Here at CIR we are as concerned about a sustainable future for investigative reporting as we are about producing high-impact journalism that is important to you. For more than three decades, CIR has relied largely on foundations to support our reporting. We are hard at work now to identify more diverse funding sources, including building our individual donor base. We know that our readers, viewers and listeners are a diverse group and that, if you chose to support our work financially, you will have equally diverse goals for your giving.
Some of you may be able to contribute $100, $500, or even $1,000 a year to support our hard hitting investigative work (you can do that over here. Others may be interested in supporting a specific investigation, like the Civil Rights Cold Case Project or The Price of Sex. Still others of you may want one simple way to support a variety of sites you like and depend on.
Introducing Kachingle, one of the first crowdsourcing services that you can use to support your favorite online news sites and blogs. Kachingle is simple, user-centric and user-controlled alternative to cumbersome subscriptions, paywalls, and pay-per-article plans some media outlets are considering. It requires virtually no effort on your part - you just become a Kachingler, giving $5 a month through PayPal, and then click the Kachingle medallion on the sites you want to support. No credit cards, no passwords. Kachingle will keep track of your visits to each of the sites you've selected and at the end of each month, your monthly pay-in to Kachingle (minus small service fees) will be distributed proportionally among your chosen sites based on your visits.
We hope you will become a Kachingler, helping to support journalism's future online, including the time and resource intensive investigative reporting that CIR produces. Your support alone won't save investigative reporting but if enough people decide to start supporting the journalism they care about, collectively we have the power to help ensure that this kind of reporting thrives in the future. Once you become a Kachingler, you can share which sites you support with colleagues, friends, and family (and soon Twitter followers and others), and turn them on to the sites you visit.
Consider signing up and beginning to support CIR and the other sites you like today.
Join Facing History and CIR for a screening and discussion of Banished, our 2007 documentary produced with Marco Williams of Two Tone Productions.
At the turn of the last century, in communities across the U.S., white residents forced thousands of black families to flee their homes. Many of these towns remain almost entirely white to this day. Banished tells the story of three of these communities and their black descendants, who return to learn their shocking histories.
The event on December 3rd will include excerpts of the film, followed by a conversation with director Marco Williams. A member of the faculty at NYU, Williams is a documentary and fiction film director. His films have been broadcast on cable and public television and have been screened at film festivals throughout the world.
As part of Facing History and Ourselves' national series of Community Conversations, this event is free and open to the public. Reservations are recommended. Click here to RSVP. For more information about the event, contact Karen Foster at 510-786-2500 x226 or karen_foster@facing.org.
This inspiring documentary thriller traces its protagonist's journey from US Marine to upper-echelon Defense Department and Rand Corporation analyst to Vietnam War whistle-blower, while reminding us how democracy relies on our potentially “dangerous” men and women in and out of government.
Sat. October 17, 6:45PM, Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center 1
Sun. October 18, 3:15PM, CinéArts @ Sequoia 2
For tickets and more information, visit the Mill Valley Film Festival website.
tel: 877.874.6333
Check out CIR Executive Director Robert Rosenthal's blog post about his time working on the Pentagon Papers project at The New York Times.
Crude, a lively and gripping documentary directed by Joe Berlinger, follows the shifting course of a lawsuit brought by 30,000 Ecuadoreans against Chevron over its responsibility for the country’s contaminated waters and streams. Part of The San Francisco Film Society's second annual Investigative Documentary Week, the film opens for a one-week run at the Landmark Lumiere (San Francisco) and Shattuck (Berkeley) Theaters on Friday, September 25th.
Following the 12:00 noon screening at the Lumiere on Saturday the 26th, CIR board member and San Francisco Chronicle editor-at-large Phil Bronstein will moderate a discussion with Berlinger and Robert Rosenthal, CIR's executive director. The panel, called Slippery Slopes, will address the functions, roles and processes of documentary film as a form of investigative journalism.
Free admission to the Forum; tickets to the film screening must be purchased separately. More information and a theatrical trailer of Crude are available at www.sffs.org.
The Center for Investigative Reporting is proud to co-present Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, directed by Andres Østergaard, and A Day Late in Oakland, directed by Zachary Stauffer, at the 52nd San Francisco International Film Festival – April 23 to May 7, 2009.
I was an intern at the Festival years ago. We are lucky to have it here in the Bay Area and I encourage you to go. It literally brings the world to San Francisco with more than 150 films from everywhere you could imagine (Burkina Faso anyone?) and many of the directors and actors in attendance. I hope you can join CIR for screenings of these films:
Burma VJ – Reporting from a Closed Country
This harrowing, breathless documentary revisits the 2007 protests by hundreds of silent monks and thousands of chanting citizens against Burma’s military dictatorship, using the stunning concealed-camcorder footage smuggled abroad by a network of youthful correspondents that calls itself the Democratic Voice of Burma. Danish filmmaker Anders Ostergaard artfully merges breathless sequences from the smuggled tapes with recreations of the DVB bureau chief Joshua’s cell phone conversations, crafting a harrowing narrative that thrusts us into the protestors’ giddy celebrations and the terrifying aftermath. Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country demonstrates the potential of consumer technology to divert power to the people, but above all salutes the heroes who pressed “record” within eyeshot of the secret police. – Michael Fox
This film screens on May 1 at 6:30PM and on May 2 at 9:15PM at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas, and again on May 6 at 8:45PM at the Pacific Film Archive.
A Day Late in Oakland
On the morning after reporter Chauncey Bailey’s murder in 2007, a sordid tale of corruption and abuse stemming from Oakland’s once-mighty Your Black Muslim Bakery unraveled in the press. That same day, a police raid in the works for months stormed the business and found the murder weapon. This short film was made by Zachary Stauffer while he was a student in the documentary program at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley.
This short film screens with Speaking in Tongues on April 26 at 3:15PM, on May 2 at 3:30PM, and on May 7 at 2:30PM at the Sundance Kabuki Cinemas.
For tickets and information visit www.sffs.org or call 925-866-9559.
The turnout was astounding for ITVS’ Community Cinema screening of Banished at the Oakland (Calif.) Museum last night. Four hundred people watched the film and many more were turned away. (A second screening at the Museum will likely be added in February.) The audience reaction was enthusiastic and animated and the discussion afterward looked at modern day displacements, specifically post-Katrina New Orleans and urban gentrification in Oakland.
As with all of the Banished screenings I’ve been to, audiences are interested in exploring how our society as a whole can explore reparations and reconciliation as a way to right past wrongs. ITVS is holding screenings of the film all over the country leading up to the February 19th PBS broadcast on Independent Lens.