5: Documentary
Interview with Thomas White, Editor, October 2006
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
This installment of Periodical Radio is about Documentary, the member’s magazine of the International Documentary Association. According to their web site at documentary.org, “The mission of the International Documentary Association is to promote nonfiction film and video around the world by doing three things:
1. Support and recognize the efforts of documentary film and video makers,
2. Increase public appreciation and demand for the documentary,
3. Provide a forum for documentary makers, their supporters and suppliers.”
Documentary is a glossy magazine printed in full color eight times a year. It’s published monthly, except for four combined issues. Serials librarians call the schedule the “publication pattern.” It’s important to librarians, because we need to know when issues are expected to arrive. A pattern with combined issues like Documentary’s is a bit of a challenge, but a complex pattern is okay as long as the publisher makes it clear and sticks to it.
Each issue of Documentary runs roughly 60 pages and features about 10 articles. Most articles are 3 to 4 pages long. Regular departments include messages from the association president and the editor, a news section, and member news. Advertisements for services of interest to documentary filmmakers take up about a quarter of the pages, including a few pages of classified ads at the back. Articles in Documentary address all stages of the filmmaking process. Topics include how particular films were made, how films are distributed, film festivals, and awards. As I browse through issues, I see a particular emphasis on film festivals and awards.
Documentary changed its name from International Documentary in December 2005. However, their web site and the magazine itself still sometimes refers to it as “International Documentary”. It is indexed in Film Literature Index. As best as I am able to determine, it is not available in any full-text databases.
To learn more about Documentary, my guest is the Editor, Tom White.
Steve: Tom, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Tom: Thank you very much, good to be here.
Steve: In the introduction to our show, I quoted the mission of the International Documentary Association. How does your magazine promote the mission of the Association?
Tom: The mission of the association is to promote documentary film, to help documentary film makers, to really make the world safe for democracy, for documentaries as it were. You really have to provide opportunities, and IDA does that through screenings, workshops, awards programs, outreach programs, seminars, and also through the magazine. The magazine functions as a communications device. What I try to do with the magazine is to try to be on top of the documentary world, but really also cover the past of it, and also the present and the future. We look at various trends in the art form, looking at directions, issues that impact the art form, etc. We’re a communications tool and in conjunction with that we’re trying to enhance our web site to be kind of a complementary device, so the whole communications infrastructure will include the magazine, but also the web site. I’m developing content for that in the form of our e-newsletter to be more timely in terms of documentaries that are coming out on certain dates, or reporting on festivals, and things like that. The e-newletter or e-blasts or e-zine is kind of an extension of the magazine, in the spirit of that.
Steve: So they complement one another.
Tom: Yes. But the magazine’s been around as long as the IDA has been around. Next year the IDA will celebrate it’s 25th anniversary. The magazine started in a very modest fashion as a two page Xeroxed newsletter. Certainly it’s evolved since then, it went to a quarterly to a semi-monthly. Right now we’re coming out eight times a year. We used to come out 10 times a year. Next year it will be seven times a year. As we build our presence on the web and building that complementary infrastructure we’re cutting back a bit on print. For everybody in the print world, printing magazines or newspapers has become a bit more expensive. So we’re all looking for ways to utilize the web in a creative way, while keeping the magazine and the spirit of the magazine.
Steve: Who are your readers?
Tom: Our readers are primarily documentary filmmakers, of course, but we also have educators and people in the business side of the documentary industry, the distributors, exhibitors, commissioning editors, etc. Again, I mentioned academics and educators, and then of course aficionados of the documentary. I think the highest percentage of our readership is documentary film makers, both emerging and established.
Steve: What are the most important or pressing issues facing your readers? You mentioned something about the future of documentary filmmaking.
