Trainees in the 2007 New Media Institute interviewed blues musicians, including James "Superchicken" Johnson.

New Media Institute

NBPC’s made-for-digital Mississippi Delta ramble

Published in Current, Feb. 19, 2008
By Jeremy Egner

Mississippi Delta blues can sound both tragic and triumphant, a paradox befitting its birthplace between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers with a fertile history of cash crops, indigenous art forms and crushing poverty.

This conflicted confluence makes the music fertile territory as well, something the National Black Programming Consortium — with help from the other minority consortia — proved again last fall in a powwow designed to train producers new to public broadcasting in skills on a number of digital platforms.

The group’s second New Media Institute brought 26 producers to Jackson, Miss., in November to develop multimedia projects based along the Mississippi Blues Trail. Their work included audio podcasts; media projects using the Global Positioning System; short videos about local blues legends and the music’s influence on hip-hop, poetry and other art forms; and an online interface for digital contributions to the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, slated to open in September in Indianola, Miss., King’s hometown. The projects will reside on the museum’s website. Many are now available at NBPC’s content portal, blackpublicmedia.org.

“The blues just really resonated with everyone involved . . . because it’s a living tradition,” Bruce Lincoln, a consultant on the project, said as producers scrambled among editing bays at Mississippi Public Broadcasting.

The New Media Institute, launched in 2006 in Boston, pursues the minority consortium’s mission of bringing new talents and perspectives to public media. But it is also highlighting original productions for digital platforms instead of supplementing or repurposing broadcasts.

“We want people to understand that this is not the same thing, just shorter and smaller,” says Jacqui Jones, executive director of the consortium. “This is a different product.”
Institute fellows meet and discuss content ideas in online chats before coming together to work on projects and attend seminars and pitch sessions with producers from national pubcasting strands and elsewhere.

The meet-ups combine the network / PowerPoint/box lunch conference formula with periods of intense production.
“You have this really diverse group of people and this great, amazing energy — it feels like a waste if you’re not capturing that,” Jones says. “Since these people are media makers, that seems like the most natural thing to do.”

From Jackson, teams fanned out across the state to shoot or record interviews with young dancers, deejays, poets, members of the Mississippi Band of the Choctaw Nation and bluesmen such as James “Super Chikan” Johnson, among others. A hotel lobby in Jackson became a laptop editing suite; Mississippi Public Broadcasting made editing bays available for more complicated work.

“It’s an opportunity to learn the language of new-media production in a really hands-on way,” Lisa Russell, a New York-based filmmaker. said between trips into the Delta. Like most in the program, Russell, whose team traced the blues influence on hip-hop and poetry, had built websites for her films but hadn’t focused much on new media as the primary platform.

Another project interviewed bluesmen including Jesse Robinson and Johnson, who mixed roadhouse licks with tales of picking at least 300 pounds of cotton a day as a young field hand.

“Anything below 300, you got beat up,” he says.

“Juke Joint Live,” an audio podcast, explores the history of Mississippi’s juke joints. “Delta Children” features video interviews with old and young musicians about how the blues is passed down within families.

“A guitar was always around my house like a piece of furniture,” Robinson says. “When I knew my name, I guess I was dragging a guitar around, playing on it.”

Jones wants the next New Media Institute to convene at election time in Washington, working more closely with PBS and NPR and presenting its output in conjunction with established shows such as Talk of the Nation.

“We want to focus more on teams being mobile, quick-turnaround units,” Jones says. “We want to try to really capture the first moments of the new administration.”
There has also been discussion about teaming up with the Integrated Media Association, which has its annual meeting this week in Los Angeles, for a joint confab next year in Atlanta, Jones says.