Hi there, I’d like to introduce myself, as I’m a new member of this newly formed social media network – Channel 19. What attracted me first and foremost about this online platform is that everything that is showcased and issues we focus on are about communities in rural and urban India who make their own media.
As a filmmaker and visual arts experimenter, I’m excited about working as the online manager for Channel 19 because I will be transforming the media that communities have made into media that global communities, who have access to the internet, can watch, share and take action upon. This literally means taking 30 minutes of un-subtitled DV footage with lots of man on the street interviews, reporter style soundbites and documentary footage amongst other shots, and cutting this down into 5-10 minutes worth of material which will tell the story and yet still be true to the content, as this is genuinely media produced from the bottom up.
Firstly, let me share with you what Channel 19 was created. The name, which we need to change soon, is based after Article 19 of UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It’s a project of Video Volunteers and the India-based partner NGO, Drishti Media Arts, as these NGOs have set up “community video units” with several India based NGOs and continue to create more CVUs in India and in Brazil. The concept of a CVU is modeled around a production house that creates media for a broadcaster, which in this case, is the NGO. The online space we’ve created on Channel 19 can be viewed as a network that gathers all these shows on various issues and distributes them out to the global audiences, such as yourself.
This is somewhat the stumbling block I now face as the editor for the online content – how to make this media engaging and relevant when there is so much media out there online and from that pile, there is so much to weed through. I have about 30 films from the various six CVUs we have set up across India, and these magazine-style videos have been shown across various villages and slums across the country. When I remind myself of the impact some of these films have made – whether its getting 700 families to demand land rights, or whether its getting people to push the local government to provide them their basic amenities, it hits that if the number of views could multiply by hundreds, imagine what could happen. And this is why I believe that there is a place for this media online – and if anything, you should also have the right to weed through online media and find a story that is genuine and directly delivered from the people in poor communities here to you – wherever you may be.
So please do suggest blogs, channels, interactive platforms to share our content!
- Ruchika

When we and our NGO partners initiate community members–young men and women from the slums and villages of India–into their new full-time jobs as ‘Community Video Producers,’ we often start the training sessions by drawing a triangle on the board. ‘This pyramid,’ the Video Trainer says, ‘represents the global media.’ The Producers then divide up the triangle into different layers–the nightly news programs at the top. Then, going down, CNN. Then India’s Murdoch-owned English language stations. Then India’s regional language private news stations, then India’s national televsion, ‘Doordarshan,’ etc. etc. At each layer, a slightly wider percentage of the global population is represented by that particular media outlet. But never does it appear that more than the top 20% of the global population (the middle class and urban part of the world) find their own representatives in the media hierarchy. Then we draw a line near the bottom of the triangle, to illustrate the ‘bottom of the pyramid,’ which is the 1/3rd of the world living on less than $2 a day. This is where the Community Producers are from.

‘We want you to become the CNN for the Base of the Pyramid,’ is what we say.

They start to share stories about how their own local papers only cover road accidents and photo ops of politicians. They come up with their own questions that the local media should answer but fails to (who is responsible for the lack of electricity in their area? Have the politicians fulfilled their election promises from last year?) They get out rulers and measure the column width given to the different ‘beats’–how much space does health coverage get, compared to celebrity coverage. As training progresses, they will start each day by analyzing today’s paper. In this way, the Community Video Producers begin their transformation into media activists.

The Community Producers, at the moment, produce exclusively for a local audience–100-400 people a night who gather in the center of the village to watch the film and discuss what they will do about the issue. But their political perspective–on the politics and economics of the global media–is national. And they just had a small victory.

They are going to be producing for CNN IBN, one of the three leading English language 24 hour news stations in India.

For the next three Saturdays, at 9pm, the Community Producers will have a short segment in a half-hour show called ‘Citizens Journalist.’ The first story will be a general report on our work. The next two stories will be on garbage and sexual harrassment. Each CNN IBN segment that we do will revisit an issue the Community Video Unit has already made a film about, and will give another demand to the authorities to do something about the problem.

