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"People of Berlin - and people of the world - the scale of our challenge is great. The road ahead will be long. But I come before you to say that we are heirs to a struggle for freedom. We are a people of improbable hope. With an eye toward the future, with resolve in our hearts, let us remember this history, and answer our destiny, and remake the world once again."
Peter Broderick, author of "The Revolution in Digital Movie Production and Distribution" in Chapter 8 of BE THE MEDIA, was featured in the June 2008 issue of BusinessWeek.
Broderick is President of Paradigm Consulting, which provides consulting services to filmmakers and media companies.
He was also the founder and President of New Wave Films, which helped launch the careers of exceptional filmmakers.
Recently,Broderick has given a presentation at the Cannes Film Festival on 'cutting edge distribution" and a keynote in Hungary on the future of distribution.
The article, titled "Indie Filmmakers Hit Their Target," was written by John Tozzi and discusses the growing number of independent filmmakers choosing to distribute to their target audiences rather than taking the traditional route through distributors. In order to do this, many turn to the Internet.
According to Broderick, "Filmmakers need to be as creative about their distribution as they are about their production." This means they have to stray from the norm and come up with innovation tactics. The producers of King Korn, compiled a list of food activists and organic farmers while they were filming. Once the film was complete, they had a roster of people who would genuinely be interested in their film that examines the role of corn in the U.S. The producers, Curt Ellis and Ian Cheney are clients of Broderick's. They also booked their film for single-night screenings and sold DVDs on location.
The people who created the film are the ones who best know who would be interested in watching it. For that reason, it makes sense for the filmmaker to distribute his own film. According to Ellis, "I think we felt in some way that we were better able to communicate with our core audience than a distributor who's used to dealing with mass audiences."
Distributing your film on your own has a huge potential for profit. If a film sells in stores for $25 after paying royalties to the distributor, the filmmaker would make about $2.50 per DVD. Selling this same DVD through his Web site, the filmmaker would net around $20 a sale. "There are a number of filmmakers who made more than $1 million selling one DVD from one Web site," Broderick said.
Web sites also offer another benefit. E-mail addresses can be collected from those who purchase the DVDs, giving the filmmaker an entire contact list of people who may be interested in future related films or products. Thus, Broderick asserts that an e-mail address as valuable as a sale itself.
In Chapter 8 of BE THE MEDIA, Broderick teaches YOU how to produce and distribute your ultra-low budget digital film.
Interested in learning more?
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Keith Knight's art has been featured in several worldwide publications including Salon.com, ESPN the Magazine, L.A. Weekly, MAD Magazine, and the Funny Times.
Keith won the Glyph award for the third year straight for Best Comic Strip.
Keith has been nominated for the 2008 Harvey Award for Best Syndicated Comic Strip, an award he won last year. You can help him win this year by downloading and filling out a ballot here.
Keith's new strip, The Knight Life, recently gained national syndication. Use the contact information below in order to help Keith get The Knight Life into the following papers:
To check out Keith Knight's comics go to kchronicles.com 
You can catch up with Keith personally at this years San Diego Comic Con on Thursday July 24 at 4:30 pm. This event includes major comics publisher presentations, autographs, and advanced premiering of network shows. Register now to experience this event!
To learn how you can syndicate and distribute your cartoon read chapter 10 when you
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An article in The New York Times entitled "The Web Time Forgot" quoted Kevin Kelly, founding executive editor and senior maverick of Wired magazine.
Kelly is also author of the very viral piece "One Thousand True Fans," which serves as the Foreword to BE THE MEDIA.
The Times article, written by Alex Wright, discusses Paul Otlet, the Belgian man who sketched plans for his "réseau," or "network," in the 1930s.
Otlet's papers layed out a global network of computers that would enable people to peruse millions of related documents, images, audio and video files.
Users would even be able to send each other messages, share files, and congregate in online social networks. The system anticipated the hyperlinks of today's Web.
According to Kelly:
"This was a Steampunk version of hypertext," and "The hyperlink is one of the most underappreciated inventions of the last century. It will go down with radio in the pantheon of great inventions."
The article delves deeper into the details of Otlet's work and how it foreshadowed many of the features of today's Web.
Check out Kevin Kelly's Foreword
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The Alliance for Community Media Conference will take place from July 9 through July 12 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington DC. The Pre-Conference workshops will be held on July 9.
The Alliance for Community Media is a nonprofit national membership organization that is committed to assuring public access to electronic media.
The Conference Track Schedule includes many subjects that are included as chapters in BE THE MEDIA:
To register and learn more about The Alliance for Community Media Conference download their brochure or visit the website.
