Event Review: Children, Youth and Media Conference

Allstream Centre at Exhibition Place
Toronto, Canada

The Alliance for Children and Television (ACT), which is celebrating its 35th anniversary, hosted its 2009 Children, Youth and Media conference last week, with a full day of presentations, panels and workshops. The event is but one part of ACT’s overall mission to bring together producers, researchers, broadcasters and other members of the kids’ industry to consider the importance of children’s programming.

"The whole idea of this event, essentially, is taking the time to go back to the basics, to go back to what it is that we’re all trying to do, which is making the best quality programming for kids," explains ACT’s executive director, Caroline Fortier. To achieve this, the Alliance organized a range of events for its Toronto conference that focused on bringing to the table the main topics in children’s programming that must be understood in order to produce better content in the future.

A true highlight of the event was the presentation of results from a national study on Canadian children’s and youth programming. ACT’s privileged attendees were provided with a unique, timely analysis of children’s programming in Canada at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, thanks to the generous support of CTVglobemedia (CTVgm) through the CTVgm/CHUM tangible benefits. This groundbreaking national study is led by the Université de Montréal communications department’s Centre for Youth and Media Studies under the supervision of Dr. André Caron. In the first of two phases, the group was looking to provide an accurate snapshot of what Canadian kids were being presented with in the media landscape.

Caron, who has been with ACT nearly since the beginning, explains: "We really wanted to have something that was representative of the programming that was out there, and therefore we wanted to include as many channels as we could. We were targeting 2- to 12-year-olds and only 2- to 12-year-olds. That’s very important because when we talk about kids, sometimes we’re talking about families, sometimes were talking about teens, sometimes we’re talking about preschoolers. It doesn’t serve anybody to mix all those categories together. We really wanted to focus on 2 to 12, obviously looking at preschool versus 6 to 12, but looking at that and trying to get it in terms of a representative sample, which is very difficult to get when you’re talking about so many hours of programming."

More than 1,000 hours of children’s programming was recorded over a week’s time from 19 different broadcasters across Canada. Of that, a representative sample of some 200 hours was selected for analysis. Caron says that while they were looking at some issues that have been presented in the past, such as the presence of violent content and issues with gender representation, the study also wanted to go a step further. "We really wanted to start to look at what were the social values, the cultural values, the identity markers that you could find in this programming, if there were any."

To view a video about the study, please click here.

Among the key findings, the main characters’ emotional well-being was assessed for the first time. Fortier says this was a pleasant surprise for her within the results. "Thanks to André’s intuition and the fact that they’re basing this criteria on strong research, it’s very interesting because this is something that probably shows some kind of a value that we have. If we value emotional well-being and mental health, this is something that is showing in our programs. That is something that we need to stress. We’re very happy that in our programs, the main characters that were analyzed were exhibiting strong positive feelings in a very significant way. This is one of the things that we’re very very happy with."

Another important finding Fortier points to is the integration of Canadian culture within the programs presented to children. "We see that Canadian characters engage more in cultural production activities. This is something that we’re very proud of because we’re trying to make sure that kids are engaged in our Canadian culture in some way or another. So if the characters are themselves engaged in cultural production activities, that’s a very good sign."

Caron says that he was encouraged by just how many of the results had positive findings. "Coming into this research, what I found interesting is that there’s a lot of media discourse about violence and hypersexualization and things like that, of which there are elements obviously out there. But when you really look at, in a systematic way, what are we proposing to our children, our 2- to 12-year-olds, we were also quite surprised to find such explicit and high levels of social relationships and positive aspects. This was not only in Canadian productions, but also in acquisitions, which in some ways is revealing that broadcasters aren’t buying just anything. They’re trying to buy things that have good values. That was certainly a surprise."

An area where Caron notes that some improvement is needed is in terms of gender representation. "It’s still 2/3 to 1/3, male to female, respectively. When we compare ourselves with international studies, we look pretty good—we’re in third or fourth place—but it’s still only 2/3 to 1/3. That just tells you how it is in the other countries."

The next phase of the study, which will take about a year and half, is to go into homes—speaking more with parents—and see how the content is appropriated. "What we would like to hear is that Canadian content for kids is appreciated as is and surpasses any other content in terms of what it creates with positive feelings and all of those things that we’ve seen in the content in general," says Fortier. "We want to see if this does strike the parents and the kids. Do they see this as well? Do they feel this as well? Do they give any credit and/or value to this? Is this something important for them? This is also something that will give us some ammunition when we go back to the CRTC and any other government agencies to tell them how important our Canadian content is, especially for kids."

Overall, the Children, Youth & Media conference had a broader, more international tone to it this year. The conference, in fact, kicked off with a keynote from Anna Home, who talked about the challenges of producing children’s content in a context of decline advertising revenues and shifting regulatory environment of the U.K. As chair of the Save Kids’ TV organization, Home recently submitted an innovative proposal to the U.K. Department for Culture, Media and Sport calling for an alternative public-service content provider for Britain’s children. Fortier draws parallels between many of the issues facing the British and Canadian kids’ landscape, and notes that Home’s insight was quite helpful in light of these similarities.

The hypersexualization of kids is a hot topic in the kids’ sector and ACT brought in Dafna Lemish, a professor at Tel-Aviv University in Israel, to talk about the issue of gender representation in children’s programming. "She gave us a realistic look at how our girls and boys are represented in television, mostly in animation," explains Fortier. "It’s quite stunning to see the difference between how the boys and girls are represented. Girls are still largely represented as being thin and quite sexy, which is something we, as an industry, have to be very careful with. A lot of work is needed in this area and this is why we wanted to make sure our attendees were aware of this reality."

An exclusive lunch was held that allowed attendees to mix with broadcasters or financial backers, among them representatives from TELETOON, YTV, CBC, Treehouse and Family Channel. Producers were presented with information about the company’s mandate, specific objectives, broadcast schedules and what kinds of projects they’re looking for.

A case study followed that put the spotlight on how to make money with multiplatform kids’ content. Through a public-mentoring session of an actual project in development, panelists shared their knowledge on how producers can create children’s content that has revenue potential in the digital space.

Maya Goetz hosted a workshop on "Everything You Need to Know About Preschoolers," where participants screened more than 20 video segments of preschoolers watching programs to see what sparked their interest, gets them participating or bores them. ACT also offered attendees a pitching clinic with Jan Miller, aimed at bolstering the presentation skills of producers and content creators to help get their projects out to the market.