Tom: I think it’s really getting your documentary made. I mean, there’s making your documentary, having the passion to follow a story and bring it to audiences. Getting your documentary made is more the business side of it, getting it funded, raising money for it, finding a home for it. I think the web and the digital revolution over the last ten to twelve years has created a lot of opportunities, but it’s also created a lot of challenges. But it’s really getting your documentary seen, being creative about it. I mean there’s I think again part of the opportunities have been proliferation of festivals. That’s certainly a way to get things seen, but also opportunities on the web with video sharing, selling your DVDs online, etc. I think the challenge is really, once you finish your documentary, how you’re going to get it out to the audiences, and how you’re going to get it finished and pay for it. Those are things that we try to explore.
Steve: I suppose it’s easy enough to make a documentary available on the web if you don’t mind giving it away for free.
Tom: Well, I think that’s where you need that sort of acumen, to not give it away for free necessarily, but I think I would encourage documentary makers to set up their own web site. So many of us have broadband access, and so many of us live on the web, that’s a way to really define your film. You’re constantly selling you film to get it to the next level, to sell it to distributors and exhibitors and commissioning editors. Finding places for it in theaters, on cable or PBS or networks and international markets, and in festivals, of course, and in DVD in the education market. With a web site, it’s probably a good idea to have a trailer at least to give people a sense of what your film looks like, and what it’s about. If you retain the rights on your own web site, that’s a way, in so doing, to force you to become the middle man. So you have to develop a marketing savvy, to say who is your core audience, what are the web sites out there where I can reach that core audience, and really try to take the aggressive role of marketer and distributor for your own work. You are your best sales person for your own work. You know what it’s about, you know who to reach, so when you retain the rights to sell your own work you’re also thinking about the appropriate theatrical distributors and the appropriate venues, whether in cable or PBS or networks. You have to think about those audiences, too. I think making your documentary for free, well a lot of people, certainly on YouTube there is a wild frontier, and in other file sharing web sites. There are a lot of documentaries available for free unbeknownst to the filmmakers, I believe. But I think the digital revolution has created a lot of opportunities for doc makers to follow the whole process themselves, self distribute and also work with the other key players to reach audiences out there as well.
Steve: Who are your writers for Documentary?
Tom: Our writers, unfortunately we’re not able to pay our writers, but we do pay them with a complimentary subscription and membership to IDA, but that aside, a lot of writers are film makers. I’ve been fortunate, because they have a certain in to that experience of film making. A fair number are educators, teachers at the college and university level. I am fortunate to have journalists. There’s a wide variety of writers.
Steve: Tom, how did you land the job of editor?
Tom: I think I go back to my English major roots in undergrad in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I did take a few film courses, one of which was actually in documentary and American television. I retained all the textbooks from that course, and I use them to this day. But I really had no idea, as no one really does when they graduate from college where they really want to go into. But I was in performing arts management and resource development, living in New York and working at Lincoln Center and Brooklyn Academy of Music, and also going to a lot of films, and a lot of documentaries. So a sort of school of hard knocks in New York. I came out to Los Angeles in 1987 to pursue an MBA with a focus on arts and non-profit management at UCLA. Then I worked at the L.A. Opera for about three years, then went out on my own. One of my first clients was IDA, so documentary was never far from my realm of art forms that I have a passion about, so it’s always stuck with me. I worked with IDA primarily at first as a grant writer and development consultant, but I did want to expand my portfolio a bit, so I started to write for their magazine, and wrote for other magazines, like Independent Film and Video Weekly, Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Indie Wire, and Release Print. About ten years ago, in 1996, I became assistant editor of the magazine, then worked my way up and became editor in June 2000. So that’s how that happened.
Steve: What do you like best about the job of being editor?
Tom: I think it’s just being…working with writers, working with film makers, but also it’s a very creative job. I like the idea that for each issue we try to have a theme. We develop ideas for articles around that theme, and so try to create an issue that is as comprehensive and cohesive and creative as our limited budget will allow. That’s what I like about it. I also work at home. All my staff are independent contractors in kind of a unique 21st century model. I’ve always liked writing, and I like the idea of hammering an article into a presentable and acceptable and pleasing form. The end product, you know you start out in flux, as an idea, then a series of ideas, and you work with the writers, then the articles come in and you hammer and work with your staff, and the end product is hopefully a product of lasting value.
