BAVC accepting National MediaMaker Fellowship applications, deadline Jan 10

Passed along from the fine folks at AIR. Happy Holidays!

2014 NATIONAL MEDIAMAKER FELLOWSHIP

CALL FOR ENTRIES: BAVC is now accepting projects for the 2014 National MediaMaker Fellowship. Early application deadline is Friday, January 10th. Late deadline is Friday, January 17th. Click here for more information and to apply:

https://bavc.org/mediamaker

The BAVC newsletter:
http://hosted.verticalresponse.com/571822/6d94939972/1467634703/ae0ca29962/

+++AIR is everywhere.+++
www.airmedia.org 

www.airmediaworks.org

audio editing gig by the Bay

Part-time, long-term audio editing gig for someone in the SF Bay Area. Details below. -Mia

++++++++++++++++

Job Posting for an Audio Editor in the S.F. Bay Area:
Climate One is looking for an audio editor who can put together our weekly audio series, “Climate One California Weekly.” This job requires very basic audio editing skills and some experience with file management. It should take about 5-6 hours/week. We are looking for someone based in the San Francisco Bay Area who can make a long-term commitment.
The Gig: 
— Pulling a single, mono audio file down from DropBox or High Tail.
— Shortening each taped conversation (running about 65 minutes) down to 59 minutes
— Adding a pre-produced Intro and Outro. (This is part of the 59 minutes) — Cleaning up volumes, fades, basic EQ
— Posting on iTunes, Content Depot and PRX, within 2-3 days of the live eventInterested?
Reply to Claire Schoen: cschoen@earthlink.net
And I will send you the full details.

CPB’s new RFP, deadline Feb 3

I have mixed feelings about sending you hard-working freelancers down this rabbit hole, but for those of you who are super motived, connected, and strong-willed, this is an amazing potential opportunity. Spread the word if you dare. Deadline Feb 3. -Mia
PS: The first part of the post comes from Sue Schardt, Executive Director of AIR. The second part is the actual RFP from the CPB.
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This new funding opportunity from CPB (below) is directed at stations, but has embedded opportunity for producers, especially if you are:

a) an indie producer with a good relationship with a local station, or
b) a station-based editor or reporter eager to create a new collaboration, or
c) either a station-based or indie with a strong relationship with an editor at NPR, PRI, or APM.

In addition to thinking about how you'd approach the topic areas the RFP is aimed at (detailed below) in some distinctive way, you'll want to also consider the ways potential stations or network program partners may want to break out of traditional coverage. Collaboration is a central opportunity for this, and we know that many AIRsters are strong, gifted collaborators.

Once you determine whether there is receptivity, and have the germ of a good idea or two, you'll need to investigate/take on board what the strategic goal is for the broadcast partner(s). How would you, for example, help build a collaboration that, from the inception, is designed to extend the work beyond their traditional broadcast? How would your idea expand and diversify the station's audience? What are the unique challenges in community that haven't been revealed? What do you see that is not apparent to others? These are just a few possible questions of many you should ask yourself. Your idea needs to be shaped/informed by the vision/goals of your prospective partners if you're to make an effective pitch. Don't forget the field research.

Take time, too, to a look at/refresh yourself with the Station Runway AIR created at the start of our Localore production. You'll find short, 3-5 min, mostly videos from more than 60 stations telling the story of their station culture, their community, and their vision for the future. This may be helpful in guiding you to potential partners, some of whom may be in your own backyard, and at least give you some inspiration to experience the breadth and diversity of the station network:

http://airmediaworks.org/submissions?sort_by=created&sort_order=DESC

AIR has had no role in shaping the RFP or this new call from CPB, and I can't guarantee the level of receptivity you may get. But it would sure be nice to have juice from some of us fueling this initiative. I've no doubt that AIRsters' participation, if played right, would only strengthen the outcome. Keep us posted on your progress here on the AIRdaily!

go go.

– ss

Sue Schardt, Executive Director
AIR
http://www.AIRmedia.org

++ AIR is everywhere ++

Dear Colleague:
 
I’m excited to inform you that CPB’s Diverse Perspectives grant program, first announced by Pat Harrison, President and CEO, at last month’s Super Regional Conference in Washington, D.C., is now open for applications.

 
The Diverse Perspectives: Enhancing the Diversity, Capacity and Quality of Local and National News grant program is part of CPB’s continued effort to support stations by promoting collaborative partnerships geared towards increasing capacity and production of high quality, locally-focused news programming.

 
CPB aims to fund work at news-oriented public radio stations to expand coverage of important issues heard locally, regionally, and nationally. Grants will be awarded on two-year terms to partnerships consisting of at least four stations aligned around original reporting of specific “beats” or “content verticals.” Possible topics may include: military veterans, education, health, transportation, technology, or coastal issues; however, applicants are free to propose topics of their own choosing.

