Media That Matters

Dear CMSI,

I am working on an installation. One of its main features will be a display with current websites of top news sources in different countries. It was also have a loop playing below it of headline news from the week before. Do I have to ask permission from anyone to build this material into my work? Read more...

Is documentary a genre? The Tribeca Film Festival this April, which Indiewire just rated among the top three for documentary, gave a chance to survey the scene of docs and look for trends. “Too many people think documentary is a genre,” said programmer Cara Cusumano. “But documentary can have every genre a narrative film can be.”

You can slice the genre question a lot of ways, but you can’t deny that the marketplace for real-life entertainment has never been hotter, and even on the indie doc circuit makers are working within formats that sell. And you can’t deny Tribeca Film Festival is positioning itself as not only a showcase but a market. At the documentary smorgasbord of Tribeca, you could see documentaries working within formats designed for great promo and quick sale. But you could also find the improbable, the quirky, and the shocking. Read more...

The visual arts community is already putting the Code of Best Practices in the Visual Arts to work in Detroit. At a late-April meeting at the Cranbrook Art Museum, speakers showed fair use can enable work in five areas.

After a presentation on the Code by Janet Landay of the College Art Association and Patricia Aufderheide, a panel of experts explained why fair use matters to them: Read more...

The Center for Media & Social Impact officially welcomes new co-directors Caty Borum Chattoo and Brigid Maher, who have both been actively involved in programming over the last year. You can rely on the same great programs and content you’ve come to love, including the 2015 Human Rights Film Series, the 2016 Media That Matters conference, field reports, and fair use guides, to name a few. You’ll also be hearing in coming months about exciting new projects in social documentary and media, impact assessment, production incubation projects and more.

Chattoo and Maher are both faculty members in the School of Communication at American University (AUSOC) with distinguished backgrounds in film production, social impact media, and social-change communication strategy. Read more...

Guest post by Andrew Lih

The insights of CMSI's Dangerous Documentaries project connected with a number of news projects at the International Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas this year, showing the risks visual storytellers are taking in reporting important societal issues and the emerging challenges in the new genre of immersive documentary making. Read more...