Steve: In your “Fast Forward” introduction to each issue of Documentary, you close with “yours in actuality.”
Tom: Uh-huh.
Steve: Why that closing?
Tom: I think when I first wrote that column, I wanted to come up with something appropriate to the magazine and documentary. In Europe, particularly in England, documentaries within the non-fiction media universe, actualities are part of that. I guess an alternative would be “documentarily yours.” “Yours in actuality” is just kind of part and parcel with the non-fiction community that we’re serving.
Steve: I see. As I browse through the issues we subscribe to here at the College of Saint Rose of Documentary, I noticed that there was quite an emphasis on film festivals. Why are festivals such an important component of documentary film making?
Tom: I don’t know if we necessarily emphasize film festivals, but we certainly cover them. I feel that it’s important to cover them. I think in the past fifteen years, festivals have played a vital role in giving documentaries a high profile, and attracting distributors and potential partners to help further the life of the documentary. In a way festivals have also played a role in test driving the documentary in front of audiences to gauge what they respond to, what they like about the film. It’s also to really interact with the audience. You don’t get that kind of opportunity when you have your film airing on television or on cable, or playing in the theaters. We can’t cover every film. From our standpoint, we can’t cover every film that comes out, and there are so many documentaries that come out, this is a way we can highlight some of them and serve the community as much as we can. I think festivals play a vital role in furthering the life of the documentary, and we’ve seen a few documentary-only festivals pop up over the past ten years or so. I think that’s great for the art form. It’s a way to give back, and when I cover festivals, for me personally it’s a way to really scout out what’s coming down the pike. It’s also not just the films that are screened there, but also the people who go there and participate in panels and workshops and seminars and things like that. It gives people a sense of what’s in the air, what’s coming up, some of the issues and trends that seem to be impacting the form and the industry. It’s important to continue to cover festivals, but there are so many we can’t cover them all, but we try to hit the important ones, and occasionally some of the regional ones.
Steve: Could you talk a little bit about the role of awards in documentary film making, and what some of the most important awards are?
Tom: Obviously the Academy Awards, certainly that’s a great honor to be nominated and to win an Oscar. But Emmys, Peabodys, and DuPonts are certainly very prestigious honors as well. I should say myself the IDA Awards. Those were created to celebrate the art form, to give back to the community. When IDA was first formed, within the first couple of years of life the people who founded it decided it’s important to have documentary awards. There really aren’t enough out there. Awards help careers. Give film makers a certain cachet to put on their CV or resume, and really help gain funding or support for the next project.
Steve: Thank you. In December 2005, your magazine changed its name from International Documentary to Documentary. Why the change?
Tom: That was a board decision. It was also suggested by our distributor that perhaps “international” had a pejorative aspect to it, that folks in the United States would misconstrue that perhaps we were only covering non-domestic documentaries, which was not true, but it’s actually important. We do cover international issues and international documentaries, and we’re the International Documentary Association, but to eliminate the word international really focused on the art form itself. It was documentary whether it was international or domestic. That was the reason behind it, to position the magazine in a different way in news stands and book stores and festivals as a magazine about the art form and in some ways about the industry.
Steve: I wanted to ask a couple of questions about the readership. I was noticing your circulation and had a couple of questions about it. First of all, for the benefit of our listeners, like all magazines each year you print your Statement of Ownership, Management, and Circulation in one of the issue. I’ve not addressed this in a previous radio show. Could you just explain for our listeners what that form is and why it’s required?
