Off the Line: Independent Television and the Pitch to Reinvent Hollywood. 2012. Dissertation. University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA.

The dissertation investigates the early years (2006-2011) of the market for independent television, or “web series,” arguing it represents a marginal but historically significant challenge to media industries (Hollywood) in a period of convergence. It asks why and how in this historical moment have web series creators opted to produce and distribute “television” independently through alternative markets.

More broadly, it asks what the market for independent television contributes to scholarly debates over the possibility of a new media system, whether it supports or contradicts claims media industries are changing in the face of digital culture. The web series market reflects what I call “off the line” production in this historical moment. Creators of independent web series attempt to reinvent and reinterpret traditional forms of production, storytelling, marketing and distribution from outside its structures. The activity in this cottage industry represents a “pitch” to Hollywood, a supposedly new and potentially profitable way of producing and distributing video.

As a market operating on the margins of Hollywood, the web series world is different from the industry, but in many ways the same. This project will tease out those differences, examining how creators and entrepreneurs distinguish their practices from the industry while borrowing what they believe works from mainstream production. Unlike popular notions of alternative production, such as noncommercial art cinema, participants in the web series market occupy an in-between space: deviating from industrial norms while ultimately seeking capital for their efforts.

When completed, the project should speak to scholars researching the production of television, new media and film; it may also be of interest to those interested in histories and theories of labor, representation and the political economy of distribution.

For a preview of the structure and purpose of the dissertation, please see this primer published on my blog.

The Instability of Independent Distribution in Emerging New Media. Continuum. (forthcoming)

This essay explores the possibility of an online video market operating independent of conglomerations. At stake is whether new media can operate “democratically,” providing more equal distribution of control to producers and distributors within an unequal market. This is the story of a handful of these websites, all of which promise this possibility: Strike TV, My Damn Channel, KoldCast, Babelgum and Quarterlife. Their stories offer telling case studies of new media in their formative years. In the end, without industrial structures in place, independents must grapple with rapidly changing conditions, improvise business strategies and, ultimately, work with the mainstream, traditional structures to which they were, however superficially, in opposition. Independent distribution in early media emerges as a practice as much indebted to the old media as it pushes new forms of engagement, marketing and production.

Fandom as Industrial Response: Producing Identity in an Independent Web Series. 2011. Transformative Works & Culture, 8.

This essay examines the development, production and distribution of a web series, The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else, which it frames as a fan-driven response to an industrial product, Sex and the City. As intermittent participants within the Hollywood industry, the series producers, a diverse group of lesbian and straight women of various ethnicities, positioned their series as a market-oriented product intended to reform the industry from its margins and participate in a growing new media economy. The essay calls for expanded notions of fan production, industry and fresh frameworks for analyzing the effects of digital distribution, especially for communities of color, women and sexual minorities.

Producing Television 2.0: Reinventing the Industry in MTV's Valemont. 2011. National Communication Association 2011 Conference. New Orleans, LA. 17-20, November.

MTV's web series Valemont marked a significant shift in traditional network practices: a piece of "branded entertainment" – sponsored by Verizon – and a web series with an alternate reality game featuring mobile extensions and involving Twitter, a fake university website, and, to a lesser extent, Facebook and YouTube.

This essay narrates how Valemont proposed an alternative to traditional network development, production and distribution practices. First, through interviews, it introduces its production team, an independent working both within and outside the industry to reform it. The rest of the essay focuses on the series itself: its distribution platforms, its engagement with fans and its alternate reality game. 'Valemont' emerges as a novelty in the television landscape, an ambitious if politically limited effort to make the industry more flexible and engaged, between fans and producers, producers and sponsors, and networks and new forms of releasing content.

Not TV, Not the Web: Mobile Video Between Openness and Control. 2012. Mobile Media Reader.

This chapter focuses on the efforts of three distributors of independent web video – Vimeo, My Damn Channel, and Q3030 Networks – alongside larger video sites – YouTube, Hulu and Crackle – to show how navigating the mobile market involves negotiating complex industrial and technological considerations. I outline what these companies wanted from mobile distribution and how they conceptualized their needs in the months leading up to and directly following the government’s first official statement on net neutrality and its exception for wireless services.

From their perspective, the realities of the mobile video market illuminate how new media arise in fractured markets, not fully open or closed to new and established entrants. This chapter analyzes a sector of the mobile video market in a specific, narrow period of time. In the end, the mobile device itself holds no inherent meaning or politics outside its market and government players, all of whom are still working out how to deliver mobile content.

Beyond YouTube and Hulu: Independent Networks in a New Media Market. 2011. Society for Cinema and Media Studies. New Orleans, LA. 10-13, March.

