Own The Media by Stan Kristansen
If you want something done right, then do it yourself.
While I usually try to seer clear from clichés like this in my writing, sometimes there’s no better way to say what you need to say.
After months of planning by an eight-person organizing team and over 60 acts, both local and international, Montréal’s Second-Annual infringement Festival was set to take the city by storm over eleven days this past June.
With theatre, music, film screenings, street performance, spoken-word and enough variety to shake a stick at, it was clear to me that this festival would not only wake the city up to the possibility of doing things differently, but would also garner quite a bit of local media attention in the process.
While the former proved right, the latter couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Yeah, the festival got press, as did some of its acts. There was the 30-minute interview on CKUT, the Bill Brownstein column in the Gazette, the pre-fest plugs in Mirror and Hour, even a first week plug (of some of the second week’s shows) from Amy Barrat in the Mirror and a smattering of other radio and print bits about the fest, but that was about it.
Not that all that coverage is really something to sniff at, but when you take into account how much was going on and how much play the infringement got last year in the media, its really not that great.
True, last year was the festival’s first outing, which invariably brings more attention, and true, there’s only so much space and airtime to go around, but it still seems like there’s something not right here.
The Montreal Gazette had enough space to cover and review shows playing in the St-Ambroise Fringe™ Festival just about every day the fest ran, which is great. I’d rather read reviews and plugs of local theatre than incessant wire stories about Michael Jackson any day.
Unfortunately, Gaetan Charlebois’ review team chose to completely ignore that there was even another festival going on and didn’t review (or, as far as I could tell, even see) any of its shows, despite excellent and even acclaimed work by touring groups and fresh, new shows by Montreal groups.
I won’t begin to speculate why not, just wonder about the message that it sends: it doesn’t matter how good your work may be, if you don’t pay $600 it won’t be recognized.
Even sending that message unintentionally discourages anyone without the startup capital from attempting to do their art and further puts the control of what messages get out there into the hands of people either concerned with potential profit over (or unable to separate it from) the importance of the work’s message, its cultural value or even its artistic merit.
The best way to deal with a situation like this isn’t to try and reclaim a media already controlled by corporate interests and ruled by petty egos (although that would be nice), nor is it to be astonished at how this could happen.
The best remedy is not to care what the big time media has to say, stop relying on it to be heard and create and own your own media. And it’s not that difficult to do.
Word of mouth is always the most effective form of publicity for new artists and the web is a free (or relatively cheap) way to reach people locally, nationally and globally.
With a web component, or strong word-of-mouth backup, you can even generate more interest for your own print media and maybe even find a few people so interested that they will want to reprint and redistribute it for you. This means the small amount of money you may have to print it can go quite a bit further.
These aren’t new ideas, but for some reason many people see these methods as somehow inferior press to the more established outlets. This stigma probably comes from a lack of confidence in one’s own work and is certainly reinforced by the corporate media that lives (partially) off the fact that it is seen as the only legitimate outlet.
This view needs to change and people need to learn that they can skip the filter entirely. In order to truly reclaim our culture, we need to create and own the media.
While I usually try to seer clear from clichés like this in my writing, sometimes there’s no better way to say what you need to say.
After months of planning by an eight-person organizing team and over 60 acts, both local and international, Montréal’s Second-Annual infringement Festival was set to take the city by storm over eleven days this past June.
With theatre, music, film screenings, street performance, spoken-word and enough variety to shake a stick at, it was clear to me that this festival would not only wake the city up to the possibility of doing things differently, but would also garner quite a bit of local media attention in the process.
While the former proved right, the latter couldn’t have been further from the truth.
Yeah, the festival got press, as did some of its acts. There was the 30-minute interview on CKUT, the Bill Brownstein column in the Gazette, the pre-fest plugs in Mirror and Hour, even a first week plug (of some of the second week’s shows) from Amy Barrat in the Mirror and a smattering of other radio and print bits about the fest, but that was about it.
Not that all that coverage is really something to sniff at, but when you take into account how much was going on and how much play the infringement got last year in the media, its really not that great.
True, last year was the festival’s first outing, which invariably brings more attention, and true, there’s only so much space and airtime to go around, but it still seems like there’s something not right here.
The Montreal Gazette had enough space to cover and review shows playing in the St-Ambroise Fringe™ Festival just about every day the fest ran, which is great. I’d rather read reviews and plugs of local theatre than incessant wire stories about Michael Jackson any day.
Unfortunately, Gaetan Charlebois’ review team chose to completely ignore that there was even another festival going on and didn’t review (or, as far as I could tell, even see) any of its shows, despite excellent and even acclaimed work by touring groups and fresh, new shows by Montreal groups.
I won’t begin to speculate why not, just wonder about the message that it sends: it doesn’t matter how good your work may be, if you don’t pay $600 it won’t be recognized.
Even sending that message unintentionally discourages anyone without the startup capital from attempting to do their art and further puts the control of what messages get out there into the hands of people either concerned with potential profit over (or unable to separate it from) the importance of the work’s message, its cultural value or even its artistic merit.
The best way to deal with a situation like this isn’t to try and reclaim a media already controlled by corporate interests and ruled by petty egos (although that would be nice), nor is it to be astonished at how this could happen.
The best remedy is not to care what the big time media has to say, stop relying on it to be heard and create and own your own media. And it’s not that difficult to do.
Word of mouth is always the most effective form of publicity for new artists and the web is a free (or relatively cheap) way to reach people locally, nationally and globally.
With a web component, or strong word-of-mouth backup, you can even generate more interest for your own print media and maybe even find a few people so interested that they will want to reprint and redistribute it for you. This means the small amount of money you may have to print it can go quite a bit further.
These aren’t new ideas, but for some reason many people see these methods as somehow inferior press to the more established outlets. This stigma probably comes from a lack of confidence in one’s own work and is certainly reinforced by the corporate media that lives (partially) off the fact that it is seen as the only legitimate outlet.
This view needs to change and people need to learn that they can skip the filter entirely. In order to truly reclaim our culture, we need to create and own the media.
posted by indietimes @ 10:59 PM
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