CORRECTION: Sorry! We listed the incorrect location for our upcoming Doc U event. Please find the correction below. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.

From the Director:

As you head into the holidays, we hope that you take a minute to register for our Media That Matters conference, Feb. 10-11. As always, space gets tight at the last minute, and we want to see all our friends there! It was great seeing old friends and meeting new ones at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival at Amsterdam) --please check out my film pics and other IDFA news.We’ve also got great new resources on public media in the Public Media Showcase and about filmmaker practices in the Pull Focus series. Also, we’re launching two new fair use works before February: a report in December on the problems faced by research librarians who try to employ fair use, and in January a new code of best practices in fair use--this time for poets.

See you soon!

Pat Aufderheide

Future of Public Media

Public Media 2.0 MediaShift Series: Public Media Goes Digital
Wondering how public media makers and reporters are adapting to the ever-evolving digital age? Check out the week-long Public Media 2.0 series on the PBS Mediashift site. Beginning November 18, the Center sponsored a set of articles, videos and news reports, curated by the Center's Future of Public Media Project Director Jessica Clark. More...

Lessons on Engagement from Public Media Camp
In late November, the Center hosted the second national Public Media Camp with PBS, NPR and iStrategy Labs. There, Associate Research Director Katie Donnelly and researcher Christopher Ali presented the Center’s latest research about public media news experiments. Read on for attendees’ responses. More...


Center’s Research on Public Media and News
Have you missed some of our recent analyses of public media news experiments? For your reference, we’ve gathered them all in a post on the Public Media 2.0 Showcase. Discover how few PBS stations are offering daily newscasts, how new projects like WHYY’s NewsWorks are working to engage publics, and more.

Revamped IMA May Help Transition to Public Media 2.0
A webinar hosted by the Integrated Media Association (iMA) on November 3 unveiled plans for the organization to act as a connection point for the public media sector. Under new leadership, the organization aims to push the boundaries of innovation on all viable platforms and create a collaborative community—goals that might help public broadcasters to transition to a more participatory, public media 2.0 mode. More...

Momentum Builds for Reforming Public Media Policy
Calls to rethink the policies that undergird public media are on the rise, matched by an increase in the pace of innovation by traditional public broadcasters. Learn more about related events, articles and  recent FCC submissions from the Center’s researchers. More...

Fair Use and European Exceptions at IDFA 2010
The European Documentary Network, which has its annual meeting at the International Documentary Festival at Amsterdam, featured a workshop cosponsored by the Federation of European Film Directors (known by its French acronym, FERA) on the implications of the U.S. fair use movement for Europeans. More...

European Filmmakers and Fair Use
David Van Taylor, a leading American documentarian, recently carried the news of the U.S. fair use movement to Europe, at the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival. We share his report with you in this blog entry: “I was invited to speak about Fair Use and its overseas potential at the Nordisk Panorama Film Festival. A small collection of lawyers, scholars, and documakers have been looking into the possibilities for fair use — or the "right to quote" as it's known over there” More...

Research Librarians and Fair Use
The Center has been working with the Association of Research Libraries and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property in American University’s Washington College of Law to investigate the problems that research librarians have in employing fair use. How much material can professors post to their electronic course platforms? How many articles from the same journal can be requested from Inter-Library Loan? When is it OK to screen some or all of a video digitally? Librarians confront these and other questions in the report, which has an expected release of December 15, 2010.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry
Working in conjunction with the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute of the Poetry Foundation and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property in American University’s Washington College of Law, the Center will issue another code of best practices in fair use in January 2011. The code was developed by poets across the country, who distilled their interpretation of fair use regarding the use of poetry in classes, in public performances, in epigrams, and more.

Fair Use Question of the Month
In this Fair Use Question of the Month, a woman embarking on a scholarly research project in communication writes in to ask about whether or not screening an episode of a popular television show to a focus group is covered under Fair Use. More...

Critical Common’s Fair Use Example: The Economics of Seinfeld
The academic website Critical Commons showcases the importance of fair use for media studies scholars. This month’s example looks at Linda Ghent, Chair of the Department of Economics at Eastern Illinois University, who for the past three years has been working with her colleagues Alan Grant and George Lesica to use clips from popular culture to illustrate theories of economics on their website, The Economics of Seinfeld. Now, Ghent's team has begun exercising its fair use rights by posting dozens of relevant clips on Critical Commons, making the media more readily accessible to those wanting to teach economics via popular culture and illustrating abstract concepts such as "opportunity cost" and "depreciation of capital" through everyday social situations.