TVEAP Films showcased at World Conference of Science Journalists

TVE Asia Pacific’s recent TV productions on science and development issues were showcased at the recently concluded Fifth World Conference of Science Journalists.

The Conference, held on 16 – 20 April 2007 in Melbourne, Australia, was attended by over 500 journalists, broadcasters and researchers associated with public communication of science and technology. Participants came from over 60 countries all over the world.

TVEAP’s recent series The Greenbelt Reports, Living Labs and Digits4Change were introduced during a session on ‘Wise Up: the truth about TV Science’, held on 17 April 2007.

TVEAP Director and CEO Nalaka Gunawardene was the sole panelist from a developing country to speak during this session. Other speakers were from National Geographic TV, Australian Broadcasting Corporation and an independent production company in Melbourne.

“If science is universal, broadcasting is not,” Nalaka said during his panel remarks, arguing that how TV broadcasters operate in developing Asia is very different.

“Talking about broadcast sales and commissions loses meaning when many TV stations are operating on tiny budgets -- or in some cases, no budgets -- for factual content. Many are struggling to survive in tough, emerging economies,” he said.

Some countries that had long traditions of public service broadcasting have recently neglected or abandoned them. Public broadcasters now receive little or no public funding, and are forced to earn their keep, Nalaka pointed out.

“In such situations, development and educational content – including science programming – is not a priority. If we wait for such TV stations to set aside any of their very limited budgets for such content, their audiences may never see any of it.”

Describing the TVEAP approach, Nalaka said: “Our pragmatic ‘business model’ has been to produce or acquire editorially independent TV content, produced journalistically to international broadcast standards. Most are financed using funding from outside the broadcast industry.”

Such funding comes from development donors, philanthropic foundations and corporate sponsors. The source doesn’t really matter, he said, “because we jealously safeguard editorial independence.”

As examples, he described how TVEAP has raised funding from Canadian, Dutch, Japanese sources -– both governmental and private –- in recent months to produce a whole range of journalistic TV productions covering issues such as coastal resource management, adaptation to climate change, freshwater resources and ICTs.

“Our funders don’t set our editorial agenda,” Nalaka emphasized.

Making editorially independent new TV content is only one of TVEAP’s six areas of activity. The Colombo-anchored regional foundation also acquires productions on a broad range of development topics from independent producers and production companies in Asia, Europe and North America.

“We offer these programmes to TV stations and channels across developing Asia, entirely free of license fees. They get unrestricted broadcast rights for our content at the cost of duplication and dispatch of tapes.”

TVEAP’s broadcast partners, in turn, make in-kind contributions to add value and extend outreach. These include assigning prime time slots, promoting broadcasts on air and online, and sometimes versioning programmes into local languages, entirely at their cost.

TVEAP relates to over three dozen channels from across Asia Pacific, which covers both large and small countries with different political systems and audience preferences. The organisation does not discriminate between public and private channels.

“Our interest is to achieve the widest possible outreach for the science and development programmes in our film catalog. We are not out to make money from distribution,” Nalaka summed up.

He shared extracts from three recent TVEAP series that have been widely distributed across developing Asia Pacific:

	Living Labs series was released in March 2007. Filmed in 9 countries on 4 continents, it looks at how to grow more food with less water. We worked with a global action research project that is tackling this big challenge in agriculture.
	The Greenbelt Reports was produced in 2006 to take a close look at the environmental lessons of the Asian tsunami. TVEAP-commissioned producers visited a dozen locations in India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Thailand to find out how community and conservation interests can be balanced in relation to coral reefs, mangroves and sand dunes.
	Digits4Change, released in mid 2006, is an attempt to understand and document how information and communication technologies are changing the way Asians live, work and play. It covered technologies such as Internet, computers, mobile phones and satellite communications.

Nalaka was also a speaker during the plenary session on 19 April 2007 on ‘Reporting Science in Emerging Economies’.