 
In addition to building internal capacity among collaborating stations (more on that below), partnership groups will need to develop strong working relationships with national editors at NPR, PRI and APM. CPB intends for these connections to create opportunities for partnership groups to contribute content to the major national flagship programs (e.g., All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Marketplace, The World, Here and Now, The Takeaway).

 
The terms of the grant program are intended to promote enduring alliances that strengthen each partner’s ability to produce high quality reporting. Each partnership must hire a dedicated editor and commit at least one reporter per station to its chosen topic. This may include a new hire or re-assignment of an existing full or part-time staff member. Reporters are required to spend a minimum of 50 percent of their time creating content focused on the given topic. There are no restrictions regarding the geographic location of collaborating stations. Additionally, individual stations are free to participate in more than one partnership.

 
Partnership groups must demonstrate a significant financial commitment over the two-year grant period to be eligible for the program. CPB will provide up to 50 percent funding for both the reporter position(s) and the Editor position in Year One, followed by up to 25 percent funding for each position in Year Two.

 
For more about Diverse Perspectives: Enhancing the Diversity, Capacity and Quality of Local and National News please see the request for grant proposals on the Open Grants and RFPs page at CPB.org or contact Jeff Luchsinger at jluchsinger@cpb.org or 202-879-9703.

 
Sincerely,
 
Bruce Theriault
Senior Vice President, Radio

New dates for next Radio Boot Camp @UnionDocs in NYC

Don't miss this fantastic radio training session at UnionDocs, March 15 and 16. Details HERE and below.

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We're excited to announce the dates for our spring session of Boot Camp! This is a class for beginners, enthusiasts or print journalists – folks new to the world of Radio. Come learn the art and craft of producing radio stories from start to finish.

Feel free to share with your friends and anyone else who's oh so jealous of your awesome career. A great holiday gift for the pub radio lover in your life. Space is limited to 12 so sign on up!

RADIO BOOT CAMP, SPRING 2013

Saturday, March 15, 2014: 10am – 6pm
Sunday, March 16, 2014: 10am – 5pm
UnionDocs, 322 Union Ave, Brooklyn, NY, 11211
Tuition: Early registration is $285.

You can register or find more info here:
http://www.uniondocs.org/radio-boot-camp-march-2014/

Who is the smartest person you know?

Nominate the brilliant young people in your life, mainly grad students or recent graduates. Nomination form HERE and below.

Seeking nominees for paid technology fellowships.
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View it in your browser.

The search is on!

Who’s your best bet to build the next big thing? We’re looking for six young, innovative, social change-makers for the 2014 class of Media Ideation Fellows. If you know a technologist, organizer, or media-maker with big ideas for making the world a better place, spend three minutes right now and nominate them for the Media Ideation Fellowship. Fellows will receive a stipend and mentorship to bring their ideas to life.

www.mediaideation.org/nominate

All you have to do is enter the name and email address of a student, peer, or colleague who has brilliant ideas and potential to create social change. We’ll do the rest.
 

Who should I nominate?

Ideal candidates for the fellowship are driven, tech-savvy social change agents who thrive under self-direction and have a specific idea or project they’d like to pursue. We’re looking for the creators of tomorrow’s Upworthy.

Candidates should be currently enrolled graduate students, have recently received an advanced degree, or are in the first five years of their career. Candidates must be based in the U.S. and have U.S. citizenship.
 

Why nominate?

Sometimes, a would-be entrepreneur needs an extra push. Your nomination may remind a young woman that her community believes in her work–and be the extra bit of encouragement she needs to apply. It’s super easy–all you have to do is enter a name and email address.

We’ll follow up with all nominees, share your support, and give them early information on the program before applications open on September 11.
 

Help spread the word.

Do you know other people who might have great ideas for fellowship candidates? Help spread the word by passing this email along to your networks. You can also tweet about the Fellowships or share this link on Facebook. And finally, stay tuned. Applications for the Media Ideation Fellowships open on Monday, January 6, 2014.

Copyright © 2013 Media Ideation Fund (SM), All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you signed up at www.mediaideation.org.
Our mailing address is:

Media Ideation Fund (SM)

655 S Sunset St
Ste A

Longmont, CO 80501

Making Contact Call for Pitches 12/13

Call for pitches from the good people at Making Contact.

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Hi Freelancers,

Making Contact is an award-winning, 29-minute weekly magazine/documentary-style public affairs program heard on 140 radio stations in the USA, Canada, South Africa, and Australia.  Amplifying voices and perspectives rarely heard in mainstream media, Making Contact focuses on the human realities of politics and the connections between local and global events, emphasizing positive and creative ways to solve problems.

We are seeking pitches on these themes

World Cup vs The People?

Reclaiming our urban spaces

Please scroll down for more detail on each theme. Please reply to pitches@radioproject.org.

World Cup vs The People?

