I attended a Producers’ Guild of America (PGA) panel discussion last night, on the Sundance Channel series “Brick City,” a powerful snapshot of Newark, NJ taped in 2008. It featured several of the series Producers; an Exec from Sundance; and the City of Newark’s Director of Communications, Desirée Peterkin Bell.
A lot of the discussion focused on the more Inside-Baseball aspects of getting the series – originally contracted as 6 half-hours but expanded to five one-hours — bought by Sundance, produced and edited, promoted on the network’s website, etc. It was a PGA event, after all. I learned a lot, especially about the increasing ability of websites and social media to be sources of valuable content in and of themselves, and not just used for promotion.
But I picked up a few other things last night. We heard a little – unfortunately, very little – from Desirée about what she called the Newark Tech Group, which would allow folks inside Newark to get smarter about use of the web and social media to pick up where “Brick City” left off in allowing people inside Newark to connect to each other, get information out and tell stories. I think Trenton could pick up something here: we are largely outside the media spotlights of both NYC and Philly, and our homegrown conventional media often leaves a lot to be desired. If we want to stay informed about what happens in our city – good and bad – we have to DIY. As newspapers all over – not just the ones in Trenton — continue to struggle, we have to find ways to make sure that we still get news and not just rumors.
The producers also talked about similar projects they’d worked on over several years – in cities as varied as Cleveland, Los Angeles, Little Rock and their home base of NYC. They said there are more similarities than differences in these towns: crime, joblessness, economic distress, yes; but also many, many areas where people just live their lives. They work, raise families, mow their lawns and keep their houses up. And all the other thousands of things that all make up what passes for Normal. A lot of people choose to live in cities, to move in, to stay. But a lot of that Normality isn’t what gets picked up by the media, and is never seen by people outside cities. Desiree described the same thing when she talked about how she moved into Newark a few years ago when she started working for Mayor Booker, into the kind of charming house and great neighborhood she never knew existed in that town.
I’m not telling all of you who live here in Trenton anything new. We know what they were talking about. There are a lot of problems here, with many getting worse. But there is a lot of Normal here, a lot to value. A lot to stay for. A lot to want to make better.
Both the Sundance exec and the producers talked about what they intend to do in later seasons of “Brick City,” so it will be coming back sometime in the future.