Julio 06, 2007

Death of Newsreal?

I've been the editor for the Indymedia U.S. Newsreal for a little over one year now, and while it's been a valuable experience for me and it's felt good to keep the project going, it has been a constant struggle to elicit contributions for it. The monthly program consists of short (1-10 minute, usually) segments sent in by videoactivists from around the country. Since the show is broadcast on Free Speech TV it seems like a great opportunity to get your work shown in front of potentially millions of viewers, and segments producers get $50 as well, but apparently this isn't enough to motivate people. I don't know what the problem is, frankly, but I'm getting tired of constanly cajoling people to send stuff in. That wasn't supposed to be my job, I was only going to be the editor, but pretty soon after I started, the outreach coordinator, Ethan, dropped off the face of the earth and stopped doing outreach.

Last month we received exactly zero submissions and Sonya, subbing for me as editor while I was in Europe, just barely managed to cobble together material for a July show. If there's still no submissions, and no renewed interest, I fear the whole project is going to have to be put to rest...

Posted by steev at Julio 6, 2007 03:34 PM
Comments
Solution: use videos from video.indymedia.org and from local imcs listed on the right side of video.indy. Posted by: pabs at Julio 7, 2007 02:14 AM
pabs that sounds fine but there are actually very few U.S. contributions there and almost zero that are files that are broadcast quality. Remember, this is for broadcast on television, on Free Speech TV. sometimes in a pinch i grab stuff from online when i need something extra to fill the space, but for an entire program highly compressed mp4 files just won't cut it. Posted by: steev at Julio 7, 2007 11:06 AM
thanks for sharing, steev. I've forwarded your latest plea for contributions to our local video list. about broadcast quality video, i was hoping we could use indytorrents.org as a way to distribute full DV quality video around the net. anyway, keep up the good work, video production is a demanding job! Posted by: matt toups at Julio 7, 2007 01:11 PM
i forwarded this to the imc-us list, and there was a bit of interest from people already working on local broadcast projects - hopefully those folks will get in touch with you - i'm assuming newsreal@indymedia.org goes to you? Posted by: john at Julio 8, 2007 08:08 AM