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MediaRights: Year In Review 2009

Published on December 15, 2009

The year in review is our annual wrap up, highlighting the standout articles of the past year that best exemplify our goal to build and empower a community around the innovative ways filmmakers, social activists and educators are engaging with media to bring about positive change in the world.

Fundraising challenges, environmental issues and the continual influence of technological change, including the rise of social media over documentary film production, distribution and promotion were the recurring themes covered in 2009.

The ongoing financial crisis directed many of our readers to Fan Base Fundraising and Community Fundraising in Media Arts. The two articles led the charge; giving unique insights on how to build collaborative relationships between communities and brands to raise funds for your organization or cause. Both pieces show how the tools and techniques of social media networks can be used to successfully build and connect to your community of donors.

In these articles we learn that Twitter and Facebook are powerful agents in helping to reach-out to constituents, however, as both articles - Fan Base Fundraising and Community Fundraising in Media Arts - strongly suggest: it is not just how you contact your community it is also who makes the connection.

Scott Kirsner, author of Fans, Friends and Followers, in his November interview on MediaRights summed up the central idea behind fundraising in the new media age when he said “…you have to give a lot of thought to who your audience is, how you connect with them and how you get them to engage in what you’re doing.” Or simply stated by our own Angela Tucker, “Know your audience.”

The rise in popularity of social media makes it a bit easier to follow the suggestions of Angela and Mr. Kirsner; “It’s about going where the audience is rather than forcing the audience to come to you,” says Scott Kirsner, but with the viewing public consuming information on multiple media platforms and increasingly being subjected to information overload and issue fatigue the wisdom of crowds and Mr. Kirsner can be a creative challenge to execute with success.

Fortunately, Lina Srivastava - in her Upstream articles Transmedia Activism: Telling Your Story Across Media Platforms to Create Effective Social Change and Building Cultural Engagement for Change through Media and Narrative – tackles these unique issues facing the social media maker/activist/educator.

Further exploring this idea - that people are now beginning to crave filters, due to the result of over exposure - is Austra Zubkovs in her popular article about 20-somethings and media consumption, entitled Breaking Snooze: My Generation’s Declining Interest in Mainstream Television News.

Guest blog posts on EngineFeed, our blog are one of the several new items offered on MediaRights in 2009. Our robust online community of bloggers spans the media making/activist network to capture the best ideas and voices from a diverse grouping of thought leaders. If you haven’t already read, might I suggest the following posts as a sample of what we’ve published thus far:

Other new items for 2009 include 90-Second Cinema and Three Qs and the Truth. The introduction of video content on MediaRights is something that we are very proud to bring to you. Both series are designed to further strengthen our value as a trusted source for media that matters.

90-Second Cinema - designed for you to watch, comment-on and forward to your peers - is a monthly selection of a video clip highlighting the art in social-issue media. Please take a look and comment on the debut selection, H2-Worker.

Green issues - led behind the media and global activist build up towards the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) this December - were central to our social-political coverage in 2009. COP-15 Begins Today! and Short Film, Big Issues were two blog posts framing social-media’s influence on this conference.

A high percentage of the new films submitted to our database were also about the environment. A Sea Change, Crude Impact and The Greenhorns are three worth checking out.

We also published interviews on the Best Practices for Sustainable Filmmaking and the environmentalist’s perspective through film (Filmmakers Addressing COP-15: An Interview with Barbara Ettinger). The feature article A Recipe for Change: Documentaries on Food discusses how documentary films have played a significant role in promoting the idea that what we eat affects our health and the health of our planet.

Filmmakers were attracted to a triad of articles offering insight to the film festival curatorial and a judging process. A Conversation with Sally Berger, Organizer of MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight, 2009, Angela Tucker’s Inside the Mind of a Jury Member (Silverdocs 2009) and Jolene Pinder’s Film Festival Secrets: An Interview with Chris Holland proved that documentaries and the festivals screening them are more popular than ever.

“There are more documentarians making films and we are experiencing a renaissance of the non-fiction form,” says Ms. Berger. This renaissance is fueled, not only, by the recent explosion of short-form docs and digital technology’s offering of less expensive, production/editing methods but also to the promotion of more diverse and independent voices, a variety of online and self distribution methods, the use of novel formats to create your documentary, as explored in What is Machinima? and the acceptance of new ideas concerning what can be a documentary.

MediaRights is happy to track and illuminate these trends - connecting film, technology and community - for the independent media maker of consequence. We hope this information serves you well and that the world is made better by the art that you are able to create with it. Happy holidays!

This article is available for noncommercial use under a Creative Commons license. It was originally published on MediaRights.org, a project of Arts Engine, Inc. This notice must accompany the article at all times.

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