DMCA was signed into law in 1996. Perhaps a little dated, hmm? After a very unsurprising backlash from the online community, the AP has decided to cool its jets a little. Not wanting to appear "heavy-handed," the renowned non-profit news cooperative has decided to re-think their policy towards "fair use" of copyrighted material.

It's not like a situation like this was unexpected by the news wires. After all, bloggers have been freely grifting headlines and sometimes entire stories from AP-client news sources (such as the New York Times) for years. I think most of the criticism of the AP for the initial crackdown is warranted, since I believe that the more public and free news discussions the better. But the idea in general - that the AP no longer has control over its protected material - is fascinating. Does this mean that ALL copyrighted material is potentially fair game? Probably not, of course. What I think is likely to emerge from this situation is some sort quasi-contract agreement between the blogging community and the AP, whereby bloggers are allowed to legally "sample" AP quotations (to an extent), much like how musicians "sample" music of the past.

If it's worried so much about bloggers unfairly exploiting their news, why the heck does the AP have RSS feeds for its stories on their website? Could they honestly not prepared for this confrontation a little better? Maybe even put incentives for blogs who have RSS feeds to the AP? Seems to me like the AP is looking to be two very different things at once - equally part of both the Old and New Media. The real issue here is the difficulty of transitioning to an age where information doesn't necessarily have to have a copyright to be valuable. It's no longer the news that's worth money, it's the vehicle bringing that news to the reader. Blogs - yes, even the Drudge Retort - are slowly being accorded the respect they deserve by stubborn Old Media organizations like the AP. Most newspapers have adopted online discussion as a major part of their delivery, and for that reason they are still incredibly useful and relevant.

But what happens when the granddaddy of news wires, a vanguard of modern journalism, has trouble adapting to this new landscape? Does it signal an approaching sea change for news distribution? Perhaps. Regardless, the AP and other wires have two options: change or die out. As trite and boiled-down as that sounds, it's the truth. The times are a-changin', and the wire services would do well to wisen up and stay with the rest of the crowd.

http://www.fastcompany.com/blog-post/journalism-2-0-whats-next-step-news-wires

Comment by glenn reedus on June 14, 2008 at 3:18am

"Citizen journalism" as in people with no formal journalism training reporting the news. Is that viable as primary news source? Will it have an impact - positive or negative - on traditional news outlets, i.e. newspapers, radio and television news operations??

Comment by carey lundin on May 18, 2008 at 12:42pm

Comment by carey lundin on May 18, 2008 at 12:41pm

I produce CitizenKate.TV, a send up of reporting on the campaign trail. I must say, the long hours, lack of proper nutrition and poor working conditions have caused me to stay up late, drink and start to count how many times Barack can say the word "change" in one speech, oh, and wish we lived in a warm climate.