"All this adds up to a criticism that has been levied at high-profile Kickstarter campaigns before: Crowdfunding is theoretically supposed to bolster charities, start-ups, independent artists, small-business owners and other projects that actually need the financial support of the masses to succeed. It’s not supposed to be co-opted by companies with profit motives and private investors of their own … which, despite Burton’s charisma, is exactly what the Rainbow reboot is."
Says who?
Look, it's a consensual relationship between backers and people looking for crowdfunding. Obviously outright fraud is wrong, but the article isn't alleging that this is anywhere close to that -- everyone agrees that they're asking for money for what they say they want money for. (And corporations with profit motives and outside investors are, oddly enough, a hedge against the biggest problem with crowdfunding -- the risk that the product won't be delivered upon. "[C]harities, start-ups, independent artists, small-business owners" are more likely to fail to deliver than an otherwise successful business that turns to crowdfunding to support a project.)
Yes, exactly. The other half of the article feels exactly the same: "PBS decided to kill the show, so LeVar is obviously wrong for wanting to continue anyway". It doesn't present an argument that teaching language is more important than creating a desire to consume books; it just appeals to PBS's authority.
But aside from the article's shortcomings, I do agree with their sentiment. You typically see Kickstarter pages explain what they need the money for in some level of detail -- who would want to give strangers money otherwise?
The idea of promoting literature to children is great, but that's just a mission statement. The entire pitch is frustratingly unspecific about what exactly they're making with their million dollars. I can take some pretty good guesses, but why should backers need to guess at that?
I haven't really checked out the Kickstarter -- Reading Rainbow doesn't tickle my nostalgia fancy as much as some people, so while I'm glad they have a chance to contribute if they want, I'm not really interested in it myself.
But when the history of this day and age is written, we're going to look back at Kickstarter as a candle in the darkness -- right now it's one of the very few ways in which "new media" is grappling seriously with the idea of figuring out how to get consumers pay content producers for content they want, rather than requiring content producers to figure out how to turn their creative endeavor into a convenient medium for advertising. The way some people want to throw it under the bus just because people are actually using it to make money rather than keeping it "pure" for the starving artist annoys me. I want people to make money off Kickstarter. I want more and more content to be made because it's what consumers want, not because it's how advertisers can reach consumers.
"Says who? Look, it's a consensual relationship between backers and people looking for crowdfunding."
Well, I do, for one. I watched the video and read the kickstarter page, and came close to donating. But the more I learned, the more I thought: "wait. this is trying to leverage my childhood nostalgia for a good public television show into a donation to what amounts to an internet startup with a paid product." And then, once I'd re-framed the project in that light I started comparing it to other worthy causes, and it didn't stack up.
The thing is, it took me a lot of thought to get to that point, and I'm pretty sure that most people just punched the money button because Levar Burton and "OMG cute childhood memories!" I'll even wager that a fair number contributed because reading and/or attention span isn't a strong suit (irony!), and they thought the thing was to bring the show back to PBS since there were lots of reading rainbow logos everywhere.
A "consensual relationship" it may be, but the old adage about a sucker being born every minute was also rooted in consensual relationships. It's why we have (had?) those pesky securities laws that prevented direct consumer solicitation of investment in private companies.
I also have a bone to pick with that paragraph. It's contradictory.
The author says that crowdfunding is theoretically supposed to bolster start-ups and small-business owners. The next sentence says that it's not supposed to be used by people with profit motives and private investors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't startups and small businesses usually have investors and want profit?
I should have said "they don't all have private investors". The article, as I read it, is making the argument that Kickstarter should only be used by entities who do not already have enough money to do whatever they are planning.
"If Reading Rainbow is so epically popular, then why was the show cancelled to begin with? And now that it’s coming back — as a for-profit company, not a charity — is it really the best vehicle for teaching literacy to “millions of children”?
So the crux of the argument is that Reading Rainbow is no longer a non-profit. I really don't care about that.
