Approximately a year ago, The Museum of Television & Radio changed its name to The Paley Center for Media
to keep up with the changing times. The program that I attended with my
sons last night "Click Critics: The Power of Fan Websites" was very
much an example of how television and radio are now very much entwined
with new media. It was an informative and very entertaining night and
my teenage sons and I truly enjoyed it.

Pat Michell, President
and CEO of the Paley Center first introduced the program. She did a
great job of discussing what the program was about. She mentioned the
power that fan websites had nowadays and that television networks and
producers no longer need to pay for feedback on television shows. They
monitor the fan websites and blogs for comments and find out all of
information that they need for free.The moderator of the panel was Alan Sepinwall,
television critic for The Star-Ledger. He did a great job of leading
the discussion with the panel. One theme that kept arising was that
fans of shows like those on the panel, mostly those with continuing
narratives, want to discuss them and aren't happy just to only watch
anymore. They want to be able to go on the Internet and have other
outlets to continue to enjoy their favorite shows after the viewing is
over.

Dan Manu, Site Director of Television without Pity,
was the only person on the panel who had thier website as his/her full
time job. All of the others work on their fan websites as sidelines.
Each of the panelists showed a clip for the TV show that they blogged
about. Since Television without Pity is not about one show, Dan Manu
showed a very funny clip from the West Wing about
fan sites. If you are a West Wing fan you may remember a scene from the
3rd season where Josh finds a fansite named LemonLyman.com. It turns
out that Aaron Sorkin, writer and creator of the West Wing, wrote this
in response to some negative incidents on Television without Pity. See
the clip below:

(see actual blog posting at http://connectwithyourteens.blogspot.com/2008/05/fan-websites-at-paley-c... for video)

Jennie Tan of OfficeTalley, has more of a relationship with people on the show than any of the other panelists. She's actually visited the set of The Office
twice and speaks online regularly to many of the castmembers. She did
say that many of them have myspace pages and are very accessible to
fans. Erica Blitz of Galactica Sitrep is one of many writers on the blog about Battlestar Galactica.
That explains how there are so many posts in such short periods of
time. Both Erica and Jennie discussed how neither necessarily started
out to write fan blogs, they just wanted to get into blogging, and just
happened to choose this area They are doing pretty well for just
stumbling into something. Erica wasn't sure what was going to happen to
the blog after the show ends. Remona Outar creator of the Ugly is in blog, fell in love with Ugly Betty
immediately and decided to write the blog to show her love for it. The
show became a hit and so did her blog. Damon Schmidt is one of many
writers at Whedonesque. For those that don't know, Whedonesque is not a fan site for one particular TV show; it is a fan site for Joss Whedon, writer, producer, director of such shows at Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Angel. Damon spoke about Joss Whedon
updating them with all his news for the website and that Whedonesque is
a site in which users (who join and become members) can post to. And
then there was Kevin Croy, the creator of the mammoth website, Lostpedia. Lostpedia is a wiki, which means that anyone can edit it, just like Wikipedia. However, Kevin tries to keep spoilers about Lost
to a minimum and the community on the site does a good job at editing
them out. Kevin said that although he created the site and does the
maintenance, most of what happens on it is run by the community that
reads it. The site has over 4000 articles and is written in over 10
languages.

Last but not least, there was some fan musical entertainment. Lost now has 2 fans that have formed a duo called Previously on Lost
that performed both at the beginning and end of the program. Each week
they make up a song that recaps the previous weeks episode of Lost.
They played Just Wink from episode 2 and Be my Constant from episode 5.
They were very funny.

Afterward, the panelists were very
friendly and accessible to anyone that wanted to say hi and meet them.
I would love to see more of these type of programs in the future.