With the 2014 World Cup set to kick off next  year- we’re looking for stories about football/soccer. Maybe you’re in Brazil and can report on communities being displaced to make way for stadiums. Or you’re in South Africa, South Korea, Japan, and can provide a retrospective look at what happened after the tournament. Reports on positive stories about soccer benefitting local communities are also welcome.

Reclaiming our urban spaces

Making Contact is seeking pitches for 5-8 minute sound-rich features that examine community-led efforts to reclaim public spaces. From Placemaking to Tactical and Guerrilla Urbanism, residents across the country are collaboratively building spaces that bring people together and address community problems. Some of these efforts are more temporary and seek to increase public social engagement, like Park(ing) Day and Chair Bombing. Others, like Ron Finley’s work in South Central, LA and Seattle's Food Forest, aim to address long-term problems, like the lack of locally-grown, healthy food. Some initiatives are sanctioned by those in power, others are not. But all of the efforts have something in common: they are ground-up approaches that create connections, build social capital and improve our urban environments.

We’re especially interested in pitches about cities and projects that often fall under-the-radar, and projects from marginalized communities that are led by long-time residents. We’re open to reviewing and/or repackaging work you’ve already recorded/produced, as long as it’s something that took place within the last year or so. And we’d love to hear your ideas for creative ways to tell these stories.

Pitches for this show are due by Monday December 23rd. We’re aiming to commission pitches by the end of the year, with a script due around mid-January.

Specifications

This call for pitches is for segments of about 8 minutes, but we also occasionally take longer pieces (12 or 26 minutes). For shorter pieces we generally pay $350 per story. As with any pitches you send us, please check out our show and read our guidelines before you pitch. http://www.radioproject.org/production/submission-guidelines/

Consider the following. Does the story:

  • Link grassroots issues and human realities to national or international trends?

  • Give listeners a historical, political, or social context of major national and international events?

  • Shed light on social and economic inequities?

  • Explore any alternatives or solutions?

Send pitches to pitches@radioproject.org. Please be detailed but succinct, and include a description of your idea, narrative/story arc, interview subjects, scenes, and sounds/ambi. If you’re pitching to us for the first time, please include a brief bio and relevant audio clips.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Nancy Lopez, Andrew Stelzer & George Lavender

Making Contact producers

Opportunities for U.S.-based journalists

Upcoming fellowships from the International Center for Journalists. Info and deadlines below. -mia 

 

U.S.-based journalists can report from Japan in 2014, covering topics including the economy, the environment, and social policies. Apply by Jan. 6, 2014.

http://www.icfj.org/japan2014

 

U.S.-based journalists can report on a social justice issue from a country of their choice as a fellow in ICFJ’s Social Justice Reporting for a Global America Program. Apply by Feb. 3, 2014.

http://www.icfj.org/our-work/social-justice-reporting-global-america

 

U.S.-based minority journalists can report from abroad on the subject of their choice as a fellow in ICFJ’s Bringing Home the World Fellowship. Apply by Feb. 3, 2014.

http://www.icfj.org/our-work/bringing-home-world-fellowship

 

Please also feel free to share with your friends and colleagues.

 

Thank you and please let me know if you have any questions about these opportunities.

 

Sincerely,

 

Lyndsey

 

Lyndsey Wajert – Program Officer

T 202.349.7605 | www.icfj.org | @ICFJ | facebook.com/icfj.org 

International Center for Journalists

Advancing Quality Journalism Worldwide

TAL Theme List

Just in time for the holidays, the latest call for pitches from TAL. Enjoy! -Mia

Dear This American Life friends and contributors,

It’s been a while! We’ve been sending out these Theme Lists with less frequency lately in the hopes that we don’t exhaust you and your patience with us. But please know that you’re free to pitch us stories whenever you like and you don’t need to wait for a Theme List or appropriate theme. That said, we've got a new round of themes-in-progress listed below! And we'd love your story pitches, thoughts and suggestions for these upcoming shows.

How this process works: When you send in a story idea to me, I'll respond with a generic email letting you know that I received your pitch and that I've read it. I promise. I read every pitch. (I won't send you the auto response until I've read your pitch so expect a bit of a delay getting that email.) If we think the pitch is right for us, or if we need more information from you, I'll send you another email asking for more info on the story or letting you know we'd like to commission the story. But if you don't hear back from us within two weeks, beyond the initial auto-reply email, it means the story just isn't right for us or for the needs of that particular show. The idea of doing it this way is just to get through pitches and get back to everyone quickly.

Like always, these themes are shows we're actively pursuing right now but we're always on the lookout for new stories or ideas. So if you've got a story that you think would work especially well for us but doesn't fit a specific theme listed below, please send it along anyway.

Thanks so much for your pitches. We appreciate it.

