Know your placement
…finding a home for your baby.. (part 6 of the e-book)
The media industry is not much fun when you approach it as an outsider. At the very least, it can be incredibly tough to penetrate it in any other way but to get a job instead of becoming a service provider or an independent content producer. I am sure it can be done; all I am saying is that it can be tough. It certainly has had its ups and downs with me. But regardless of the assumed excellence and insightfulness of your production, you now need to place it somewhere. Unless, you had had an arrangement before getting to this point, or, like said, you’re nine to fiving for a station or a production company.
Unless your idea of placing your work is on CD on your bookshelves or as a file in a forgotten folder in the depths of you computer, there’s a need for some decisive action.
Now having a final product, I am sure you’ve thought hard that where would its style work, or alternatively produced it in a style that fits into the flow of your targeted station. It’s important to familiarise yourself with stations where things like these can find themselves in, and work with the knowledge gathered from that exercise. What topics get commissioned and in what kind of style? Is it more hard journalistic expo’s, human interest stories with a strong emotional aspect or reflective journey-like content? Every single bit of information you can find out may be very useful when you approach the station.
If you haven’t had an arrangement to have your piece placed anywhere, it might be a good idea to email the person who is in charge; programme controller or some such (don’t mistake the vague sound of that with it not mattering; it might just depend on the station’s organisational structure who is that right person – but you need to find it out), and demonstrate to them why your feature or documentary would specifically work on their station. It’s generally better to email than to call as many people can find phone calls from people they don’t know a bit irritating, but once you have created a contact, if there’s a delay with their response, you can call to remind. I do advise you to remember that sometimes it is a thin line between reminding and pestering, and many of the people you must get through to have many meetings so don’t try to prolong the conversations if they sound hurried. That’s not to say that you couldn’t say what you called to say.
Another very practical reason why it is better to email is that then there’s a digital paper trail, and whatever arrangement you end up with, the information can be traced back, which erases many potential misunderstandings and also the occasional people who don’t agree with fair play.
There are of course other reasons why you may have produced your material, than to just get it sold once and then move on to the next one to do exactly the same thing. Maybe you did it as a showcase that you hope will get you hired. It’s not a bad plan either, especially if you are a student.
And as a student you can’t expect to automatically be able to sell everything that you do. Strictly legally speaking actually, you might not even have a right to if it’s part of your studies, but I am getting into the copyright matters in a moment.
I always recommend students to blog. You have your Facebook and Twitter, but realistically as a media student, you should have a blog as well. I am not the one who decides that, but I really struggle to come up with any reasons why you wouldn’t. Your blog can be your showcase of your writing, videos, photographs and of course also audio. You can be a podcaster or just occasionally upload some audio you’ve worked with for people to hear and for you to learn the way the technology works. There’s all the chances in the world that you need to know the basics of updating a blog of some kind when you are hired and it’s something nice to pull out of the bag in a job interview. It’s demonstrates taking initiative, creativity and passion for production. I’d see it as a massive plus on the corner of your application, and although not everyone in the industry feels as strongly about this, I can’t see how it would reduce your chances. Maybe with an exception of you having uploaded photos from the weekend night out where you passed out half naked and your friends draw a Hitler moustache on you with a marker pen, but isn’t that what Facebook is for?
As always, you can find many services that you can use online, but I wanted to provide you with a very short list of a few web services I like, and find convenient specifically when it comes to blogging and placing audio online. A word of warning though; in the Internet these things keep on changing and what is good today, may be overdone by someone else tomorrow. So there will be a moment in time when this list becomes outdated.
WordPress is one of the free ways of blogging. You can make your blog really rather professional looking by tweaking it for a while.
Blogger is one of Google’s services and one of the older blogging platforms. It is increasingly flexible and has an added social networking aspect by allowing you to follow other blogs and them to follow you.
This is probably the easiest and by far the most convenient blogging service that I have tried. With a Posterous blog everything can be done by sending an email. That includes attaching pictures, PDF’s, audio or video to the email and the blog then presents them in a nice stylish manner. There are things you can’t do with it, but the ones you can are incredibly effortless.
