It’s been a mystery to me why PLE organizations in Canada do not make more use of mass media. Of those few programs that have used the mass media for PLE delivery, almost none leveraged the popularity of mainstream media as a way of educating the public. What I’ve seen, instead, are three types of mass media PLE:
- Cultural and minority media placement: programs like the Cultural Minorities Program at the People’s Law School and the new Six Languages Project at CLEO place PLE content in newspapers and on radio stations that target specific minority (and often non-English-speaking) communities.
- Public access shows: in the past, PLE organizations from many parts of the country produced instructional TV shows—and sometimes hosted live TV talk shows—for broadcast on public access and educational channels.
- Promotion: several PLE organizations issue press releases promoting their programs and organizations. Éducaloi is a notable leader in this area and has attracted significant media coverage.
Even though all three of these mass media strategies may be important, I and others still wonder why PLE organizations have not gone for the heart of the beast. Why not find ways to deliver PLE through the most popular media outlets and programs? To paraphrase what one observer told me: PLE organizations have trouble getting their message across because of all the “background noise” of popular media—there’s a competition for the public’s attention, and PLE organizations just don’t have the resources to compete with Ally McBeal.
But competing directly with Ally McBeal &c. is not the only way. Although producing original content for mainstream media outlets has worked for PLE in the past (consider successful CBC radio shows produced by PLIAN and CLIA, and the wildly popular legal radio spots and TV soap operas done decades ago in Québec), the media is also an intermediary, and it can be educated like one. Here are a couple examples from the American Bar Association:
- Supreme Court Preview: this is a periodical published monthly during the U.S. Supreme Court’s annual term. It’s targeted at the reporters who cover the Court, and last I heard it was the only external material distributed by the Court’s press office.
- The Silver Gavel Awards: an annual slate of awards given to mass media creators who get the law right and build public understanding of the justice system.
Both programs are intermediary PLE. Both have an end result, presumably, of improving the accuracy of legal depictions in the mass media.
Are ideas like this on the radar of Canadian PLE programmers?
April 3, 2007 at 11:45 am
Ritchie,
You make a good point about “Using the Media” and why PLE organizations have not, perhaps, used the mass media for the delivery of PLE as much as we should or could.
Most PLE organizatons, I think, have made several, if not numerous, attempts to use the media for the purposes of 1) promoting PLE events, and 2) providing ongoing PLE by means of radio, TV and print media. But there are challenges to doing so on a sustained basis. These are:
PROMOTION
I would venture to say that most PLE organizations use the media to promote PLE events and, by so doing, hope that the media coverage will not only promote the event but also provide the public with some additional PLE content.
In our experience, the media are generally quite helpful in this regard, especially the smaller media outlets, like weekly community newspapers. But the news media are, as their name suggests, primilarily interested in “news”. If your PLE event is not newsworthy (e.g. it is the same free law class on separation and divorce that you’ve been offering for years), it is unlikely that the news media will give it a lot of coverage, if any.
To obtain media coverage, the PLE group has to be doing something novel: our recent community workshops on Human Trafficking, for example, were newsworthy enough to get quite a lot of news coverage in the communities in which they were held.
I think it may be unrealitic to expect that PLE groups are going to receive a lot of news coverage of this kind unless we are constantly tackling new and, to the media, exciting topics. And let’s face it: we can’t all the time because the people we serve mostly want events that deal with the ol’ favourites such as family law, writing a will, power of attorney, etc.
ONGOING MEDIA-BASED PROGRAMS
These are great and, as you observe in your post, many PLE organizatons have or are currently working with the news media in providing ongoing PLE by means of radio, TV, and newspapers.
The challenge here is that this kind of PLE programming requires is as demanding as any other kind to be sustained. To operate the kind of media-based PLE programing for immigrant communities that we do requires a full-time staff person, plus program costs.
We made a concious and deliberate decision to re-direct staff time away from free law classes for immigrants towards a media-based approach. Not all PLE organizations would wish to re-direct resources away from an exising, successful progam to create a new one based on the media.
Our Cultural Minorities Program has the advantage in that our Co-ordinator is dealing with a variety of ethno-cultural media outlets that are rather hungry for “made-in-Canada” content. It must also be said that – in most cases – we pay these outlets for the PLE coverage they provide, and at very modest rates compared to “mainstream” news media.
Quite a few years ago, we had a lot of success with English-language newspapers throughout BC. We used to send them free articles about the law, usually serialized into three or four segments of about 700 words each. At its peak, about 70 weekly newspapers throughout BC were publishing up to 30 of our “Law Talk” articles per year.
Why did we stop? Once again, it was a question of resources. The success of our “Law Talk” Program required the services of a journalist/co-ordinator at about two to three days a week for the purposes of interviewing lawyers, writing the articles, obtaining legal reviews from the lawyers who had been interviewed, sending out the articles, monitoring the community newspapers, and constant promotion of the “Law Talk” series to other, untried newspapers.
We cancelled our “Law Talk” series when funding cuts required us to use the funds for other programs. I am convinced, however, that something “Law Talk” could operate successfully in most Canadian jurisdictions subject, of course, to the availability of sustained funding.
PUBLIC ACCESS TV PROGRAMS
As you note, Ritchie, many PLE groups have produced PLE programs for public access TV, consisting of talk shows or pre-recorded videos. Both approaches are labour intensive and, in the case of broadcast quality videos, very expensive.
But who in this day and age watches public access TV? Most Canadians don’t event watch the CBC or even commercial channels, especially now with the advent of digital cable boxes.
In your post, Ritchie, you used the past tense to describe PLE groups’ work with public access TV. We stopped doing law-related talk shows on public access TV years ago because there simply didn’t appear to be any audience. I’d be curious to know the experience of other PLE groups.
So, my final comment on PLE and the use of the news media, is great if you can do it but be aware that it requires as much time, effort and funding as any other PLE programming to do it well.
Gordon
April 11, 2007 at 12:34 pm
[...] April 11th, 2007 If it’s safe to say that Canadian PLE has not yet fully exploited the mass media, then I should definitely point out that YouTube is wholly uncharted [...]