This essay explores the possibility of an online video market operating independent of major conglomerations. As YouTube rose in 2006, numerous venture capital firms and entrepreneurs invested millions in creating distribution sites for amateur, user-generated and independent professional content. Typical of Internet, a number of those companies folded. Yet those who survived had to grapple with competing interests: how to scale and monetize content created outside traditional media structures in a fractured, diffuse and complicated market, stymied by a recession, run by powerful but flawed advertising networks and exchanges and eventually reliant on traditional advertising agencies and brands conditioned to working with traditional media. At stake is whether new media can operate “democratically,” providing more equal distribution of control to producers and distributors within an unequal market. This is story of a handful of these websites, all of which promise this possibility: Strike TV, My Damn Channel, KoldCast, Babelgum and Quarterlife. Their stories offer interesting case studies of new media in their formative years. This is a work of early history, placing new media in a historical moment of immaturity, when the future is uncertain and the market constantly shifting.
In the end, without industrial structures in place, independents must grapple with rapidly changing conditions, improvise business strategies and, ultimately, work with the mainstream, traditional structures to which they are, however superficially, in opposition. Independent distribution in early media emerges as a practice as much indebted to the old media as it pushes new forms of engagement, marketing and production.

Marketing Connection in Original Web Series. 2011. International Communication Association. Boston, MA. 20-26, May.

The essay probes the niche phenomenon of “web series,” here defined as original serialized video created for online and mobile consumption. Through interviews with distributors, marketers, journalists, independent and corporate producers, this essay uses the term “connection,” frequently espoused by informants, to investigate what the market for original web video says about the contemporary media landscape. “Connection” becomes a rhetorical strategy used to justify market practices when new forms of storytelling, seeking legitimacy in an unstable industrial market, are in their infancy.

Independent Cinema in Hong Kong: Negotiating Independence, Navigating Global Markets and Defining the Nation. 2010. Lecture. SummerCulture Colloquium. University of Pennsylvania. Philadelphia, PA

Far from its heyday as the center of Asian film production, the market for Hong Kong cinema has changed drastically over the past ten years. Independent filmmaking -- locally produced and shot -- is experiencing a small revival, with the participation of the government and the local industry. Yet that market faces numerous challenges: a small and insufficient local box office, the global marketing power of China and, most significantly, a still nascent notion of Hong Kong identity, all of which prevent the forms from maturing achieving "independence."

"Racing Independent Production: Making and Marketing Black and Latino Web Series." 2010. International Communication Association. Singapore. 22-26 June.

Among hundreds of user-created shows made for the web, only a few feature casts primarily of people of color. Yet those that do offer insight into how independent producers frame and position race outside the industrial constrictions of major television networks and film studios. This paper explores both why these series lack the same funding and market saturation within the sphere of original web content; what entrepreneurs are doing to self-promote the shows by creating their own spaces on the web; and what kinds of representations of black and Latino identity the shows put forth. This paper arises from interviews with producers such as Fresh Prince’s Tatyana Ali for her show Buppies to creators of websites for black/Latino content, like RowdyOrbit and BetterBlackTV. The aim is to see how new media industries offer bold possibilities and distinct challenges in racial self-production.

"Music Video Remakes and Fan Production." 2010. International Communication Association. Singapore. 22-26 June.

Proposes answers to the dilemma of cultural ownership in the digital age – copyright – through a theoretical and historical lens. First it places music video remakes on YouTube in the context of music video history, then it discusses the cultural significance of music video remakes, i.e. what they say about this moment in history. In compliance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, YouTube takes down videos accused of violating copyright, so I will proceed by discussing some of the consequences of this policy on the remakes. Finally I will attempt a fair use argument using some examples as a way incorporate the history and meanings of this form into actionable policy and practice; I argue that nearly all fan-produced music video remakes inherently transform their source material by remaking and re-imagining the corporate image, providing a legal justification for this form of media production predicated on pastiche, sharing and multiple interpretations.

"The Network Meets Community: The Boundaries and Ethics of Online Groups." 2009. New York American Studies Association. New York, NY. 14 November.

Uncovers what it means to call an online group of individuals a community or a network; what is at stake in these metaphors; what happens when an enclosed, presumably unified or group of individuals is opened up; and finally what sort of ethics arise out of framing online groups as communities. In the end, this paper seeks to lay the groundwork for a realistic ethics of online unity and community-building, one that incorporates the very slippages in erecting these boundaries. The essay uses an extensive literature -- from Howard Rheingold, Benedict Anderson and Manuel Castells -- and three case studies -- the Kathy Sierra incident, the suicide of Abrahama K. Biggs and the case of teenage crying for help on YouTube -- to break down the assumptions used in descriptions of online groups.