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The media becomes an activist for democracy
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May 15, 2012, 1:39 p.m.
Reporting & Production

Richard Sandomir at the Times has word of ESPN’s expansion of the 30 for 30 series of sports documentaries it launched in 2009. That’s great, but most interesting to me was this bit:

As the films roll out, they will be augmented on Grantland by podcasts, feature stories and oral histories. A short digital film — which will be unrelated to the longer ones — will make its debut each month on Grantland.

Mr. Schell described the shorts as “visual editorials,” of five to nine minutes. “They’re meant to be interesting conversations with people who have a point of view about something or sports stories that don’t require a four-act treatment,” he said.

Those “visual editorials” remind me a lot of The New York Times’ Op-Docs, which we wrote about in March.

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The media becomes an activist for democracy
“We cannot be neutral about this, by definition. A free press that doesn’t agitate for democracy is an oxymoron.”
Embracing influencers as allies
“News organizations will increasingly rely on digital creators not just as amplifiers but as integral partners in storytelling.”
Action over analysis
“We’ve overindexed on problem articulation, to the point of problem admiring. The risk is that we are analyzing ourselves into inaction and irrelevance.”