NEWSLINE: 2017 PNR Networks State Of The Site address

Greetings everyone! I do this every year, usually around January 1 or so, and I thought I’d start this year a little late as we tried to balance things out a bit for spring and begin looking towards the rest of the year and what PNRNetworks will be doing to bring you a great 2017.

First up – an immediate announcement – this week’s Subject:CINEMA will be posted on Wednesday evening, with coverage of this week’s Oscar nominations, the Golden Globe winners from a couple of weeks ago, and more. We’re taking a couple of extra days due to other stuff going on, but will return to our usual Sundays one week from today with our 11th annual Fethival of Film Fethivals show!

Now, on to the actual address…

We are presently in our 12th year of providing news and entertainment commentary for our readers and in our eleventh year of same for our podcast listeners. There’s lots of exciting plans on the horizon, but we can’t launch much of what we have planned without more success in our Patreon campaign. To be totally honest, I thought from the number of downloads we receive each week from our various shows, including Subject:CINEMA, Three Minute Weekend, Front Row Five and Ten, Tuesday Digidex, Platinum Roses’ Garden, and Cavebabble, we would have already surpassed at least level two if not level three of our goals list on our Patreon campaign. To my shock, we haven’t even begun to make it to level one – in fact, our campaign right now is a complete bust. With thousands of seemingly  loyal listeners out there downloading the shows each week, the revelation that not even one person is apparently willing to part with even a small $2 a month recurring donation – well, to put it bluntly, it hurts. We have worked so hard for eleven years now to bring you an entertaining, informative, and funny show, and nurtured dozens of fans over the years into personal friends, and it stings greatly that our listeners and readers are obviously willing to enjoy our programs and websites, but not help us with our longterm goals, all of which are designed to benefit you, our loyal fans and friends, as well as ourselves in making the site bigger and better than ever.

So…we have to make sacrifices we didn’t plan on due to this and other factors that have started to creep in, such as my ongoing health issues, and trying to arrange things around our regular jobs and such.

All shows WILL continue to be available to ALL listeners, that isn’t going to change. However, what IS going to change is that we are going to start incentivizing a few things here and there. I am developing a host of extra stuff for our various shows and sites that will be available exclusively to Patreon supporters. Hopefully what we have planned will be satisfactory to our listeners and readers to begin to come on board the campaign. The more people come and help, the more we’ll be able to do. We want to expand so much this year, and we KNOW you will LOVE what we have planned, but we simply can’t make it work on our own, due to continuing need to upgrade our equipment, which we can’t do until we make at least our first target goal.

To this end, we will be beginning a MASSIVE Patreon blitz in February surrounding the debut of PNR Networks’ latest podcast, which will officially be announced on our Patreon Supporters blog on Tuesday, January 22nd, around 3 PM ET, followed by a formal announcement – both on Subject:CINEMA and on a special YouTube video – on Wednesday evening. We’ve developed a super-special perk to go with the launch of this site and podcast, and all you have to do is hook up with our Patreon campaign at a specific level, and then click a new ‘add-on” button on that level’s recurring donation, which will appear on Wednesday when S:C is posted, to be a part of it. ONLY people who click the new button on the level requested for the show will be able to take part in this special perk, but trust me for your recurring donation at that level, everyone who chooses it will get EXCLUSIVE access to special features surrounding that show, access to Patreon Supporter special goodies, a special certificate or card (or both), a button, a tee shirt, and more more MORE! I’m more excited about this new show than ANYTHING I’ve been working on for a long time, because I am going to be the host for the show, it covers an area that I know like the back of my hand, and I’m hoping we’re going to have a huge interactive group of fans, readers, and listeners willing and able to participate for all kinds of chances to be included in a special community of fans.

Next on our list, the launch of several new additions to eCinemaOne’s accessible features, including a new weekly newsletter. Our Paper.li-distributed newsletter, The PNR Weekly Blast, will continue to be available, and will be augmented by my new news and commentary newsletter, the title of which has yet to be decided. This newsletter will detail the various projects we are working on, include some personal anecdotes, and info about the latest shows for the upcoming week. You will begin to see popups for the newsletter and hear calls to action on the podcasts to subscribe to it in the next week or so, and I hope to launch the newsletter the first week of February.

Also in early February, PNRNetworks will relaunch three of our most in-demand products – internet radio stations Marquee Mixx, Marquee Mixx Classix, and Marquee Mixx Score, partnered with our new service Radionomy. These three stations will form the backbone of what we hope will be a vast network of eclectic curated radio stations for the discerning music listener, and will all be branded through my music site, The Kirkham Report.

