The Video Consortium launches a new initiative for local newsrooms Doc

The documentary “Going Varsity in Mariachi” was produced with the help of the Video Consortium.

Courtesy of the Sundance Institute

As the reality space continues to face greater difficulties in the entertainment and journalism industries, a global nonprofit focused on helping documentarians communicate is expanding its reach with some help from the Knight Foundation.

Through an investment from the Knight Foundation, the Video Consortium will partner with local newsrooms to help build and enhance their video strategy. They will bring talent and help train local video journalists.

“We will work with them, wherever they are, to make sure the stories they tell are authentic and reflective of the communities in which they work,” says Skye Dylan Robbins, founder and CEO of the Video Consortium.

Dylan Robbins is a journalist and filmmaker who previously worked at NBC News and… The New Yorkerthe Video Consortium began nearly a decade ago, providing clarity on issues from finding financing to finding distribution, which can be difficult to navigate, even for mid-career filmmakers.

“Our biggest mission is to democratize the industry,” says Dylan Robbins. “The goal is to make sure people can pull back the curtain on how you get your stories out into the world.”

The Video Consortium has long offered resources such as workshops, mentoring programs, and a job board. Go to university in Mariachiwhich premieres at Sundance in 2023, is the product of the efforts of the Video Consortium, where participating film directors come together through the organization.

Now, the Video Consortium offers initiatives that directly help filmmakers create work that not only benefits their careers, but local communities as well. She recently launched the Solution Storytelling Project, an initiative aimed at training filmmakers and then pairing them with a local non-profit organization to create short documentaries about the organizations’ work. More recently, the program has worked with filmmakers and non-profit organizations in Africa. “By the end of the program, (participants) had a really great piece of work to add to their repertoire, and the organization had this great piece of media, and we were able to sell a bunch of it, too,” says Dylan Robbins.

Many filmmakers ended up with their first international bylines in publications such as American Scientific, and market rate compensation for their work. This year, the Solutions Storytelling Project will head to Latin America.

The world of documentary and non-fiction filmmaking has been hit by crises in both entertainment and journalism. The entertainment industry, which in the late 2010s experienced a documentary boom thanks to streaming, is currently dealing with economic headwinds and widespread layoffs that make production and distribution of nonfiction projects difficult. As for journalism, where video has become an important part of print reporting efforts, mass layoffs, budget cuts and complete shutdowns of newsrooms have left fewer and fewer places available for filmmakers to put their work.

“While current models are cracking and collapsing, there are a lot of questions and a lot of people trying to talk to each other to figure out what we can do differently,” says Dylan Robbins. The Video Consortium is looking to help fill in some of these cracks.

The nonprofit is running a new initiative through Press Forward, a national campaign to revitalize local news, aimed at connecting filmmakers with local newsrooms, a space that has been hard hit. According to a recent report from the Local News Initiative at Northwestern University, one-fifth of Americans live in a news desert.

Dylan Robbins emphasizes that through the new initiative, the Video Consortium hopes to provide newsrooms with the video journalism resources they desperately need. “There’s no obvious misunderstanding about people in coastal media going somewhere else and saying, ‘This is how you do it,’” says Dylan Robbins. “And we’re going to do the opposite of that. It’s about listening first and making sure people are expressing what they’re saying.” They need it.