It had to be a little painful: just when Google ponied up $1.65 billion for YouTube earlier this month, producer Tom Weinberg was finally preparing to launch Media Burn (mediaburn.org), the Chicago-based streaming-video site he says he was working on before YouTube was a glimmer in Chad and Steve’s eye. Weinberg’s been making and promoting independent video since 1972, right after portable cameras were introduced and the genre was born. He created the WTTW video showcase Image Union and produced it for 11 years, then spent four seasons at the helm of The 90s, which brought indie video from all over the world to PBS. His resume includes an arm’s-length list of other video programs and television series as well as teaching posts that stretch from primary school to college. He cofounded TVTV, which pioneered the use of handheld cameras for broadcast, created TWTV, a for-profit production company, and founded the Fund for Innovative TV, Media Burn’s parent organization, which he runs out of a storefront on Irving Park near the Kennedy–each focused on alternative, offbeat, socially progressive documentaries. After 30 years Weinberg had accumulated an archive of 4,000 videotapes, many of which were beginning to deteriorate, so in 2001 he and his FITV colleagues founded yet another organization, now called the Media Burn Independent Archive, to get those taped pieces of history transferred to digital media before they were lost.
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It Ain’t Rushdie
