Monday 24 October, 2011

In This Newsletter

• Save Kids’ TV Becomes the Children’s Media Foundation
• What’s New?
• What Will Remain?
• What Next?
• Why Change?
• Personal Views on the New Venture
• VLV Children's Seminar

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Save Kids’ TV Becomes the Children’s Media Foundation

Save Kids’ TV will shortly recreate itself as an exciting new body - the Children’s Media Foundation (CMF). 

SKTV is joining forces with another well-respected children’s organisation - the Children's Film and Television Foundation - to form a new body to better serve UK kids.

The CMF will bring together kids’ screen-based media and entertainment practitioners, with academics, educators, artists, parents and others passionate about the media used by children in the UK, and concerned to promote quality and sustainability.

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What’s New?

The CMF’s remit will be dynamic and evolve to suit the ever-changing needs of the audience and the industry.  However it will be built on the following foundations:

• Its purpose will be to pursue quality in children’s media of all kinds, on all platforms.
• It will speak for children and young people, who, as a group, are frequently disenfranchised and ignored. 
• It will also act as a critical champion of the children's media industries and provide briefings and information to government and the media.
• It will act as the Secretariat for the new All-Party Parliamentary Group on Children’s Media and the Arts.
• It will work with the academic community to stimulate and disseminate research around kids and media.
• It will provide online resources and organise events and meetings on children’s media and the issues of current concern.
• It will provide a focus for parents, educators, children’s charities, policy makers, and the press, on all matters relating to children and their media lives.
• It will be professionally managed and supported through fundraising

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What Will Remain?

• The CMF will continue to be the guardian of the Children's Film and Television Foundation archive.
• The new organisation will continue to lobby for support for children’s content, respond to government consultations, and grow public and policy-makers’ awareness.
• It will continue to be a point of contact for the press and other media for comment on issues relating to children and media.
• The CMF Board of Directors will be chaired by Anna Home OBE, and includes Linda James (from CFTF) Greg Childs and Nigel Pickard (from SKTV)

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What’s Next?

The new organisation will still need the help of the many volunteers who have worked with SKTV in the last five years, and it will certainly rely on your support. 

This starts with a questionnaire which will shortly be sent to all SKTV supporters.  We’d really value hearing your views on the plans for the CMF.

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Anna Home outlines the vision for the CMF

The Children's Media Foundation has grown out of two organisations which have the interests of children at their heart – and that will remain its position. 

The new organisation has the following aims:

• To increase public awareness and improve understanding of the value of media made for children and the issues arising from children's media use.
• To protect the quality, variety, and range of media of all types for children and young people in all social groups.
• To support the production of media for children and young people in the UK while embracing stimulating content from all parts of the world.

The CMF will take the basic position that media for young people is a force for good, when well made and properly funded.  The CMF will campaign for quality amongst the makers and distributors, and for support for quality, range and diversity amongst the press, politicians and the public. 

It will also address the many and varied issues facing young people as media users, and how these affect the industry that serves them, including:

• internet safety
• commercialisation
• audience care, appropriateness and the role of the regulator
• support for children’s content in the public service broadcasters
• the relationship between media and education
• empowering kids and parents through media-literacy
• quality of content across all platforms

The CMF aims to be the focus for reasoned debate around these and other issues and it plans to produce evidence to dispel the wilder rumour and conjecture which so often feature in the press.  We want to see children and media at the centre of public attention for all the right reasons.

To support that position the CMF will partner with the academic community to stimulate research, and through a continuing relationship with the press and other media it will help disseminate research that broadens understanding of how kids relate to media and how it affects them.

An annual “state of the nation” review of kids’ media will keep the topic in the public consciousness.

As a national body, the Children's Media Foundation will continue the work of Save Kids’ TV and focus on supporting UK-produced media.   But it will also take an international role, as the representative body in the UK and build relationships with other organisations with similar aims to improve the quality of media for children worldwide.