Around February 7th, eCinemaBoston will be back online, back from it’s self-imposed six-month oblivion of re-evaluation of what it is, why we started a special Boston-centric version, and what we can accomplish with the site. It has been completely overhauled, newly redesigned and retooled into a general film site for the Boston metro area, and will integrate more interaction with readers than ever, so if you live up this way, you’re going to want to take a look at it when it resurfaces. And its return will also mark the beginning of our busiest season here in MetroBoston, the “Boston Springs A Fethival” Season, where we bring you the The Hub’s most extensive coverage of the incredibly busy spring festival circuit up here – full coverage of NINE festivals and two spring film series, all in a short span of time with an early bird jump start during President’s Day week, then a week or so off,  then running near-continuously from March 1-May 5, from the beginning of Salem Film Fest to the end of the Independent Film Festival Boston. It’s going to be hella exhausting, and oh-so-much-film fun you won’t believe it, it always is! Hundreds of exciting festival films, the people who attend, the filmmakers and stars out in force, and more. And we have plans that outdo even our massive and extensive coverage from last year’s BSAF – including TWO episodes of Subject:CINEMA – a Double Feature weekend devoted to it in May. It’s going to be the best year EVER! And as if that’s not enough, eCinemaBoston will also have another redesigned feature soon, and although I can’t talk about it now, we’re going to have a lot of fun mingling with Boston film fans through it, and more will be explained when the site returns online.

Now, for the future…

As we go on throughout the year, eCO and SC will launch THREE new installments of our “Fethivals” franchise, starting with the Summer Fethival World Tour currently scheduled for July 30 – for the first time, extensive coverage of a group of well thought of and influential festivals that happen from late winter through early summer each year – this special will cover US favorite festivals True/False, South By Southwest, Tribeca, and Los Angeles (and possibly one or two others), world class favorites Locarno, Shanghai, Melbourne, and Venice, local Massachusetts faves Roxbury International, Woods Hole and Nantucket, and the Grande Dame of all things Film Fethival, CAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNES…::ahem:: Cannes.

September will bring a new shorts-oriented fethival show to the franchise – logistics are still being worked out – and finally, after circumstances two years in a row scuttled it, we will debut the Fall Fethival Fiethta in November – every year on the weekend following Thanksgiving, we’ll devote a Subject:CINEMA Double Feature weekend to the massive Fall circuit and all it brings – show one will be devoted to the big Oscar-centric festivals of fall – Toronto, Telluride, AFI, Doc NYC, Hamptons, Woodstock, Austin, and Chicago International, plus the genre-fave Fantastic Fest, while show two encompasses the second massive Boston-centric season each year: Boston, Boston Jewish, Boston Bike, Arlington, Boston Asian American, Boston Palestine, Boston Latino, Mass Independent Film Festival, and two more well thought of fests from up north, New Hampshire and Somewhat North of Boston (SNOB). And, oh yeah, something called the Boston Pancake Film Festival, which made it’s debut a couple of years back…not sure what to expect from that one, but reading about it, it sounds like a blast…and something ONLY Beantown can come up with…

Can we accomplish all this? Well, we’re sure gonna TRY. A successful Patreon campaign would make it much MUCH easier, but we’re still gonna TRY. And we hopefully will make it. Among other things we hope to do later this year:

• the launch of our first regularly scheduled VIDEO PODCAST, with Kim as host
• An interactive film club designed to bring our readers and the two of us together to watch a film via online service and chat about it together
• A new video series on the wonderful theaters of Massachusetts (for eCinemaBoston)
• the launch of a new and extensively overhauled Roku channel
• the launch of a brand new PNR Networks store with show branded merch and stuff
• and more more more

We hope to make all things work out, but if we don’t, we’ll take what we can get. We love what we do. And we hope you do too – and we hope you’ll write and tell us about it, leave us a Speak Pipe or give us a call, and most importantly, we hope you’ll finally make a committment to a show and site many of you have enjoyed for over a decade now and join our Patreon campaign.

We’ll see you Tuesday with Tuesday Digidex, and with our special announcement on Patreon, with Subject:CINEMA on Wednesday, Front Row Five And Ten on Thursday, Three Minute Weekend on Friday, and the return of Platinum Roses’ Garden on Saturday!

Thanks for your continuing support!

TC N KIM