We will be giving away free galleys of BE THE MEDIA to select attendees of this conference. Chapter 17 teaches you how to create a Public Access TV Show. Chapter 18 teaches you how to create a Community Media Center, and is based on how community media advocates from Media Action Marin (Marin County, California) lobbied Comcast during their cable franchise renewal and won $2.5 million to run their own Public, Education and Government channels.
For more information on this, see the blog entry from August 14, 2006.
Thanks to interim ACM Executive Director Deborah Vinsel for this opportunity. And once again thanks to David Rubinson for underwriting the cost of the books and getting them into the hands of people who can use them. David was the founder of the Automatt Recording Studio in the 1970s and produced an astounding list of musicians, including Herbie Hancock, the Pointer Sisters, Santana, Janis Joplin, Moby Grape, Jefferson Airplane, and Taj Mahal. He was also the music producer for the film Apocalypse Now (1979).
To learn how to create a Community Media Center or a Public Access TV Show, see chapters 17 and 18
in your copy of BE THE MEDIA:
Everyone - regardless of income or status - should enjoy the benefits of a fast, affordable, and open Internet. High speed Internet access should be treated as a public utility, like the provision of gas and electricity.
InternetforEveryone.org, an initiative announced at the Personal democracy Forum, calls on Congress to act in the public interest by enacting a national broadband plan built on the following principles:
Access
Every home, business and civic institution in America must have access to a high-speed, world-class communications infrastructure.
Choice
Every consumer must enjoy real competition in lawful online content as well as among high-speed Internet providers to achieve lower prices and higher speeds.
Openness
Every Internet user should have the right to freedom of speech and commerce online in an open market without gatekeepers or discrimination.
Innovation
The Internet should continue to create good jobs, foster entrepreneurship, spread new ideas and serve as a leading engine of economic growth."
BE THE MEDIA attended the press briefing where the InternetforEveryone initiative was announced. Below are some photos:
Participants in InternetforEveryone, pictured from left to right:
Van Jones: Founder and President, GreenForAll.org
Larry Lessig: Founder, Creative Commons
Vint Cerf: Chief Internet Evangelist, Google
Tim Wu: Professor, Columbia Law School
Michael Winship: President, Writers Guild of America
Jonathan Adelstein: FCC Commissioner
Robin Chase: Meadow Networks; Zipcar
Brad Burnham: Union Square Ventures
Josh Silver: Executive Director, FreePress.net
Below is a video from the press briefing with comments from the supporters.
Note especially Vint Cerf's segment at 14:50, and Larry Lessig's segment following Vint.
There will be a series of local broadband hearings to encourage the public to participate in helping to create a national broadband plan. To find the next local hearing, contact them by email.
Join now to help and take part in InternetforEveryone.org.
More photos from the event:
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| Tim Wu and David Mathison | David Mathison and Vint Cerf |
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| Lawrence Lessig and David Mathison | David Mathison and Jonathan Adelstein |
BE THE MEDIA, Media Action Marin, and Media-Alliance have been advocating Community Internet and Digital Inclusion since 2007. They even created a two-part television program on the topic.
Part One was titled "Internet Access as a Public Utility" (see December 14, 2007).
Moderated by David Mathison, panelists included:
Part Two was taped at Media-Alliance's Digital Inclusion Summit. The session was titled "Creating Platforms for Success," and focused on various Community Internet solutions in use throughout the US and abroad (see February 15, 2008).
Moderated by David Mathison, panelists included:
To learn more about Community Internet
See chapter 19 of BE THE MEDIA:
Keith Goetzman is a senior editor for Utne Reader and is a veteran journalist who has worked for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, the Rake, the Twin Cities Reader, and many other publications.
Keith blogged a panel at the National Conference on Media Reform featuring author David Sirota (excerpt below). Keith's entire post is at Utne here.
"Sirota, author of The Uprising,
added a fresh twist to the discussion. Many of us, he noted, see the
media as a monolithic force, and we await the news sent down from
"Media Mount Olympus." But that passive role is exactly what has
strengthened
the role of the "paternalistic" media.
We have the chance to be our own media," he says, and we ought to seize it. For another audience, this might have sounded like a simplistic bromide. But for this crowd, made up largely of indie media activists and advocates, it sounded plausible, and when they filed out of the room, you suspected they might just go out and do it."
Do YOU want to Be The Media?
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The Author's Guild has been the nation's leading advocate for writer's interests in effective copyright protection, fair contracts and free expression since its founding in 1912. The organization currently has over eight thousand members.
Alison Owings included BE THE MEDIA in the Feature Article on The Author's Guild's website.
Alison Owings has written for The Author's Guild for many years and
she is also the author of Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich and Hey, Waitress!: The USA from the Other Side of the Tray.
In the featured article titled, "Bloggi Blenni Blicci Losing One's Virtual Virginity", Owings tells of her adventure when entering the blogging world. She credited her knowledge of blogging to the book that she is editing, BE THE MEDIA, and its informational content on creating different types of media, blogs included.
