New: Tyee Master Classes

Speaking of independent media, skill-sharing schemes, and revenue diversification, I’ll be putting on a D.I.Y. documentary course this May in Vancouver.

It’s one of a suite of seven Master Classes organized by The Tyee, Canada’s multi-Murrow-award-winning little online news magazine that could.

There’s some exciting stuff on offer – Sean Holman, Mr. Public Eye himself, has a workshop called “Finding Stories in Public Documents: Introduction to Investigative Journalism”.

Bill Tieleman’s course is called “How to Beat the Odds: Low Budget Campaigns That Win”.

The full menu is available here. Food writing, memoirs, photography, data scraping — you really don’t have to think of yourself as a “journalist” to get something out of these classes.

For me, it’s a return to familiar ground – I used to be a video instructor at the Pacific Cinémathèque. That’s why I wanted our recent documentary project, Renaissance Man, to have a . And that’s why I’m mentoring a youth video group this week at my old high school.

I’m excited to see how much we can cram into two days.

At the same time, this is a way to subsidize my own projects and experiments, more of which will be going up on this blog soon. And it’s a way to fund operations at the Tyee — a living model of efficient, editorially independent media that deserves our support.

Most importantly, the Master Classes are an attempt to equip members of the wider Tyee community with new skills, ideas and contacts. I think that’s a good thing for the public conversation.

Vancouver people: drop me a line here if you have any questions about the workshop.