Universally, the people we’ve spoken to here in Detroit over the last couple of days have nothing kind to say about their mainstream news sources.  They see the Detroit Free Press as disconnected from the community.  They hated a recent Dateline special about their city.  And even Time’s well-intentioned “Assignment Detroit” — in which the…

So we arrived in Detroit with a rough idea for a film: using a Journalism That Matters gathering as the “peg” to draw a parallel between a profession in crisis, a city in crisis — and what people at the community level are doing to alleviate those seeming insurmountable challenges.  I hadn’t done any intensive…

We’re clearly in the middle of a content production arms race. Even as Hollywood champions new technologies to differentiate itself from the YouTube crowd, amateurs quickly raise their own standards, adopting new platforms and cameras to try and keep up. So what strategies should independent storytellers adopt?