Best,
Julie Snyder
This American Life
(julie@thislife.org)

THE THOUGHT THAT COUNTS: This show is coming up soon (three weeks) and while it's holiday-related and timed, the stories for this show don't necessarily have to be about Christmas. But it'd be great if they were! We've got a few stories about gift-giving and we'd love more stories in that direction. Maybe a story about a particularly awful or weird (or wonderful!) gift? Or a gift that truly does speak more to the 'thought' behind the gift than to the actual reality of the gift? We may also just gather up a lot of different stories about notable Secret Santa gift-exchanges so if you've even got a small story for that, please let us know. Other takes on the theme could be stories where the 'thought' or intention of something is unclear or, perhaps, misguided. Or stories where the thought truly was greater than the action — something where the thought had a power of its own.

GOOD GUY: There is this thing called the "good guy discount" where basically while you're at the counter making your purchase, you ask the cashier for the good guy discount. When the cashier inevitably asks, "What's the good guy discount?" you simply say, "You know — you're a good guy, I'm a good guy … a good guy discount." A reporter for our show SWEARS this works more times than you'd think, and he often walks out with 10-20 percent off the price. But how can this work?! WHY does this work? In this show, we're hoping to explore this idea of being a 'good guy' and what that means. We'd like stories about people who have a specific notion of what it means to be a good person and where the lines get drawn between good and not-good. In another story, a soldier talks about his motivations for joining the military and his struggle with what are morally acceptable motives when you're training to kill. For some variety, stories about relationships or love would work well for this show.

STUCK IN THE MIDDLE: These are stories of people in limbo, fighting desperately to get out. We've got one story about a man who's in prison right now because of a bureaucratic mistake. But it's not the kind you normally think of because this guy was guilty. He was convicted of an armed robbery more than a decade ago, he bonded out while appealing, and then his appeals failed. But here's where the remarkable mistake happened – no one ever came back to put him back in prison. So he went on living his life. He had kids, started a business, bought a house. And then when the Department of Corrections was preparing to release him they finally realized, "Oh wait. We don't actually have this guy in custody." So now, even though he's completely reformed and has never committed another crime, he's back in prison. We have another story of women in a strict religious community who turn to some pretty extreme measures when their community says they can't divorce their husbands. We're looking for more stories like this where people find themselves in some kind of limbo they can't control. The stories we have so far are pretty serious, so suggestions or stories that are funny would be helpful. Maybe one of you has a story about being then unwilling mediator in a dumb family fight. Some story about a very common sense piece of legislation or a scientific idea that will never see the light of day because it's stuck between two sides could work too.

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE: In the absence of facts, people will often make up their own truth — a story that somehow explains the world in a way that makes sense or feels logical or comforting. We are working on one story for this show about a murder investigation where it seems like the police certainly know more than they're letting on but for whatever reasons, they won't reveal anything. Now the victims' families and friends are trying to figure it out on their own but it's taking them down some weird (and scary) paths. We'd like to explore this idea with more stories about searching for truth and ending up in a place that maybe isn't quite right. Because we have one story about a murder and are working on another story about a political legend, smaller, personal and even light stories might be nice for this theme. Maybe a story about figuring out a family secret? Or a small-scale mystery? A story told from the perspective of someone who *knows* the truth but won't reveal it would be really nice, too.

DAY AT THE BEACH: It's getting cold and soon the holidays will be over and we'll be entering the dreary malaise of the I've-got-nothing-to-live-for months of mid to late winter (is this only me?) so we'd like to do a fun show in February where all of the stories either take place at the beach or, basically, just have something to do with the beach. Stories about family vacations or romances or mysteries or even environmental stories — just as long as at some point in the story, we come across sand and water. We've got one story about an octopus and another about a family reunion but even if your story involves both an octopus and a family, that's fine. We'd just love to be thinking about the beach soon!

THE LOCAL SHOW: A few years ago, a woman in Maine who runs a snowmobiling camp was fighting to keep a massive conservation project out of town, largely because the person overseeing the project is considered an "outsider." Yet when that person's son took over the project, the woman started to see things differently and after some grouse hunting and socializing with him, the woman ends up supporting the same conservation she'd been radically against. All because the son grew up in the same part of Maine and therefore he's a local. The thing is, while the son had been born there, he was also the heir to a huge fortune, had moved away and lived a very big city, non-Maine life and then carefully cultivated a "locals" image to return to Maine in order to sway the opponents. His image makeover wasn't unknown though — people in the town just didn't care. He was born there, he was a local and that's that. The idea of what makes someone a "local" or an interloper or something in between — we'd like more stories about where being a local means something. Maybe a story about being mistaken for belonging? Or a story about trying to fit in but doing a horrible job of it? A story about figuring out someone wasn't a local because of a very small 'tell' – a look, phrase, or gesture that just was obviously out of place?

Julie Snyder
Senior Producer
This American Life
(212) 624-5012