Say, "Hello!" to Bernie2016.tv! We are a grassroots collection of volunteers working to bring a 24-hour, educational and inspirational medium to the internet to promote Bernie’s ideas and efforts for a better world.

The fire in Bernie’s ideas caught the attention of John Ellis (@johnetec on Twitter) who has an extensive history in media production. After taking note of the power and enormous possibility encompassed by Bernie’s historic run for the Presidency, John quickly decided to dedicate himself full-time to this project to help raise awareness for Bernie’s cause over the internet (and every town and city in the nation by necessity). The best part? It’s working. Using all free technologies and organizing on social media, he’s collected over 150 educated, empowered, and dedicated volunteers to help assist in this project. And that’s after just two weeks.

Bernie2016.tv has rapidly established itself as a central resource for Bernie’s grassroots following across all major social media platforms. With volunteer time, organization, and production, Bernie2016.tv has already successfully produced live, interactive broadcasts at two of Bernie’s most recent campaign stops -- Madison, WI and Portland, ME. Most recently, two amazing 15yo students in Alabama in the same small town hosted a 2+ hour show around Bernie’s speech in Portland, Maine. We coordinated with independent rally attendees for both events and brought them into our live broadcasts alongside the hosts for viewer interaction. In addition to our live productions, we’ve also received and shared recordings provided to us by local meetups, grassroots musicians, and grassroots video podcast producers. The Huffington Post also elected to include us in one of their articles recently.

In the coming days and weeks, Bernie2016.tv has active plans to not only continue live-broadcasting official campaign events with an important human touch from the 99%, but also broadcasting non-official gatherings and individual efforts to illustrate the international reality of this amazing Bernie-mania. We are currently focusing on producing and facilitating grassroots-generated content of all kinds to fill the 24 hours of available broadcasting space each day on our not-for-profit network. For example, we are broadcasting an independently produced, 2-hour LIVE "Berniecast" (video podcast) this Saturday morning and plan to cover the Birmingham rally live on Sunday afternoon from one of our volunteers’ cell phones (and probably more if we can reach them). The concept we are spreading is that we have created, currently, a professional news/production environment on the internet, streaming live over YouTube, which anyone can use if they have Hangouts and a reliable connection on their cell phone. This is the way major media is supposed to work to accurately reflect the People’s voice. And this was supposed to be an uphill battle. But the feedback we’ve already received from the online community has been, for lack of a better word, unbelievable. I guess that’s simply a trend that follows Bernie and we should all just get used to it :)

We aspire to serve as an authentic, free, and accurate source of information from the American grassroots community of the 99%. We do not feel this critically important community-based dialogue should be limited by the priorities of major media conglomerates and their majority shareholders. We want to serve as the example which proves crowd-sourced broadcasting can educate and improve our country far more efficiently than scripted, primetime broadcasting in between credit card commercials.

We have a fairly small number of core volunteers who are active daily in logistics planning, organizing, technical production, and social media management. We organize in our Google+ group and have existing, live chat rooms established for various projects and events. But the essence of the project commands widespread participation from intelligent activists like those who participate here. We promote and engage actively with the public during live broadcasts via the Youtube chat functionality and also record all broadcasts for subsequent use. These recordings will be included in our Youtube playlists along with our collections of videos and media uploaded directly by the 99% into our Public Google Drive storage space. Our content is already being re-broadcast by various online media aggregates to a surprising degree.

Our effort to educate the country from the bottom up allows us to draw on productions like "Brunch with Bernie," hosted by Thom Hartmann, ads from Bernie’s previous campaigns in Vermont, speeches from the House or Senate Floors, and literally hours and days worth of material to show who Bernie is and what he stands for and, most importantly, why he’s the BEST choice for the Democratic Nomination in 2016! We have volunteer audio editors, video editors, and translators standing by to assist in getting this message to every possible audience. But we need authentic, intelligent content NOW to start illustrating the power of this new kind of education, entertainment, and "news media."

Below is a link to an infographic we’ve created to quickly display the many ways we can use creative professionals in this online effort. Please take just a couple minutes to look through it and consider any possible ways you’d want to help to bring YOUR local narrative(s) to the national and international forefront. If you have Hangouts on your phone and a good connection, grab your Senator, Mayor, neighbor, and friends (hopefully they’re ALL your friends!) and reach out to us over any of our social media pages to put your voices on the air. There are no rules aside from the identity and morals Bernie chooses to exhibit himself. We have no commercials and no bosses. We are the 99%-- and we have a Presidential candidate who has brilliantly legitimized our ideas in formal politics. Now is our one and only chance.

Infographic

Volunteer Form

Mission statement (PDF)

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