I think the other part is the audience and target demographic. Despite that, they can still have my donation, I'd rather give a bit and see them fall short than not give at all.
Here's Levar Burton explaining that funding priorities changed and that's why the show was cancelled. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi8adI4e2Lk#t=28 Basically they moved all the funding from shows that showed kids why to read into programs that taught kids how to read.
Oh I see what's going on! They cancelled it in 2009 because of their surpassing epic smartness, to create more demand for this for-profit venture, and to raise more money on kickstarter 5 years later. Washington post, hire me.
Seriously though, cancelling the show in 2009 was probably just a mistake or it could have been anyway.
I'm not saying this program was good or should be brought back (I never watched the original and don't know anything about it) but doing a hack piece on a KS campaign with such scant reasoning is not cool.
I think Star Trek is an even better example. It was under constant threat of cancellation (saved only by fans writing in), then finally moved to a death slot and killed after three seasons. Then it went on to become the second-biggest science fiction franchise ever.
I think some valid points were made. It also saddens me that "love of books" takes a back seat to "learn to read". What went wrong? Has education quality decreased? Has parenting quality decreased?
> he study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
Depends what you call literacy. The US has good rates of literacy (over 95%) but as can be seen from the study quoted in WP that doesn't seem to mean much if between 1/5 and 1/4 of the population can't use printed material to extract information.
This article might not be partial at all. WP writes say "Reading Rainbow was cancelled abruptly in 2009 after nearly three decades on the air. Per John Grant, the content director at WNED Buffalo, which co-produced the series, it would have cost “several hundred thousand dollars” to renew the show — i.e. far less than what the Kickstarter is asking for now. But neither WNED nor PBS wanted to pony up because both believed that the show was no longer the best way to teach kids reading skills. "
However if you google a little bit these two, you can find that PBS has a partnership with Washington Post. PBS said, in their website: "We’re very excited to announce this partnership because the Washington Post is an ideal partner for many reasons." Read: http://tinyurl.com/mj48log
That lead me to think that Washington Post has actually some other interests they are not mentioning here, in order to write this article against Reading Rainbow.
> In other words, when Reading Rainbow began in 1983, the big question was, “how do we get kids interested in reading?” By 2009, that question had become, “how do we teach kids to read, period?”
> Unfortunately, it’s unclear how the new, digital Reading Rainbow will address that disparity — if it chooses to at all.
Maybe it will address that disparity by recognizing that there is a disparity: those are two different things that both need to be addressed, and it was ridiculous to focus on one while completely abandoning the other in the first place (to be fair, PBS funding somewhat forced the issue).
This is Reading Rainbow continuing to go after "fostering a love of books" and no, not teaching the basics of reading. Why is that an issue?
edit: it also isn't going to be for the desktop, but for the web, something still much more ubiquitous than tablets, especially in low-income areas. Explicitly supporting and testing on the mobile web would be a great goal for them, though, if they don't already plan to do so.
Just because the focus of publicly funded programs has shifted from encouraging kids to read more to teaching them how to read does not mean that RR has become less useful or its' goal less noble, only that the checkwriters have different priorities.
That the kickstarter was so successful among the kids of yesterday speaks to its' long lasting influence and positive impact. Even if it's just nostalgia and a catchy themesong driving the money, they will certainly do some good.
In the campaign page, it states that 1 in 4 kids is illiterate in the US. Is it just me or does that seem untrue? I would of expected it to be something like 1 in 10 maybe...
Kickstarter is basically tech's closest thing to a PBS pledge drive. This is quite a bit less problematic then Sesame Street. I really don't get the writer's outrage other than he needed to fill column inches.
