In these dog days of August, we could all use a little refreshment, right? What could be cooler than some skin-tingling multimedia projects? Check these out and tell me what you think:

1.  Love Letters to the Future. Xenophile Media and Greenpeace launched this stunning project last year, leading up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen (December, 2009.) The multiplatform initiative featured an online "open stage for the public to share messages of hope for the future so that children of today and tomorrow will know we cared about the planet." People from 128 countries contributed love letters and the top vote-getters were encoded and placed in a waterproof, shock-proof time capsule, so that they could be played on any device 100 years from now, assuming there's still human life on the planet.

Watch this powerful trailer about this innovative project and its immersive, interactive gaming component in which Maya, a character who lives in the dysutopian future sends cryptic messages back to us, urging us to take action now. Guaranteed to give you chills.
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Did this ever happen to you? You stumble upon a book, film or radio program that brings together a lot of disparate ideas and thoughts that have been lurking in your mind? Serendipity.

This week, I've been thinking alot about the battle over Arizona's immigration law, our country's real dependence on immigrant labor to produce and harvest our food supply, the beauty of the Spanish language and the importance to me that my own children learn it and love it. And, I've been pondering the positive - mostly potential - role of media to create common ground between people of diverse perspectives and cultures.

So, here's what happened: I was in the library with my daughter and a beautiful bilingual children's book just flew off the shelves and into my arms: Radio Man/Don Radio by Arthur Dorros. It's old already, published by Harper Collins in 1993. But it's a sweet story about a boy and his family of migrant farm laborers who work their way from the Texas border through Arizona, California and Washington state, picking cabbages, melons, cherries and apples. 

Along the way, they listen to radio: Spanish language community radio; stations that are part of the pioneering Radio Bilingue network. Diego is nicknamed "Don Radio" because he carries a radio with him and finds these voices in the wilderness, broadcasting to the campesinos. The book is filled with Latino DJs and announcers in every town who reach out and foster a sense of community and belonging for those passing through. This short picture book is really a love letter to radio that goes straight for the corazon.

It doesn't dig deep into the reality of agricultural work: the endless days of back-breaking, finger-bleeding, sun-baked, stoop labor in fields of pesticides and pests. That story was told on a recent memorable segment of NPR's Tell Me More by United Farm Workers President Arturo Rodriquez, whose union has launched a clever social media campaign to cultivate more respect for the people who toil in the soil to bring food to American tables. "Take Our Jobs" offers to help unemployed U.S. citizens land agricultural jobs, work that clearly is outside the comfort zone for most of us. Now, there's a radio diary I'd like to hear: "Gringo's Field Trip."  read more »

Credo, the politically progressive activist phone company, has launched an online petition to urge the White House Correspondents' Association to give retired reporter Helen Thomas' coveted front row seat in the White House Briefing Room to NPR, instead of FOX News.

In a just-launched Facebook and social media campaign, Credo links to NPR News Editor David Sweeney's letter to the WHCA applying for the newly-vacant seat, in which he details NPR's audience growth over the last decade as evidence for why NPR deserves this prime position.

He writes, "Since 2000, NPR's average weekly audience has grown by approximately 54%, exceeding the growth rate of other broadcast media and in contrast to continuing circulation declines in print media."  read more »

"Sometimes you get lucky, and what people do is just poetic."

That's the voice of Natasha Trethewey, one of the poets whose work was featured as part of independent producer Lu Olkowski's In Verse project during the pilot season of MQ2.

Trethewey is interviewed in this week's
Book Bench column in the New Yorker magazine. Danielle Blau asks the Pulitzer prize-winner about documentary poetry, "How does being tied to the truth affect your ability to make poetic leaps."

It's a powerful question for a poet who must live with some painful truths about her family: Her stepfather murdered her mother; her brother did prison time on drug charges.  read more »

The killing of Oscar Grant, a 22-year old black man, by Johannes Mehserle, a white transit police officer, on New Year's Day in 2009 was a tragic event that sent ripples of rage through Oakland, California, and beyond.

The cop thought he was pulling out his taser, but instead drew his gun, and shot Grant at point blank range before a bunch of witnesses, including Karina Vargas, whose cell phone video recording of the incident would go viral and raise the promise of citizen journalism in the pursuit of justice.

Youth Radio, the Oakland-based multimedia training and youth development organization has been covering this story from the beginning, through Mehserle's Los Angeles trial and conviction for involuntary manslaughter, a verdict of deep disappointment and disillusionment to the Grant family and their many supporters.

Following up on its in-depth reporting, commentary and live coverage of protests and the trial, Youth Radio has just published a digital magazine called "Grant Station: A Killing and the Aftermath," featuring a timeline, photographs and reflections.  read more »

I've always been intrigued by hybrids: Makers who mash different media, meld fantasy with fact to tell stories, or present familiar, yet altered, images that make us think differently about reality as know it, or history as we've experienced it.

