PBS plans Planet Forward

It’s one thing to create your own Web video and submit it to YouTube or put it on your Facebook page. It’s quite another to create a Web video and submit it to PBS.

That’s what PBS is proposing with its new series, Planet Forward, which will air quarterly on PBS over the next two years. Starting March 6, 2009, the program – a partnership between the George Washington University Public Affairs Project, Nebraska Educational Telecommunications, Public Agenda and Sunburst Creative Productions — will accept submissions on how people think America’s energy future should be tackled at www.planetforward.org.

 Planet Forward will be hosted by Frank Sesno, former CNN Washington Bureau Chief and the director of GW’s Public Affairs Project. On the Planet Forward Web site, Sesno encourages people to submit anything from a “photo to an op-ed to digital animation or even a poem.”

 Here’s where the difference between YouTube and PBS comes into play: “Base your argument on fact, experience, research, the real world,” exhorts Sesno. Most YouTube video makers just want their audience to think their video is really cool; they aren’t too concerned with whether it makes logical sense.

Planet Forward’s audience will probably be a little less broad than your typical YouTube crowd. A panel of experts, scientists, policy-makers, business leaders and citizen journalists will watch and then discuss the best submissions during the show’s live broadcast on April 15, 2009.

Planet Forward is public affairs for the next generation – think innovation, not pontification,” says the project’s press release. News organizations do need to do something dramatically different to engage younger audiences in news. Perhaps this is it.

 Of course, an entire network already exists where this sort of thing takes place every day. Remember Current TV, Al Gore’s thing? A check on its Web site reveals it’s still going strong, although I’ve never seen it on a cable system.

 Maybe Planet Forward will reveal what I would like to know: how far do people really want to take their social networking? Sure they want to put videos of their kids and reports of their weekend activities up on their profile pages, but do they really want their TV shows to be produced this way? Thus far, I have found TV shows that overtly try to integrate social networking – CNN’s Rick Sanchez a huge case in point – to be pretty irritating. On the other hand, aren’t these shows really just an updated version of the standard call-in show, which Larry King is still doing today?