The Challenge of The American-Made Benny

We had numerous challenges in reporting, producing, and in making the decision to ultimately publish this story. We feel this story is incomplete due to access issues and time constraints inherent with MediaStorm's approach to a workshop story. Sometimes you can learn as much from your shortcomings as from your successes. As such, we hope this will serve as an important case study about the ethics of storytelling. - Brian Storm, Executive Producer, MediaStorm Unanswered Questions: On the Limits of the Single-Subject Interview by Eric Maierson By any measure, the MediaStorm Storytelling Workshop is an intense week. It is a product-focused experience, meaning that unlike in other teaching environments we are wholly focused on producing the most compelling story possible, one that demonstrates the collective skills of the participants and the MediaStorm staff. The week consists of one day of lectures, three days in the field, and another three days editing. Workshop…

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Matter Ventures: Exciting New Opportunity for Media Entrepreneurs

Matter Ventures, a new start-up accelerator for media ventures, launched this week offering financial, strategic and management support to entrepreneurs looking to create meaningful and profitable media businesses. The program is designed for media startups with multi-disciplinary teams who have early-stage prototypes, mobile applications, B2B media services, and content production engines. Matter will invest in entrepreneurs who show high potential to create media ventures that make a meaningful, positive impact on society while pursuing a sustainable, scalable, profitable business model. Startups selected to participate in Matter will receive a $50,000 investment, work side by side in a creative space in San Francisco, and participate in a four-month intensive acceleration program. Matter was founded by three media nonprofits—KQED, the Knight Foundation and Public Radio Exchange (PRX)—to encourage media ventures that make a meaningful, positive impact on society while pursuing a sustainable, profitable business model. KQED and the Knight Foundation are each investing $1.25…

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Call for Participants: POV Hackathon 2

The PBS documentary series POV has announced its Call for Participants for POV Hackathon 2. Ten teams of filmmakers and technologists will converge for a January weekend in New York City to create prototypes that seek to reinvent the documentary for the web. The application deadline for filmmakers, developers and designers is December 7, 2012. There is no fee to apply or participate. More information is on POV's hackathon site at http://www.pbs.org/pov/hackathon/.

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The Wider Image: New Reuters iPad App

Reuters has released a new interactive iPad app to bring its award-winning news photography to life. The Wider Image is an unprecedented news photography experience from Reuters. Created exclusively for the iPad, it gives users a new way to engage with news photography. With updated daily content, it aims to position imagery at the heart of the user experience and to realize the unique potential of photojournalism. The Wider Image includes more than 100 stories by Reuters photographers from across the world, and they'll be adding new stories daily. The app allows viewers to interact with image sequences, read expanded facts and quotes, get to know the people behind the images through photographer profiles and in-the-field witness commentary, and visually compare social, demographic and economic differences between story and user locations. Take a tour of the Wider Image app here... Reuters-MediaStorm Interactive Collaboration The Wider Image builds on two Emmy-nominated interactive news-photography…

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