There is a story-making revolution underway. New channels have opened for audio distribution. There’s a rise of live platforms in communities large and small across the country. Creative talent is approaching the blended media environment in new ways, with work transcending traditional boundaries of time and space. These shifts have important implications for whose stories are told and how, ultimately opening the way for mission-focused makers to cultivate a broader and more inclusive reflection of our world. AIR producers will visit the OpenDocLab to open their playbook and share perspective and practices driving this exciting and transformational “golden age of talent.
Localore: Finding America is an independent public media production comprising 15 teams embedded for nine months at forward-moving public radio and television stations across the U.S. It’s the third in a series of national productions first launched by AIR in 2010 and led by some of the most gifted independent producers in the nation. Localore moves into communities large and small to invent new storytelling models with citizens who help us tell a new story of the rich diversity of America today.
Bios:
Sue Schardt leads AIR, a network of 1000 producers working across public media to lead change and broaden the impact of public service media. She writes and presents frequently on media-technology including 2012 Radio Features “Think Tank” in Leipzig, NEA’s 2012 National Council, FCC’s Future of Media in the Digital Age, Australian Centre for Moving Image’s Co-Creative Communities: Forum and Lab, MIT Open Docs Lab’s Technologies in a Changing Media Landscape, Doc/Tech at the Camden Film Festival, and keynote session on Engagement as a Business Strategy at the 2014 Public Media Development and Marketing Conference. She is Executive Producer of Localore, a ground-breaking producer-led initiative designed to build public radio and television stations’ innovation capacity and plant seeds to take public media to more Americans. She is a 2014-15 National Arts Strategies fellow, and has served on the NPR Board as a member of the Distribution and Interconnect Committee, is an advisor to Native Voice One, the Native American radio service, and is an artistic advisor to NPR’s From the Top. Schardt is a long-standing live music DJ on MIT’s free-form station WMBR in Cambridge.
Kelley Libby is a public media producer based in central Virginia. She holds an MA in Writing and Rhetoric from Virginia Commonwealth University and attended the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. She is the creator and producer of UnMonumental, a Localore: Finding America platform designed to instigate productive dialogue around the debate over Confederate monuments — what is memorialized, what is not, and why? Watch a documentary, May it Be So, based on the project. She is currently producing for With Good Reason, a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. Kelley’s work has been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered, Virginia Public Radio, and BackStory with the American History Guys.
