Say What?

They say YouTube isn’t making any money.  Its bread and butter is user-generated content, although it has managed to draw partnerships with some major Hollywood content providers, such as Fox and Warner Bros.  Nevertheless, the money is supposed to be sparse.  Then you have Hulu, which got started with content from some of the major players, like NBC Universal and Fox, right off the bat.  Hulu is, according to the word on the street, doing very well.  And so what we’re looking at is two models, UGC and content from mass media.  In other words, a site catering to social media vs. a site catering to mass media (or, instead of simply saying “mass media”, we mean the lumbering, late arrival of mass media content providers to the social media space).

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Posted by Sarah F.

Orting is a small town southeast of Tacoma that I had never heard of. Its longtime weekly newspaper, The Gazette, stopped publishing at the end of March. To remedy the lack of news coverage and try a new business venture, a community member launched Orting News, which solicits articles and content created by citizens of the town.

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There is no doubt that all we read and discuss in class is helping us understand how much we are changing the way we communicate as a society. But last year, as I was researching UGC (user generated content) I starting to observe that some physical goods manufacturers are adopting a form of user-generated content/social media. They allow consumers to create their own goods for them to purchase and also, they give them the option to sell them in a virtual marketplace. All these manufacturers do is provide the platform for this to happen.

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Posted by Adriana

We have been having an intense email discussion on what constitutes media and what is Flip the Media as a concept. It all started with a Common Craft video about what is Twitter and whether or not it fits in the scope of this blog.

What do you think Flip the Media means?

(1) using the Flip camera

(2) turning media upside down

(3) Giving the “bird” to traditional media (i.e. ‘flipping them off’).

(4) Other

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Two interesting tidbits:

(1) Multimillion dollar author Paulo Coelho wants his audience to do all the heavy lifting while he profits — asking them to collectively shoot a film for his book The Experimental Witch. As MCDM student Carie Burgess notes, “There’s some interesting stuff going on here with regard to out-sourcing to your audience and leveraging UGC, licensing and rights, creative control, film-making, etc.”

(2) Barack Hussein Obama “gets it,” and apparently Hillary Rodham Clinton doesn’t! Great article by UW journalism professor David Domke notes why one journalism class leans towards Obama. Students who get respect from the real world while shooting, blogging and reporting (hint hint to those playing nice with our Flippers) reap unexpected rewards!

Since Scorsese is trying to get the UGC angle of all of this, I’m curious what sort of challenges you have had while completing your projects. We will try to find a way to illustrate these challenges in our own film.

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