Beyond clickbait and commerce

Jocelyn E. Williams
Framing participation in
collaborative community
media: The living community
documentary series
This paper positions the concepts of participation and
collaboration for media content creation in the context of
a complex, commercialised media landscape that is difficult
for community and not-for-profit groups to break into, and
focuses on the case of a 2014-2015 community media project
funded by Unitec Institute of Technology in New Zealand. The
project set out to produce a series of half-hour documentaries,
The living community, for broadcast on Face TV, a pay TV
channel with a public service/community commitment. Each
of the seven programmes was intended to offer insights
into a community group or organisation in the Auckland
region. The paper explores potential issues in co-creating
community stories for media visibility, with few resources.
The paper proposes an inclusive co-creation model based
on the experience of creating the final filmed piece in 2015,
influenced by ‘a subset of planned, intentional participatory
media engagements that rely upon professional facilitators
to lead collaborative projects with explicit purposes and aims’
(Spurgeon et al. 2009).
Key words: participation, collaboration, community media,
public service broadcasting
Introduction
In this paper, the challenges and outcomes of collaboration
during 2014-2015 between an educational institute and several
community groups to create a low-budget series for broadcast
TV called The living community are presented. Seven communitybased
filmed stories were produced, six of them screening as a
series on Face TV in May 2015 and a further one being shown in a
public screening at the Auckland Museum, in October 2015. The
project had multiple aims in terms of product and process while
also bringing together multiple stakeholders. These included the
seven Auckland region communities who had a story to tell, each
with leaders or key members representing a wider constituency;
48 Copyright 2016-2/3. Ethical Space: The International Journal of Communication Ethics. All rights reserved. Vol 13, No 2/3 2016