''' ...in 1983, the big question was, “how do we get kids interested in reading?” By 2009, that question had become, “how do we teach kids to read, period?” '''
I remember learning to read. I taught myself (mostly) because I wanted to read books. I went to a tiny rural school with 3 grades in each room. After school it was an hour or so before my dad could come get me. I sat and looked at books. When I didn't know a word, a very patient older lady, the teacher, would tell me what it was while she sat and graded papers (probably cursing my dad to herself). I learned to read in kindergarten, a full year before the rest of the class (admittedly this wasn't a high achieving school and was nearly 40 years ago).
The point is... To teach kids how to read is just like teaching anything else. Get them interested in it. Or, we can keep trying to club them over the head with reading. Even though that approach doesn't seem to be working.
>In fact, while the Kickstarter promises to deliver more books to low-income kids, there are already some hints that it’s not totally up to speed with those same kids’ digital realities. It’s well-documented fact, for instance, that low-income households are disproportionately more likely to access the Internet by cellphone. And yet Reading Rainbow wants to put its app on desktop computers first — which requires both computer ownership and high-speed Internet access. (Less than half of households earning less than $30,000 a year have high-speed broadband, per Pew.)
It looks like the writer of this article may be one of those disadvantaged illiterates. Or at least a technoilliterate. The kickstarter is about getting Reading Rainbow on the web, and thus everywhere; desktop, tablet, phones. I see no mention of any desktop-specific app, or indeed any app except the pre-existing iPad one.
One point the author makes that I'm hoping the Reading Rainbow team will address is the need for high-powered devices to consume this content. I don't think a million dollars is going to cover the subsidy needs to get this content into the hands of kids that could use it if it has to cover the cost of iPad-equivalent-performance devices to handle all the audiovisual bells and whistles that we see in the tablet app (and, to some extent, that made Reading Rainbow so much fun to watch on TV).
So I have some concern there... But in general, a project betting against devices in the future---even in the hands of at-risk demographics---being more powerful is a project that is targeting wrong. So the concern may be overblown.
Everything else in this article aside, I think the point about "fewer than half of households with less than $30k income having access to high-speed internet" is a bad one.
The flip-side of that statistic may well be "close to half of households with children below the poverty line have high-speed Internet". If that's the case today, the trendline is probably going to continue in the direction of more people getting access to high-speed Internet access.
So look at the timeline of a project like this (setting aside whether it's a good project or not, which is besides my point) and think 5 years out; think of the number of households we're already talking about with the current statistic, and how many households it'll be in the future.
It may well be more than half considering Pew made an odd decision to exclude 3G and even 4G cell phone networks from its definition of "high-speed internet."
To be fair this may not have much effect on their results now, as they say only 10% of their respondents had a smartphone but no home internet; even so, for many people cell phones give the best value and as wireless networks improve and get cheaper I bet more people drop expensive cable operators in favor of wireless--or, alternatively, people who just never saw the need for wired home internet will say "oh, this Facebook thing is neat, I can keep in touch with family and do it right here on my phone."
The WashPo article takes this into account by attempting to ding Burton for targeting "desktops first", when lower income families are more likely to access the web via phone.
But my understanding is the new Reading Rainbow will be a website, meaning it will work fine on phones if it follows modern web standards.
I'm not at all convinced that focusing on _how_ to teach kids to read is ultimately better, which was apparently one of the reasons the show was cancelled. If you give kids a reason to _want_ to learn to read then maybe the hows will fall into place.
My kids and I loved Reading Rainbow so I think whatever shape it comes back as is going to be a plus. If it's only a vehicle for LeVar advocating reading then that's good enough for me.
I actually think that Washington Post has some other interests they are not mentioning here, in order to write this article against Reading Rainbow.
WP writes say "neither WNED nor PBS wanted to pony up because both believed that the show was no longer the best way to teach kids reading skills. "
However if you google a little bit these two, you can find that PBS has a partnership with Washington Post. PBS said in their website: "We’re very excited to announce this partnership because the Washington Post is an ideal partner for many reasons." Read: http://tinyurl.com/mj48log
The problem isn't merely that they're a for-profit entity. It's that they're a for-profit entity semi-masquerading as a charity. "RRKidz," a company with multiple large, private investors, is appealing to donors' sense of altruism to receive $1 million+ in additional revenue. The investors (not donors) are all expecting a share of the profits in proportion to their investment.
