The monetization panel introduced two options for funding a web series: crowdfunding or a sponsor/brand liaison. Much of the panel’s discussion focused on how to create a crowdfunding campaign that stands out (“offer personalized rewards” was one suggestion) and how to find a sponsor (one panelist remarked that if great content doesn’t fit a brand, it will have less of a chance of gaining sponsorship). The Digital Distribution panel offered insights into My Damn Channel and CW Seed, including the notion that for online distributors, the boundaries between marketing, distribution, and audience engagement are collapsing because content circulates via social media. CW Seed’s Rick Haskins also rejected the long-standing idea that online video content needs to be short in order to be successful, observing that the CW’s statistics show an increase in mobile viewing of hour-long dramas. “A screen is a screen,” he remarked and explained that convenience trumps quality of the viewing experience.

I found the panel on building an audience most intriguing. The panel highlighted only one way to build an audience: social media, by which panelists meant Twitter. The panel might as well have been subtitled “how Twitter will save television.” Moderator Fred Graver, Head of TV at Twitter, emphasized that Twitter has special values by being live, public, and conversational. The liveness of Twitter came up several times during the panel. The panelists focused on two main strategies for building an audience: branded content or ads that appear in the Twitter stream and showrunners’ /casts’ direct engagement with viewers via Twitter. Graver heralded branded content as “closing the loop” between seeing a tweet and watching television, especially via Comcast’s new “See it” initiative.

The singular focus on Twitter surprised me—after all, there are numerous online platforms on which viewers engage with TV. For example, the complete absence of Tumblr at this panel struck me as significant oversight. In addition, this panel conveyed the idea that the industry has never had the opportunity to engage so directly with audiences before when viewers have discussed television online for decades now, and this isn’t the first time that the industry has discovered online audience engagement. Let’s remember articles like Marshall Sella’s The Remote Controllers from 2002, which describes message boards like Television Without Pity. But Twitter’s liveness—and its potential to foster live viewing—is what sets it apart from more asynchronous sites, and offers a reason why the industry is cultivating Twitter as a TV engagement tool: because it fits the networks’ needs and preferences for advertising and ratings. In addition, Twitter tends to be public and centralized. Instead of trying to locate dispersed audience-created content and opinions on various sites, industry insiders can execute a key word search on Twitter that results in easily accessible data for a range of TV shows.

Beyond praising Twitter’s general capabilities for connecting audiences and TV, panelists also agreed that paying attention to Twitter has become a must for showrunners and writers. As Embassy Row’s Mike Davis put it, Twitter functions as a barometer of the audience that is more productive than a focus group (although both are similarly limited in offering only a small and very selective slice of the audience). Law and Order: SVU showrunner Warren Leight shared his experiences using Twitter to build buzz for SVU. Leight candidly spoke of NBC’s disinterest in promoting the show and needing to find ways to promote SVU that doesn’t cost the network any money. NBC only considered using Twitter to funnel audiences toward the official SVU website, an effort that Leight deemed unproductive. Calling TV show websites the “rust belt” of the internet, he highlighted the cast and crew’s tweets as better alternative because their tweets, especially images and links, get picked up by an average of ten to twenty entertainment websites in addition to being spread via retweets. Leight’s comments reminded me of the central argument in Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green’s Spreadable Media, namely that the industry needs to shift away from keeping content and audiences locked in one place (like an official website) and toward making content mobile so audiences can spread it wherever they want (a model that makes tracking impressions more difficult but demonstrates an understanding of how audiences engage with content today).

Leight’s recognition of spreadability’s importance also came across in his anecdote about last summer’s #savebenson campaign. The campaign and hashtag originated (unsurprisingly) in fans’ tweets in response to SVU’s season finale. Leight described the surprise and delight of coming across the hashtag. The writers pushed the hashtag to keep conversation going about SVU over the summer. Despite the new ways of engaging SVU viewers, Leight’s ultimate concern and focus is still on ratings. For example, Leight observed that good East Coast Twitter buzz can translate into a ratings bump for the West Coast and highlighted the potential of guest stars with a large Twitter following who can tweet about their guest appearance, which might also translate into an increase in ratings. While there is ultimately no way to correlate Twitter buzz/engagement and ratings increases, Leight’s analysis says much about his investment in Twitter as a space of maintaining interest in a show that is off the network’s (and critics) radar. Overall, Leight described his cast and crew’s Twitter engagement as “complete anarchy” because there are no coordinating talking points for what happens on Twitter. While he mused that the corporate world will likely get very anxious about this free-for-all mentality, Fred Graver added that Twitter advises networks not to interfere because it relieves them of responsibility when inappropriate comments surface.