The article includes her view on the feedback that she received from her blog, "My Hillary Problem", on The Huffington Post. Owings was amazed to find that creating a blog opened her to a whole new world where she could voice her opinion and receive comments instantly.
Want to learn more about blogging?
See chapter 1 of BE THE MEDIA:
Editor's Note: We liked this article so much that we wanted to share it with you on our BE THE MEDIA site.
This article by Robert C. Koehler of was originally published by Commonwonders.com. Robert is an award-winning, Chicago -based journalist, is an editor at Tribune Media Services and nationally syndicated writer:
BE THE MEDIA
The nation is fed up with military-industrial patriotism
By Robert C Koehler
Tribune Media Services
June 12, 2008
"Camera, lights, mike-in-the-face. Hey Bill Moyers, what are you doing at a left-wing, partisan media conference?
That was how Fox News producer Porter Barry tried to ambush television’s most venerable voice of sanity this past weekend, after Moyers spoke eloquently — “Journalism can only exist in a vibrant, democratic culture” — at the fourth annual National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis.
But Moyers would have none of it. By standing his ground, reframing the “gotcha” idiocy of the encounter (a bully-boy, “say yes or we’ll crucify you” summons to appear on Bill O’Reilly’s show) and turning it into a dialogue for which Barry was unprepared, he managed to shove the ambush oh so figuratively back down Barry’s throat. What goes around comes around, guys. As the producer retreated, he himself was filmed and peppered with questions by a reporter for the American News Project.
Be the media! This was a real-time demo of the core imperative of the four-day conference: that it’s up to us to turn things around. The flailing and desperate corporate media have prostrated themselves ever more irredeemably before the altar of organized money and, in their compromised allegiance, purvey not actual “news” any longer but a simplistic military-industrial patriotism to a country sick of war and hungry for truth. They’re not going to change; they’re just going to keep staggering, so it seems, toward total irrelevance.
The serendipitous poke in the eye to Fox News notwithstanding, the message of the conference was not part of the zero-sum paradigm of left vs. right and Whose Ideology Is Better? What’s at stake — i.e., human survival — is far bigger than that.
And perhaps no presentation at the conference demonstrated this with more urgency than the screening of “Body of War,” a documentary by Ellen Spiro and Phil Donahue that, in its unblinking honesty, scrapes the platitudes away from “the most sanitized war ever,” as Donahue put it.
Allard, yea. Allen, yea. Baucus, yea . . .
The film, which portrays the day-to-day struggle of Iraq war vet Thomas Young, who became paralyzed from the chest down after he took a bullet above the collarbone in Sadr City in 2004, begins filling in what I call the hole, or responsibility void, at the center of the Iraq war and every war.
It begins with the slow intonation of the Oct. 11, 2002 vote that authorized the use of military force against Iraq: Bayh, yea. Bennett, yea. Biden, yea. This vote, indeed, serves as the backdrop, the canvas, on which the film unfolds. We cut away from the names and suddenly here’s Thomas Young in his wheelchair, sitting at his computer, typing a letter to a paraplegic Q&A Web site. He’s getting married. He wants to know how to avoid having an accidental bowel movement when he’s in his tux.
Brownback, yea. Bunning, yea. Burns, yea.
“The vet’s choice,” says Young, who has become an anti-war activist, “is to tell the truth and be called a traitor or internalize and self-destruct.”
The thought could have served as a catchphrase for the whole conference, sponsored by the organization Free Press (freepress.net), which 3,500 people attended this year. What I felt not only during but between the breakout sessions was an intense concentration of . . . intelligent passion, you might say — creative determination not to self-destruct and not to let this country self-destruct. This may be what a movement feels like, or what the future feels like.
“Every day that Cheney and Bush do not bomb Iran . . . is because of that greater force — all of us working together,” said Amy Goodman of Democracy Now.
While there was plenty of urgent anger at the failings of the corporate media, and plenty of incisive analysis of the government-friendly propaganda they push and call news, what I felt was not despair but an extraordinary sense of purpose. Upheaval is in the air. Maybe it’s partly because of what has happened this year in the Democratic primaries.
On Saturday, as the conference was in full flower, Hillary Clinton conceded to Barack Obama. “What happened today is that someone paid a price at last for supporting the Iraq war,” said author Naomi Klein.
Carper, yea. Cleland, yea. Clinton, yea. . . . Lott, yea. Lugar, yea. McCain, yea.
The accountability is just beginning. But, as Klein noted, weapons companies have given more money to Democrats than Republicans this year. The old system, even with a President Obama at the helm, is geared to perpetuate inequality and generate conflict. A new media is forming, on the Internet and in our hearts, that will be beholden not to the interests of oil and war but to a just, sustainable future."
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