Anyone who has been involved with an electronic media project in an academic environment knows that many complex issues surround a project's development. This presentation will describe an ongoing project to systematically document and compare how academic media projects are conceptualized, created and managed. The main focus of this work is on determining relationships among the financial, legal, technical, and human factors within projects. The long term goal is to illuminate characteristics and choices that result in sustained successes, and ideally, identify and disseminate self-sustaining approaches. 

This paper looks at the changing parameters of documentaries in the digital age, specifically what constitutes the 'text' and who controls the vision of the film. I analyze the Frontline documentary, Secret Daughter, written by June Cross.  Examining its reliance on both tv and the webpage, I consider how multiple technologies  affect the message of the documentary. The source material includes interviews with the filmmaker, executive producer David Fanning, and the web designers at WGBH.