About Purple States

What Is Purple States?

Purple States¨ is a media company with a pioneering method for capturing the authenticity of user-generated content in a premium format that creates value for major media platforms and advertisers. We transform the voices and experience of real people from different backgrounds into a single coherent narrative: a Òcitizen filterÓ on issues that matter to the public. Our people powered video ranges from professionally shot documentary-style series featuring an unscripted 'cast' of real people, to professionally directed and edited series crafted from self-filmed footage submitted by people we recruit, train, and manage. In 2008, Purple States video aired on NYTimes.com and washingtonpost.com, local television, Verizon's v-cast channel, cnn.com, and CNN. Purple States is an LLC with a nonprofit partner. We are featured on the website of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media.

A professionally produced video narrative with a cast of real people.

Purple States video engages on-air and on-line audiences on a range of topics and concerns through the personal experiences of real people. The members of each Purple States team are carefully selected to reflect the range of demographic and other characteristics appropriate to the season's programming, whether that is election coverage or how the economic crisis looks from Main Street. They bring the depth of their own life experience to their interpretation of the news and Ð in the Ôreality newsÕ series Ð to their relationships with each other. The members of a Purple States team are citizen journalists, but not in the usual sense. They are not isolated man-on-the-street videographers, but members of a systematically deployed team who together report on news from the frontlines. The Purple States election-season cast included a 24-year-old florist - now college student - from Iowa, a laid-off manufacturing professional and libertarian from New England, a 33-year-old Baptist mother of three and teacher from South Carolina, a gun-carrying Cuban-American art gallery director from Florida, and a grandfather from Southern California who works for AT&T and lives with his Mexican-American son-in-law. The 50/50/50 self-filmed series (fifty bloggers from fifty states in fifty days) assembled the experiences of bloggers from across the political and economic spectrum into a cross-country story about the way the economic crisis was affecting ordinary people. WhatÕs next? Purple States continues to develop programming for major news platforms on themes that lend themselves to people-powered coverage. We are also in discussion with television networks about longer-form Ôreality news,Õ documentaries, and dramas that translate cultural, economic or political clashes into powerfully personal narratives. And we are taking the self-filmed series global: in World Without Walls, candid video from one person from each of the 192 UN Member nations that will vividly convey how they experience life on shared dimensions, including water, the condition of women, education, and other UN Millennium Campaign goals. Purple States TV Contacts Purple States was created and is managed by Dr. Cynthia Farrar. Dr. Farrar is nationally-recognized for her work in orchestrating non-partisan conversations among randomly-invited citizens. Her experience includes extensive work with MacNeil/Lehrer Productions and local public television. Contact: cynthia@purplestates.tv Strategic Partners: contact Co-producer John Kennedy 828-713-6872 johnny@purplestates.tv