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Greg Childs outlines the Save Kids’ TV thinking behind the new organisation

Kids… Could there be a hotter topic?  They’re either getting the best exam results ever, or they’re knife-wielding, hoody-wearing looters. They’ll be paying for our pension plans and their student debt for the rest of their lives.  They’re over commercialised, too early sexualised, , anti-political, anti-social, ASBO’d and obese and generally disengaged! 

But they are also... the living messages we send to a time we will not see.  (Neil Postman The Disappearance of Childhood 1982).

Children’s media has a powerful role to play in how our kids become the future.  For the last five years Save Kids’ TV has been saying that the range, diversity, quality and purpose of the media we serve to our kids really matters.  Ensuring that some of that content is made here in the UK, reflecting their lives and telling their stories, is also vital if they are to engage fully with society and our culture as they grow up. 

That’s the “big-picture” story for us.  But many other stories focused on children and media regularly feature in the headlines and on the radar of politicians and regulators.  With children at the heart of the national debate, the time is ripe for SKTV to turn itself into a more permanent, professionally managed and broader-based organisation capable of reacting quickly and pro-actively taking the lead with the voice of reason, supported by research.

Save Kids’ TV has made a fantastic start.  The CMF will be there for the long-haul.

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Nigel Pickard outlines industry thinking behind the new organisation

The Save Kids’ TV story is one we can be proud of.  It’s successfully brought to the attention of the public, the press and politicians that kids’ media needs support if it’s to be the best it can be – and that they deserve the best. 

We have the talent, the drive and the energy to make fantastic, relevant, exciting content in the UK – on TV, on film, online, on mobiles, on games consoles – and in fact we already do.  But to maintain that edge for the industry, and to maintain choice and variety for the audience, we need at least the opportunities, funds and support mechanisms that many of our competitors are offered by their governments. 

At last the issue is recognised by politicians, and the setting up of the all-party group in Parliament is proof of that – a Save Kids’ TV success story, which the CMF will inherit. 

Currently there are no big solutions for public funding.  It’s not exactly the time for that.  But the need for support is still on the agenda.  The CMF will allow us to pursue that more effectively with backing from the research community and the public. 

In its broader role the CMF will provide the industry with a strong perspective on serving the audience well, and act as a co-ordinated voice to build quality, responsibility, responsiveness and sustainability into everything we do.

The CMF will empower the kids' media and entertainment industries to confidently make a difference in kids’ lives.   It needs YOUR support!

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VLV Evening Seminar - Wednesday 2nd November

SKTV's Anne Brogan is on the panel at this annual event hosted by the Voice of the Listener and Viewer...

‘CHILDREN’S PROGRAMMES –
OUT OF DATE IN THE DIGITAL AGE?’
VLV Evening Seminar
Wednesday, 2nd November 2011 
6.30pm – 8.30pm
National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1

Children’s programmes have long been a key factor in the definition of public service broadcasting, and Voice of the Listener and Viewer has been among the leading campaigners to support high quality British programmes. A seminar will be held at the National Liberal Club to examine the ongoing role of children’s programmes in today’s multi-media age. Have they changed to meet the new conditions, and are they still as important? What is the relationship between broadcasters and parents, and with society as a whole?

Panel will include:

Baroness (Floella) Benjamin
Campaigner and Liberal Democrat Peeress

Joe Godwin
Director of BBC Children’s

Reg Bailey
Chief Executive, Mothers’ Union

Anne Brogan
Director, Kindle Entertainment

Sonia Livingstone
Professor of Social Psychology and Head of the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Economics and Political Science

In the chair:

Máire Messenger Davies
Professor Emerita, University of Ulster, and VLV Board Director
Tickets: Students £5; Academics £25 (including tea/coffee/biscuits)

For tickets please telephone Linda Forbes on 01474 338711 or email Linda.Forbes@vlv.org.uk or visit our website www.vlv.org.uk and book online.                Postal address: VLV, PO Box 401, Gravesend, Kent DA12 9FY

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