While Podbean also gives you a blog, it is actually more of a podcasting service. By opening this account you can upload 100mb of audio for free and get automatically created feeds for your audio to be subscribed to via iTunes or RSS. Even if you’d use other services for blogging, this could work as your audio base.
Created more for the purposes of musician, Soundcloud allows you to upload and store audio for free. It gives you, in my opinion, very stylish audio players that you can easily embed into your blog or elsewhere online. You can decide whether your audio is downloadable or not, and the drop box enables you to easily receive and give files to others.
PRX, or the Public Radio Exchange is a website for the American Public Radio system. This is a place where you can upload your material and even sell it to the stations for some money. While the money isn’t necessarily going to blow your mind, it might be a nice thing to have in your CV. You can listen to other people’s work here as well, get ideas, give feedback to others just as they can give it to your work and generally get good ideas for your future work.
Finally, whether you are uploading your audio on your personal blog or on someone else’s website, working for a station or a production company or trying to sell your content independently, it is good to have an idea of copyright matters. They can be tricky on a good day.
You own the full copyright to your work as soon as you have done it. You don’t need the © symbol or a detailed explanation on how you are going to let the blood thirsty dogs after anyone who even thinks about using your work; what you have done, you own the rights for. Copyright is your incentive for your creativity.
Or so they say.
Here’s the fine print; for the sake of clarity I wrote it on the same font size as the rest of the text. If you have done your work at a university or with university’s equipment, depending on their policies, but quite likely, they would own the copyright to your work. In theory you are not able to sell that or arguably, if indeed they do own the rights, legally put it online to your blog. I am sure that the latter should never be a problem and even the former generally shouldn’t land you in trouble. The truth is that if you as a student manage to sell your work while studying, you are also positive PR for the department and that may even end up recruiting a few new students; that’s where the money is for them. And where it definitely isn’t, is to make a few bucks out of selling student work for which they claim ownership. Even if they did own the rights, they wouldn’t probably use them.
Another option is that you work for a radio station or a production company. It is then also, in all probability somewhere in your contract that the work you have produced is owned by them. Which means that, again, at least in theory, you cannot even place it online for free for others. In practice, I am sure you can, but legally, you could be sued. Definitely they wouldn’t be happy if you tried to sell the work they paid you to do to someone else.
It can also so happen, that you are an independent producer who has taken a risk and without any advance payments produced something out of your own concept with your own equipment on your own time, and when you wish to sell it to some broadcaster, instead of one-time only rights, they want the full copyright of your work. That means that they pay you once a bit and then own this work for so long that it could as well be forever. In practice it means that they’ll play it once and then it goes into an archive in all likelihood never to be played again anywhere. Legally, they will decide what happens to it. You could renegotiate this clause, I guess, as I doubt it’s a deal breaker since often especially in radio, the stations and broadcasters aren’t banking on further income from your work. For some reason the contacts are not drawn that in mind.
Basically what that means is that it’s important that you know what kind of contracts are involved and what are the policies. Just because I have said many times in the previous paragraphs that in all probability a non-commercial usage of your production, would not create problems, doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t know what you are dealing with. And I can’t promise to you that there definitely won’t be trouble. One thing that you can learn more about is the idea of Creative Commons. Creative Commons licences are part of copyrights, only with them you can release some rights so that people can use your content just like you can use the content that has been licensed in this same way. I personally wouldn’t mind seeing these licences used more by universities and even radio stations, which could release some rights after the first broadcasting of the content, but that is not a very common practice at this point in time.
But whatever is the case with your legal rights to your production, I’d encourage you to upload it online to your blog. It’s your demo tape and a proof of the standard of your production work. No corporate lawyer will realistically bother you for having it there, because they are not losing revenue in the process. At this point that is what it all comes down to. Everyone needs to pay the bills and how does this kind of audio content support that?
In the next segment, we look into how important all of this really is – I mean who even cares about the radio documentaries anyway?
Radio Student by 
