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A media evaluation tool developed by ITVS gives producers new insights on issues that audiences want to talk about.
Current (https://current.org/tag/itvs/)
A media evaluation tool developed by ITVS gives producers new insights on issues that audiences want to talk about.
A new report from the Center for Media & Social Impact reveals passions and pains of the creative community’s relationship with public TV.
ITVS is being recognized for transforming the media landscape and supporting timeless work.
The Independent Television Service has hired Noland Walker, former executive editor of the Association of Independents in Radio’s Localore project, as senior content director.
Kori Cioca said the film’s distributor gave her emotional support after she was raped while serving in the U.S. Coast Guard.
Baroch joined the organization in 2005 and was part of the engagement crew that launched the Community Cinema program.
Women and Girls Lead, a public media–based outreach and empowerment program, has evolved into a broader international effort, seeking to drive positive societal change in Kenya, India, Bangladesh, Jordan and Peru. The public-private initiative grew out of the national documentary-based campaign created in 2011 by the Independent Television Service with funding from CPB. It is designed to build engagement around issues such as women’s leadership, violence prevention and economic empowerment. Films presented through the initiative include the five-part Women, War & Peace; The Interrupters, about a Chicago woman working to defuse gang violence in her community; and Strong!, profiling a champion woman weightlifter. More than 50 films have been distributed through the initiative so far, according to ITVS, and they have attracted an audience of more than 42 million through broadcast and online distribution.
This article has been updated and reposted with additional information. Women and Girls Lead Global, a public media–based international outreach program, is helping drive positive change in five countries, participants said last week during panel discussions in Washington, D.C.
The public-private initiative grew out of the national Women and Girls Lead, a 2011 documentary-based campaign created by the Independent Television Service and backed by CPB. Partnering with ITVS in the international effort, which launched last summer, are USAID (the United States Agency for International Development), the Ford Foundation and the humanitarian organization CARE. The March 13 event, “Media as Multiplier: Using Documentary Film to Boost Global Development,” provided a forum for the international development community to discuss the value of using media as a development tool, Kimberley Sevcik, ITVS director of international engagement, told Current. Speakers at the Meridian International Center included New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, whose book Half the Sky inspired a four-hour PBS film; Rajiv Shah, who leads USAID; David Ray, head of policy and advocacy for CARE; Judy Tam, e.v.p. of ITVS; and ITVS country engagement coordinators from Bangladesh, Peru, India and Kenya.
The grant will fund a film focusing mainly on the oil boom’s effects on Native tribes.
After plumbing the global repercussions of America’s war against terrorism, documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras helped expose how that war has stripped away the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Citizen Koch, a documentary about the influence of money in politics, closed its 30-day Kickstarter campaign with more than double its initial fundraising goal.
Citizen Koch, a documentary about the growing influence of money in politics that lost a pot of planned public TV funding in December, has taken in more than $100,000 on Kickstarter in less than a week.
Public TV was less visible at this year’s American Film Institute documentary festival. Yet several of the 10 films that had received financial support from public TV grant-makers or broadcast commitments from PBS stood out among the 53 documentaries in the lineup. One even took the top prize.
The mass shootings last year in Colorado, Wisconsin and Connecticut reawakened Americans to recurring tragedies of gun violence and rekindled a national debate about gun control — one that public radio and television have chronicled and analyzed through ongoing programs and the package of special broadcasts that aired on PBS last month.
After a season of bad press following PBS’s much-maligned 2012 decision to move its flagship independent documentary program POV from Tuesday nights to Thursdays, the show will move to Mondays for its 26th season, which premieres June 24. POV announced the lineup for its new season today. The program is also building off another recent round of good news: a $1 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation on Feb. 28. Its premiere episode will be Homegoings, a documentary about Harlem undertakers that was selected as part of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 2013 Documentary Fortnight. The lineup, with 15 national broadcast premieres and two encore presentations, will also include the Oscar-nominated Palestinian film 5 Broken Cameras on Aug.
During a conference at the U.S. Institute of Peace Feb. 28, the makers of human rights documentaries discussed the techniques and challenges of using modern technology to gain a following for a cause.
Wendy Levy, the director of arts consultancy group New Arts AXIS, called for documentary filmmakers to embrace big data tools as a permanent part of their storytelling process during the keynote address at the Media That Matters Conference, held Feb. 15 in Washington, D.C.
As a Masterpiece production competing against other miniseries, movies and specials, Great Expectations received Emmys for outstanding achievement in costume design (Annie Symons, Yvonne Duckett), art direction (David Roger, Paul Ghirardani, Jo Kornstein), main title design (Nic Benns, Rodi Kaya, Tom Browich) and cinematography (Florian Hoffmeister). In addition, the Masterpiece production Page Eight won an Emmy for original main title theme music (Paul Englishby). Other PBS winners included the Independent Lens production Have You Heard From Johannesburg, a seven-part series about the global anti-apartheid movement that received a juried award for exceptional merit in documentary filmmaking. Cited were Connie Field, producer; Lois Vossen, series senior producer; and Sally Jo Fifer, executive producer. Geoffrey Ward received the Emmy for nonfiction writing for scripting Ken Burns’s Prohibition: A Nation of Hypocrites.
Producers of the documentary As Goes Janesville found themselves, quite by accident, in the midst of three national news stories during filming.
An infusion of CPB funding is allowing the Independent Television Service to add more features to OVEE, the online engagement tool that ITVS calls “the world’s first fully functional social screening platform.”