The overwhelming focus on Twitter in the panel on audiences, with frequent gestures to Twitter appearing in the other panels as well, was noticeably different from the previous year, when Digital Day centered on second screen apps offering program-related content. It is interesting to speculate, and invite you to do so in the comments, whether or not this emphasis on Twitter constitutes a silent concession that content-based second screen apps are largely failures because the audience won’t budge from Twitter as virtual watercooler.

For more on the NYTVF, check out Aymar Jean Christian’s Can the New York Television Festival Get Past the Pilot?

With those words, Pam Wilson captured the urgency of the Fiske Matters conference: Over two days in Madison, Wisc., some sixty speakers and attendees reasserted John Fiske’s still powerful, still relevant ideas for a field in danger of losing them. Among the diagnoses:  Fiske’s examples are now dated, making it challenging to teach his books; the cheap caricature of Fiske as a naïve populist Pollyanna continues to function as a convenient straw man; the new media landscape invites revision of Fiske’s analyses.

But as several people noted, theory is an ongoing dialogue, and the conference demonstrated the value of staying engaged with Fiske’s ideas. Speaker after speaker showed how Fiske’s productive and provocative theories continue to illuminate our current cultural moment and media landscape.  Presenters drew on Media Matters and Power Plays to understand racial politics in the age of Obama and the imperializing populism of the Tea Party movement, or showed how Fiskean approaches to technostruggles, active audiences, and pleasure allow us to analyze power and participation in a range of media forms and practices, including the internet, video games, satellite technology, scrapbooking, poetry, and even—in Fiske’s own keynote address—17^th-century furniture.  This short report can’t capture the breadth and quality of the contributions, but I’ll put my favorite moments in the comments (and hope others will too), and the Twitter feed provides snapshots of how presenters mined the richness of Fiske’s oeuvre.

A modest subtext of vindication also characterized the weekend:  although Fiske has been pilloried and ridiculed, the last ten years have proved him mostly right and often prescient. Henry Jenkins’ keynote, for example, coolly and effortlessly showed Fiske’s theories of active audiences demonstrably borne out in online activism and pop-cultural participatory politics today.  Anyone tempted to mock Fiske along the lines of “Listening to Madonna = liberation ha ha” must contend with Jenkins’ wealth of examples in which the skills, literacies, and pleasures of fandom are deployed for political action.  At the same time, Jenkins showed how Fiske’s approach could be productively updated, e.g. by replacing “resistance,” appropriate to the industrial information economy, with “participation,” which better describes cultural politics in a read-write age.

Fiske himself, despite claiming to have done no theoretical thinking for ten years, continued to offer new ideas and challenges for the field.  An hour into the conference he casually tossed off the insight that norms, which used to be produced at the centers of categories, are now emerging at the margins.  He also suggested that the most interesting problem for this generation is the “technologization of the inner self” through social media, a phrase that should immediately enter the literature (and our classrooms).  It was a delight to see Fiske still producing such generative ideas.

Part 2:  “I am John Fiske”

The conference celebrated not just Fiske’s ideas, but also Fiske the teacher, mentor, and colleague.  There was an “Old Home Week” quality to the weekend, a reunion of friends drawn back to Madison by their deep respect for Fiske (an indisputably great teacher) and the intellectual community he fostered. His students carry his instructional style and philosophy into universities around the world, leading Steve Classen (with many nodding in agreement) to declare “I am John Fiske.” That might sound cultish if you weren’t there, but it simply speaks to Fiske’s students’ attempt to imitate his pedagogical example: clearly explaining difficult concepts, remaining gracious to opponents, and fostering a climate of “serious fun.”  The conference got emotional at times as John’s former students articulated this dimension of Fiske’s legacy, and as a choked-up Fiske himself put it, “Ideas go out there, they float. It’s the people that matter.”

There will be next steps.  The papers will be compiled and published in some form; the website will hopefully become a repository for resources about Fiske; participants will return to their work re-energized as teacher-scholars. The straw-man abuse of Fiske will undoubtedly persist, but Fiske’s ideas will continue to inspire new scholarship and—the ultimate point—help us understand our culture and ourselves. Fiske himself is ever the optimist, thus it seems appropriate to believe that time will continue to prove the central assertion of the conference:  Fiske matters.