There are some contemporary/emerging visual artists who are getting attention for this kind of work. Two examples that I've recently discovered include Alexa Meade, a young painter I read about in the Washington Post, who creates living portraits using the human body (including her own, pictured below) as canvas; and Ben Heine, a Belgian artist and journalist (covered by the Peta Pixel blog) whose series called "Pencil vs. Camera" blends photography and sketches to super-impose new realities.

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Place + Memory Project is one of the new media life forms created as part of the pilot phase of MQ2. Shea Shackelford and Jennifer Deer launched a wiki platform where anyone from anywhere can upload content about beloved sites that no longer exist in the real world, but can be remembered in the virtual world.

With the advent of the iPhone, mobile gaming and augmented reality applications, the intersection of "place" and "memory" is reaching a new level for user experience and engagement. This is truly The Next Big Thing. Let me share with you some examples of different applications that aim to revive our sense of history and restore our sense of place.

HistoryPin is partnering with Google to create a digital time machine that enables you to share, map and view images from the past.

Are you ready to climb up into the dusty attic, go deep into the moldy cellar, and dig out any sepia-tinged historical photos to contribute to this global image memory bank? 10,676 photos have been uploaded to HistoryPin so far.  read more »

With this post, we inaugurate a series of occasional guest blog columns by several finalists in the pilot round of MQ2. These individuals represent some of the most inspiring and visionary talent in the public media world. We hope their posts will illustrate how MQ2 cracked open some of the best minds of our generation, sparked new thinking and unleashed creative possibilities for independent producers. Our first post is by Rose Bianchini.

What is an innovative storyteller?

It is hard to believe it has been more than a year since I got the call that I was a MQ2 finalist. It was a thrill to imagine and pitch the cross-platform project of my dreams. (What was that project? Leap of Faith was a multi-platform documentary proposal about individuals with unconventional and at times wacky beliefs, such as snake bites leading to salvation and the belief that aliens walk amongst us.) I didn’t get the grant in the end, but it certainly was the beginning of me wrapping my head around cross-platform storytelling.

I love that we live in a time in which young people have no recollection or experience of life before being online or playing video games. Yet, what remains true is that we still long for compelling stories. We identify with characters and people on quests to find themselves, survive unrequited love and family dramas.

I, like many creative souls, do many things. I write, make art, animations and films. I have worked in radio, TV, film and new media. I am cursed and blessed with a need to express myself and will use any medium at my disposal to do this. Yet what I have learned in the era of new media and trans-media storytelling is that I am not alone in my multi-level approach to pulling an audience into a new world.

Here are some projects I’ve worked on, and continue to work on, since I was nominated for MQ2. I have directed a music video for a talented musician named Gentlemen Reg, which featured a few drag queens and some other gender-bending folks grooving down. The video aired on "traditional" broadcast outlets such as MTV, but made its biggest splash online on You Tube and MySpace where it was featured.   read more »

It's one small step for AIR, but a giant leap for coverage of mental health issues.

Ann Heppermann, co-creator of Mapping Main Street, and Peabody Award-winner Nancy Solomon, have been named winners of the highly competitive Rosalynn Carter Fellowship for Mental Health Journalism. That's two out of 6 awards to U.S.-based journalists.

Ann and Nancy will receive $10,000 and a year to produce ground-breaking investigative stories that will change the way we think about mental illness. They will travel to the Carter Center in Atlanta for intensive training from mental health experts. And, they get to meet the former First Lady herself, a pioneering advocate for mental health parity.

Ann will produce a multi-platform project about pre-teen anorexia, in collaboration with Ms. Magazine and the Kitchen Sisters' Hidden World of Girls project. Nancy will explore how K-12 schools are failing students who face serious mental health challenges.  read more »

There's something about being in a crowd of people sharing an experience that's so exhilarating. Some of my most spiritual moments have been at marches and other public events where thousands of people have joined together to make a statement  – or make a difference. When I am in the midst of a sea of diverse humanity united by a common purpose, I am awed by a sense of connection; I feel a calming peace and the electric current of hope and possibility pulsing through the masses.

Where am I going with meditation? Well, I think it's that same sense of engagement and empowerment that makes crowd-sourcing so compelling. And each day, some entrepreneurial-type is finding a new way to harness the power of the people and our vast and seemingly boundless ability to share information and resources from the ground up, redefining mass media as media made by the masses. Today, I'm sharing with you just a few examples of crowd collaborations I find inspiring.

You've Got the Power

A Girl Story is an animated web series about a Tarla, a 6 year old girl in India who desperately wants to go to school. Her story is typical of many rural girls who are denied an education and forced into child labor, early marriage or even slavery. The series is progressively crowd-funded; it cleverly invites curious viewers to make a donation in order to unlock subsequent webisodes.The funds raised go directly to support the education of girls in India through Project Nanhi Kali, which says its the first-ever donation-based film series.   read more »