Over at Zeek, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser joins the debate over the closure of JDub Records with a smart and wide-ranging essay.
She begins by putting the issue in a larger context, noting that “the big wave of hip, innovative Jewish media seems to have washed out."
Green Kaiser divides the responses to JDub’s demise into two camps: 1) those who say the Jewish community needs to offer sustained financial support to innovative new Jewish media initiatives beyond their initial start-up period, and 2) those who argue that such projects need to find business models that will make them self-sustaining.
Both views have something to recommend them, Green Kaiser writes, but ultimately she comes down on the side of the former view:
[T]he business model for innovative Jewish media, particularly media attempting to reach the 20-35 demographic, is broken. But I don’t think there IS a business model for that demographic, not for Jewish media.
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Noting that the media business in general is struggling to find successful models, Green Kaiser writes that Jewish initiatives have it particularly tough because they have only a small potential audience.
But what are we to do about it?
Green Kaiser writes that Evangelical Christians offer an example of a group that is committed to funding initiatives aimed at young people. She then offers a creative proposal on how we could express our communal commitment to engaging young Jews by involving them in shaping their own Jewish media landscape:
One variation is to take open source culture seriously, and to accept that most young people, and particularly ones less likely to affiliate Jewishly, do not want to be told by others who to be or how to behave. Suppose Jewish funders set up a kind of digital currency that the “target audience” could spend on its own. Give young Jews a thousand dollars of Jewish Media Credits, and let them decide how to spend them. This could encourage this population to recognize the value of such content and the need to pay for it. It’s a model closer to what PresenTense is pioneering in Israel, and one that perhaps is better suited to the age of Web 2.0 and user-generated content.
Her full article is well worth reading.
Also worth reading: Over at the Forward, Jacob Berkman reviews JDub’s history, accomplishments and tribulations.
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