Tom: The form is something we file with the Post Office. It’s required just to show that we are not a dormant publication. It’s to be accountable, how many issues we print, where they go to, how many we keep on hand, how many go to subscribers and members, and how many go to news stands and book stores, and how many we distribute for free. We do send a certain number to festivals and markets. A number of other of my contemporaries in the non-profit media arts world also send their magazines, and the for-profit media arts publications. You go to the prominent festivals and you’ll see a whole slew of magazines on display there. It’s a marketing tool. That’s why we fill out that form every year.
Steve: And that’s required to get the special periodical postage rate?
Tom: That’s right, the non-profit rate.
Steve: When I was looking at the form, there were a couple of things that struck me. One of the things is “in county” and “out of county”. I noticed about half of the membership was within county, which I assumed to be Los Angeles County.
Tom: Um-hum.
Steve: For some reason I would have thought that documentary film makers would be more widely distributed, and not half in Los Angeles County.
Tom: The bulk of our membership is from Los Angeles County, or southern California I should say, mainly because that’s where we’re headquartered. We do try to partner with various organizations around the country. We have had workshops and seminars in New York and Washington D.C. and Chicago and other places when we can, several times over the course of the year. Our awards galas are in Los Angeles, and the screening of the award winning films are in Los Angeles. Our Docuweek, which is a showcase for qualifying documentaries for consideration for the Academy Award, takes place in Los Angeles or New York. We send a number of those films on an eight city tour, so we are trying to serve the Academy’s qualifications, but also building our presence in other places around the country. Because we’re based here, and we have a lot of screenings here, but in other places, that’s where a good portion of our membership is.
Steve: I’d like to bring us back to a topic at the very beginning of the interview, and that’s the future of the magazine, specifically the magazine as a print publication. You spoke of how you’re expanding the web presence and using the timeliness of that. Do you see a future for the print magazine, 5, 10 years from now?
Tom: I do. I don’t think the print magazine is going to go away. Print magazines are being born every month. But I think it’s important to think of it as a hybrid. That’s kind of the future of it. Print magazines will still be around five years from now. It’s the portability, it’s saving the magazines for future use, archiving it. The best zines on the web have been around for a while, because they’ve known how to utilize the web. It’s different from a magazine. There’s more dimensionality, it’s a bit more versatile. By the same token, they certainly have archival capabilities, too. But there is a little bit of the ephemeral aspect of a web based publication. It’s a matter of perception, and how we’re conditioned to engage in the print media versus the electronic media. We’re just conditioned in the print media that there’s a little more of a lasting value, or at least less of an ephemeral aspect to it. But I think that will change. All print publications, whether newspapers, dailies, monthlies, semimonthlies, need to be thinking about utilizing both the print medium and the electronic medium, and really enhancing both, using each medium to enhance each other.
Steve: Tom, is there anything I haven’t address that you’d like to tell us about Documentary.
Tom: You focused on the coverage of festivals, and I mentioned that, but I do want to say that we do try to cover as much as we can in other areas of documentary, and try to be as versatile and dynamic as possible. Whether we’re covering education, or emerging and evolving platforms, or looking at various regions. This past year we looked at the Washington, D.C. region. We looked at New York City the year before. In other publications we’ve looked at regions around the world, not as a special issue, but in various articles. We try to look at the documentary community as a whole and look at various aspects of it and highlight things. The core of our mission as a magazine is service, being of service to the documentary community as much as we can. That’s in concert with the IDA’s mission. In developing the web as a complementary tool, it’s really so we can be a bit more timely and that our service can improve somewhat. The bottom line for me is service to the community and I try not to waver from that.
Steve: Tom White, thank you very much for being my guest in Periodical Radio.
Tom: You’re welcome. Thanks for the opportunity.
Steve: Have a good day. If you are interested in becoming a member of the International Documentary Association and receiving a subscription to Documentary, go to documentary.org and click on Become a Member. Individual memberships are $85/year. Thank you for listening to this installment of Periodical Radio. I'm your host, Steve Black.