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[ 11.9 ms ] story [ 315 ms ] threadSays who?
Look, it's a consensual relationship between backers and people looking for crowdfunding. Obviously outright fraud is wrong, but the article isn't alleging that this is anywhere close to that -- everyone agrees that they're asking for money for what they say they want money for. (And corporations with profit motives and outside investors are, oddly enough, a hedge against the biggest problem with crowdfunding -- the risk that the product won't be delivered upon. "[C]harities, start-ups, independent artists, small-business owners" are more likely to fail to deliver than an otherwise successful business that turns to crowdfunding to support a project.)
But aside from the article's shortcomings, I do agree with their sentiment. You typically see Kickstarter pages explain what they need the money for in some level of detail -- who would want to give strangers money otherwise?
The idea of promoting literature to children is great, but that's just a mission statement. The entire pitch is frustratingly unspecific about what exactly they're making with their million dollars. I can take some pretty good guesses, but why should backers need to guess at that?
But when the history of this day and age is written, we're going to look back at Kickstarter as a candle in the darkness -- right now it's one of the very few ways in which "new media" is grappling seriously with the idea of figuring out how to get consumers pay content producers for content they want, rather than requiring content producers to figure out how to turn their creative endeavor into a convenient medium for advertising. The way some people want to throw it under the bus just because people are actually using it to make money rather than keeping it "pure" for the starving artist annoys me. I want people to make money off Kickstarter. I want more and more content to be made because it's what consumers want, not because it's how advertisers can reach consumers.
Well, I do, for one. I watched the video and read the kickstarter page, and came close to donating. But the more I learned, the more I thought: "wait. this is trying to leverage my childhood nostalgia for a good public television show into a donation to what amounts to an internet startup with a paid product." And then, once I'd re-framed the project in that light I started comparing it to other worthy causes, and it didn't stack up.
The thing is, it took me a lot of thought to get to that point, and I'm pretty sure that most people just punched the money button because Levar Burton and "OMG cute childhood memories!" I'll even wager that a fair number contributed because reading and/or attention span isn't a strong suit (irony!), and they thought the thing was to bring the show back to PBS since there were lots of reading rainbow logos everywhere.
A "consensual relationship" it may be, but the old adage about a sucker being born every minute was also rooted in consensual relationships. It's why we have (had?) those pesky securities laws that prevented direct consumer solicitation of investment in private companies.
The author says that crowdfunding is theoretically supposed to bolster start-ups and small-business owners. The next sentence says that it's not supposed to be used by people with profit motives and private investors. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't startups and small businesses usually have investors and want profit?
So the crux of the argument is that Reading Rainbow is no longer a non-profit. I really don't care about that.
Seriously though, cancelling the show in 2009 was probably just a mistake or it could have been anyway.
This, of course, assumes perfect knowledge and efficiency. I wonder if the author of this piece would make the same sloppy argument against, say, Tell Me More, which, NPR announced this month, will be cut (http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/05/20/314256024/npr...). Or consider Firefly, the arch-example of clueless program cutting (https://www.blastr.com/2013-5-3/netflix-exec-explains-why-th...).
I'm not saying this program was good or should be brought back (I never watched the original and don't know anything about it) but doing a hack piece on a KS campaign with such scant reasoning is not cool.
> he study, the most comprehensive study of literacy ever commissioned by the U.S. government, was released in April 2002 and reapplied in 2003 giving trend data. It involved lengthy interviews of over 90,700 adults statistically balanced for age, gender, ethnicity, education level, and location (urban, suburban, or rural) in 12 states across the U.S. and was designed to represent the U.S. population as a whole. This government study showed that 21% to 23% of adult Americans were not "able to locate information in text", could not "make low-level inferences using printed materials", and were unable to "integrate easily identifiable pieces of information."