I learned a few things, both about our model of community video, and about the mainstream media, in working out this deal:

Sustainability: CNN IBN is going to pay us Rs. 5,000 for each story ($125). If we can work very efficiently, this can be a break even project for the Community Video Unit (’CVU.’) That’s a first goal — to be efficient and break even on new projects they undertake. We talk about a ‘media industry at the base of the pyramid’ as our big goal. Obviously it needs to be sustainable. but the question is how? I guess not making a loss is a first step, but we need help getting to the next level. How do the CVUs make a profit, so they can expand their number of Producers, raise salaries, get new equipment, serve more people?
A ‘Social Media Network’ for the base of the pyramid: we designed our model of Community Video with the idea of reaching scale. We aim to partner with 30 NGOs in five years, to train more than 200 Producers, and thereby create a media-producing ‘Network’ that is at least as large (in terms of number of full-time videojournalists employed) as a single Indian national news Network. Our ‘Network’ of NGOs and Community Producers is tentatively called ‘Channel 19′. We were thrilled that CNN IBN has agreed to describe the Producers as part of the Channel 19 Network, and also that our NGO partners have agreed to this experiment in collective identity. For us, this is a chance to test out a hypothesis we have: the TV media has hardly any stories about the poor, that show the situation from their point of view. But yet, there is a lot of social documentary material and social issue content out there. Maybe the solution is this: producers of pro-poor media content need to be networked together, to increase their visibility and lobbying power. CNN IBN is giving us a chance to test out that idea
The poor as Producers as content, not just victimized subjects: over the past two years, we’ve approached maybe a dozen TV stations asking for collaboration. All of them would say, ‘we’d love to do a story ON the Community Producers, but we can’t air a story BY them. What quality will the story have? What does our audience care about a bunch of villagers? Who wants to hear more stories about poverty and human rights problems?’ CNN IBN was the first one to agree that the Producers could MAKE the program. I think this may be one of the first times (in India at least) where the poor have been paid to produce for a leading television station.

CNN IBN is giving us our first step in becoming the “CNN of the base of the pyramid.”

This blog, in particular, would be a great place to address the question of, ‘the poor as producers and not just subjects of the news.” For me and my colleagues, WHO produces the news, is as important as what is being said. So, as long as leaders in the field of democratizing the media remain exclusively English-speaking, Western (or Westernized), middle class and urban, how much change can we really make?

- Jessica

Hi there.. my name is Ruchika and I’ve taken on a challenging new position as the online manager for Video Volunteers’/Drishti Medias’ social media network online called Channel 19.

Community Producer Neeru was featured on October 21st on Nickelodeon, in a special about Dalit kids. Read about it here. http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=ind_focus.story&STORY=/www/story/10-10-2007/0004679534&EDATE=WED+Oct+10+2007,+01:30+PM Neeru works . Neeru, shown here filling out a feedback form at a screening of a community video unit, is one of the all-Dalit community Producers working at Navsarjan’s CVU.

Stalin and I returned to India from six weeks in the States four days ago, to a great scene in Drishti’s office—about a dozen young college students singing one after the other folk songs from India and the West.  They were auditioning for a place in a Peace Film Festival that VV’s partner Drishti puts on.  Drishti’s been running a Peace Film Festival in Ahmedabad for two years now, the first film festival ever in the entire state of Gujarat with its 60 million people.  You can read more about it here: http://www.drishtimedia.org/FilmFestNote.htmThey show films from around the world on the subject of peace, an important theme in Gujarat which witnessed terrible ‘communal’ (ie, religiously-based) riots in 2002.  The great thing about this festival is that it is entirely run by youth volunteers, who are part of Drishti’s Nazariya program.  Nazariya runs film clubs in 15 colleges in Ahmedabad, which are really a vehicle to get the polarized youth of the city volunteering, and thinking about peace and identity and who they want to be when they grow up.  These young volunteers run the whole festival themselves, and even select the films—I’m excited to see what kinds of films these young people select–its safe to say don’t know a whole lot about film festival curating!  But that will make it much more interesting and authentically from the perspective of the youth.  Filmmakers interested in submitting films can apply here:  http://www.drishtimedia.org/FilmFestForm.html