New field report - Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes

Today the Center for Social Media is publishing the first in a series of "field reports" designed to illuminate innovative public media projects: Hip-Hop, Beyond Beats and Rhymes. I completed the research for this report in March 2007, just after the film's PBS broadcast, but the story of how filmmaker Byron Hurt has worked with partners like ITVS and Firelight films to make his documentary the center of an evolving outreach campaign continues, as his keynote presentation at last week's Making Your Media Matter conference demonstrated.

It sometimes seems miraculous that social issue documentary films – which customarily deal with tough subjects and even tougher challenges of funding and distribution – get made and seen. Amazingly, they do. But the process by which that happens is rarely examined in any systematic way. This field report illuminates the ever-evolving strategies and techniques that documentary filmmakers have developed to support and produce their work, and to engage and activate audiences. Such stories reflect skill, ingenuity and passion, and provide lessons for funders, media makers, and organizations for whom media strategies are at the core of struggles for social justice.

Films are collaborative projects, bringing together not only specialists in production, but also networks of organizations and individuals who are focused on similar issues or policies. Strategic outreach plans - which may include broadcast, curriculum development, community screenings, websites, etc – often bring together coalitions of organizations with common goals.

Documentaries tell stories that humanize abstract issues, introducing into public discussion rich content that travels though multiple circuits - framing and stimulating civic dialog around shared issues. Hurt's project underscores how – against the odds – social issue documentaries are participating in the creation of a robust public media world.