Depends what you call literacy. The US has good rates of literacy (over 95%) but as can be seen from the study quoted in WP that doesn't seem to mean much if between 1/5 and 1/4 of the population can't use printed material to extract information.
However if you google a little bit these two, you can find that PBS has a partnership with Washington Post. PBS said, in their website: "We’re very excited to announce this partnership because the Washington Post is an ideal partner for many reasons." Read: http://tinyurl.com/mj48log
That lead me to think that Washington Post has actually some other interests they are not mentioning here, in order to write this article against Reading Rainbow.
> Unfortunately, it’s unclear how the new, digital Reading Rainbow will address that disparity — if it chooses to at all.
Maybe it will address that disparity by recognizing that there is a disparity: those are two different things that both need to be addressed, and it was ridiculous to focus on one while completely abandoning the other in the first place (to be fair, PBS funding somewhat forced the issue).
This is Reading Rainbow continuing to go after "fostering a love of books" and no, not teaching the basics of reading. Why is that an issue?
edit: it also isn't going to be for the desktop, but for the web, something still much more ubiquitous than tablets, especially in low-income areas. Explicitly supporting and testing on the mobile web would be a great goal for them, though, if they don't already plan to do so.
That the kickstarter was so successful among the kids of yesterday speaks to its' long lasting influence and positive impact. Even if it's just nostalgia and a catchy themesong driving the money, they will certainly do some good.
I remember learning to read. I taught myself (mostly) because I wanted to read books. I went to a tiny rural school with 3 grades in each room. After school it was an hour or so before my dad could come get me. I sat and looked at books. When I didn't know a word, a very patient older lady, the teacher, would tell me what it was while she sat and graded papers (probably cursing my dad to herself). I learned to read in kindergarten, a full year before the rest of the class (admittedly this wasn't a high achieving school and was nearly 40 years ago).
The point is... To teach kids how to read is just like teaching anything else. Get them interested in it. Or, we can keep trying to club them over the head with reading. Even though that approach doesn't seem to be working.
It looks like the writer of this article may be one of those disadvantaged illiterates. Or at least a technoilliterate. The kickstarter is about getting Reading Rainbow on the web, and thus everywhere; desktop, tablet, phones. I see no mention of any desktop-specific app, or indeed any app except the pre-existing iPad one.
So I have some concern there... But in general, a project betting against devices in the future---even in the hands of at-risk demographics---being more powerful is a project that is targeting wrong. So the concern may be overblown.
The flip-side of that statistic may well be "close to half of households with children below the poverty line have high-speed Internet". If that's the case today, the trendline is probably going to continue in the direction of more people getting access to high-speed Internet access.
So look at the timeline of a project like this (setting aside whether it's a good project or not, which is besides my point) and think 5 years out; think of the number of households we're already talking about with the current statistic, and how many households it'll be in the future.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/29/how-pew-rese...
To be fair this may not have much effect on their results now, as they say only 10% of their respondents had a smartphone but no home internet; even so, for many people cell phones give the best value and as wireless networks improve and get cheaper I bet more people drop expensive cable operators in favor of wireless--or, alternatively, people who just never saw the need for wired home internet will say "oh, this Facebook thing is neat, I can keep in touch with family and do it right here on my phone."
But my understanding is the new Reading Rainbow will be a website, meaning it will work fine on phones if it follows modern web standards.
My kids and I loved Reading Rainbow so I think whatever shape it comes back as is going to be a plus. If it's only a vehicle for LeVar advocating reading then that's good enough for me.
WP writes say "neither WNED nor PBS wanted to pony up because both believed that the show was no longer the best way to teach kids reading skills. "
However if you google a little bit these two, you can find that PBS has a partnership with Washington Post. PBS said in their website: "We’re very excited to announce this partnership because the Washington Post is an ideal partner for many reasons." Read: http://tinyurl.com/mj48log