3 Years and Counting
A few years ago we began a small project here at KCET New Media. Let me walk you through it.
Without much in the way of resources - but with lots of friends and partners willing to help us and share their work and vision - we launched Web Stories. Taglined "Cultural Journalism and the Southland," Web Stories explores the ways in which art and culture intersect with (or in) the daily life of Southern Californians.
So far we've produced 17 episodes, from the rise ofDJ culture and backyard parties on the east side of Los Angeles, to the Iraqi archives of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Rick Loomis, to the exploits of environmental art collective Fallen Fruit, who map fruit trees on public property throughout the city.
In the summer of '06 we expanded Web Stories' purview with the introduction of an online documentary series called Departures. The basic idea was to map L.A. one block at a time, neighborhood by neighborhood.
The main navigation - and central conceit - of the feature would be a panorama inspired by the muralist tradition and laced with multimedia hotspots linking to the people who live and work on a particular street. Through audio clips, video portraits and photography, users would experience the hood subjectively, as if they where walking down the street. The idea was that Departures would open a window onto the mundane and ludic realities of the people and places of Los Angeles.
We weren't sure what to expect when we launched the first installment - Departures: Boyle Heights - in September 2006. Departures was clearly an online experiment from a public television station looking to reach out to and report on its community in a completely new and different way. A few months later, though, I was invited by Julie Lazar and Sasha Anawalt to give a talk about the project to the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellows. I decided I would take the fellows down 1st Street in Boyle Heights - featured in that first Departures- and introduce them to the people that live and work on the main drag. After talking to some folks at Homeboys Industries and visiting Marcelino Avila at the 1st Street Boxing Gym, we ended up at CASA 0101, a community theater space, where I gave a multimedia presentation about the project.
The interplay between the physical space as the fellows experienced it on our walk and its virtual representation seemed to strike everyone as natural, organic and fresh. So much so, that when fellow Carol Kino got back to New York she wrote a two-page spread about Departures in the Sunday New York Times. Thanks to Carol our little public new media experiment began to garner some attention and momentum. It had legs!
Soon after, we began to further develop Departures as a concept. We decided we wanted to add one other component to the production model: community participation in the creation of the content. After a conversation with Dan Burrier from the Ogilvy agency (which has helped brand KCET), Jackie Kain, KCET's Senior Vice President of New Media, managed to get Locke High School involved in the next installment of the series. At the time, Dan's wife Laurie Burrier helped fund the Genius Lab at Locke High, and the web of mutual relationships seemed good opportunity to pilot a new production model.
I met with Daphne Bradford, Apple's "Teacher of the Year" and director of the Genius Lab at Locke, to discuss how to get her students involved in the production. My friend and co-producer Bijan Rezvani, (now at WNET in NYC, alas) created an extensive instruction manual for the kids, with directions on Departures' format and templates for Daphne and her students to use. The result was Departures: Watts - a walk down Central Avenue in South Los Angeles through the eyes and minds of the youth that live in the area.
A few months later, I was invited by Steve Anderson and Mimi Ito to give a talk at 24-7 DIY media conference at USC. There I met professor and author Katie Mills, who proposed to work on a Departures feature with her students at Occidental College in Eagle Rock. We had received a grant from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department to produce a new installment of the series, so I handed her Bijan's production manual, talked with her students and, after a long, arduous semester, Departures: Eagle Rock recently went live.
The youth component and community production model of the last two Departures features caught the attention of the Adobe Foundation's Youth Voices, who asked us to submit a proposal for three new installments. We came up with three locations that would allow us to build new formal elements into the program such as direct uploads of user generated content, geo-tagging and mapping, and a broader educational track to facilitate the development and research of deeper, more contextualized content . The locations? The Los Angeles River, Venice and a "sister city installment looking at the San Gabriel Valley and Chengdu Province in China.
Which brings us up to the present. This not-so-brief walk through more than three years of work here at KCET New Media kicks off the latest wrinkle in Web Stories: a production blog. From now on I'll be carrying a pocket video camera with me everywhere I go in order to capture the nuances of creating public new media with and for the Southland's communities. We want to create transparency into our production process and allow you to see the development of each series - from germinating thought to a full blown feature. Much as we didn't know what to expect when we launched Departures: Boyle Heights, we're not sure what will happen here, but the goal remains the same: reach out to and report on our community in a completely new and different way.
