Hopefully there’s a business model here.
Snag Films is the just-launched site for (free) web-distribution of documentaries via web widgets. Founded by Ted Leonsis, Ex-AOL exec and Chairman of web-widget technology company Clearspring, it’s been dubbed “Hulu for documentaries.”
More from Variety:

IndieWire will supply SnagFilms with archival content, news, analysis, blogs and film reviews. IndieWire will also [...]

Ben Compaine, author of Who Owns the Media? has some interesting data from the Project for Excellence in Journalism on the shift in the WSJ editorial composition since it’s acquisition by News Corp.

Compaine also ran some numbers a few years back in Reason.

From Craig Newmark:
ProPublica is an independent, non-profit newsroom that will produce investigative journalism in the public interest. Our work will focus exclusively on truly important stories, stories with “moral force.” We will do this by producing journalism that shines a light on exploitation of the weak by the strong and on the failures of those [...]

Wow. A well-done, unexpected bit of interactive experimentation from MSNBC.

Via Prolost.
Opencut is an open source film competition where (for a $25 entry fee) you get digital footage shot on a RED camera and a shooting script. A description of the first project, “Susannah” is available at the website.

Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail, discusses “free”:
Chris Anderson talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about his next book project based on the idea that many delightful things in the world are increasingly free–internet-based email with infinite storage, on-line encyclopedias and even podcasts, to name just a few. Why is this trend happening? Is [...]

To celebrate Hayek’s 109th birthday:
The Use of Knowledge in Society

Not to sound like a hippie, but some personal inspiration via Jim Coudal—
Working for months on some damn project that gets watered down and compromised and eats up your time and your soul until when you’re all done with it you realize you’re not proud of it and you don’t even want to show it [...]

An excerpt. A little windy, but it’s pretty amazing somebody said this to a NAB audience.

Indie film grants and funding.
Toshiba—HD DVD Interruptus. A shame, because HD DVD authoring and production is both cheaper, and easier to author for independent producers.
Tulip is software for visualizing very-large sets of data. Download Tulip at Sourceforge.
Tag your environment with EEML-Extended Environments Markup Language.
(EEML) protocol for sharing data between remote environments, both physical and virtual. [...]

Lecture/discussion with Lev Manovich, media artist/lecturer/theorist and co-author/creator of Soft Cinema and author of The Language of New Media, and Sean Cubitt, media theorist/historian and author of The Cinema Effect and Digital Aesthetics.
Remixing, Coding, Remapping, and Recombination of visual manifestations are revolutionizing the narrative form of film - new societal phenomena, like the VJ scene, [...]

Interactive. iPhone/Touch Starbuck’s “Quickorder” application. No waiting. Pocket Guitar for iPhone/Touch. Interactive Architecture. Interactive building façades.

Web Trend Map 2008 Beta.
Film, video, music. The films of Joe Merrell. Good Copy Bad Copy (2007), Copyright+Culture. Hulu Discusses Private Beta, Suggests Public Launch Time Frame. Jem Cohen directs DVD for The Ex. Talking to the Music Industry, a [...]

Related to yesterday’s post about The Pirate’s Dilemma: Do Youth Media Habits Predict The Future Of Media?

The Pirate’s Dilemma looks quite awesome. Absolutely next up on the reading list.
The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing tool [...]

Making Your Media Matter
February 7-8, 2008
American University, Washington, DC
Making Your Media Matter is a conference for established and aspiring filmmakers, non-profit communications leaders, funders and students looking to learn and share cutting-edge practices for creating media that matters.