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In web and multimedia
University Channel's Donna Liu switches from soundbites to the rich context of full-length university events
By Bill Densmore, MGP Editor
Feb 22, 2006, 14:14

(View the Media Giraffe profile of Donna Liu)

As she likes to put it, Donna Liu spent 21 years of her life "chopping people down to sound bites" as a producer at CNN, the U.S. cable news network. Now she's taking a different approach.

In 2005, now a researcher at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, Liu realized the growth of the broadband Internet was creating a new outreach opportunity for U.S. colleges and universities -- the opportunity to bring lectures and events to a audience that previously might not have even know they occurred. "It's amazing how many schools record these and ust put the tapes on the shelves. Hopefully we are building a platform," says Liu.

Why did Liu take on the idea, which went public in July 2005 and now has about 20 contributing institutional members?

"You know, it seemed like a good idea, it seemed like I had the wherewithall to carry it off and hopefully contribute something to the public, faciliate some kind of betterment, something to the public sphere," she replies. "I think that in some ways,and this is nothing against CNN because I have a tremendous amount of respect of the service, but 24-hour news created a culture of information dissemination. I'm now going through my anti-24hour news phase where I am sort of overcompensating for chopping people down into soundbites over the years. I am now giving people the full context and maybe we'll restore full oratory in that context. The 24-hour news is good for headlines but not good for really thoughtfull discussion on issues."

Liu went to leaders at Princeton with her idea for the University Channel -- a website which would cache or point to MP3, streaming audio and video files of important lectures, talks and events. Charter membership by founding institutions cost $30,000 as a seed for the idea, and year-to-year membership is $3,000. Once five charter members are on board, University Channel will be on a more permanent footing.

"My first focus was to build the protoptype and get it up and running and then get everybody to sort of buy into the idea," she recalled in a Jan, 2006 interview. "The next step is to find the longterm funding, frankly. the options are quite good. We are rounding up our charter membres right now and those are the unviersitieis that will be coming with us to the foundations."

Because of her TV background, Liu thought at first of a TV "channel", on the web. But she says podcasting took off by wildfire and she realized it is going to be the preferred presentation technology for lectures. She says she is often taking in video, stripped off the audio, and making audio MP3 podcasts. Right now she does much of this manually. Eventually, she hopes to manage streams directly from host institutions, not from UC's servers, in audio and also MPEG-2, broadcast-quality video. The video would come for a central server, for feeding cable and public-access channels.

Liu joined CNN in 1983 when it was a one-room operation. She left in 2001. Over those years, she was a newscast producer for a fair amount of time, then some feature production, some, field work during major events, and the last six years more of a manager, launching the CNN Asia production center and Asian focus programming. She came to Princeton on a teaching fellowship in 2002 in the humanities council, a fellowship which invites working jornalists to come and share their practical experience with students.

"When I was here," she recalls. "I realized what a wealth of material there was, and being a TV person, my inclination was to ask -- is anyone recording this? And they were, but they had no place to show it."  So she started doing a lot of cold-calling to universities, fishing through their websites, finding sympathetic faculty, media-relationships people and technical people. "And so often I would eventually come across someone who would say they were sitting looking at a lot of tapes on shelves and wondering what they could do with them all," she recalls.

University Channel would have been impossible even a few years ago. It would have been too expensive to maintain, she says. But the emergence of simple blogging software made it easy to launch and maintain UC's website. The service's tech requirements are pretty humble, she says, other than bandwith to handle multimedia traffic -- which so far Princeton has provided.

The biggest headache -- varying formats among the various institutions she deals with. She spends lots of time converting files from one format to another.

Liu is trying to avoid having to charge for the service, even though others have told her that will become unrealistic. She feels the essential mission of colleges and universities is to transfer knowledge to the public, so she hopes a way will be found to finance the work of University Channel within that context. She also is relying upon the member institutions to sort of "curate" what they submit.

"It is kind of Wiki-like I suppose in the sense that we are asking the contributors to make good decisions about what they choose to submit and it won't work if I don't know who it is," she says.

University Channel is not alone in trying to move academic talks into the public sphere. But it seems to be the only resource focused on the web and seeking material nationally. WGBH television in Boston has the WGBH Forum (http://forum.wgbh.org/wgbh/), which focuses on events in the Boston area, and the University of Washington has Research Channel -- a satellite-driven video srevice.  "We are certainly encouraging of each other's efforts but it was hard to find a way to mesh the operations," she says. "I'm not sure what it was. We had trouble finding ways to actually combine operations. So we went a separate way."