Before we tell you about our background we’d like to answer one of the most frequently asked questions about “How’s Your News?”  This question is: “Has anyone ever found this material offensive?”

The short, simple answer is: no.  We fully understand why people would express concern upon hearing the concept behind HYN, but we’d hope anyone with such concerns would take a look at the films we’ve made and get to know the background of this project.  All of our reporters, and their families, are very proud of this project.  The disability community has widely embraced this project, often using our films for training or inspirational purposes.  Far from being offensive, they provide a positive, empowering view of life with a disability.  That’s our opinion.  Please watch our films and let us know what YOU think!

And now, the background:  How’s Your News first began over ten years ago at a summer camp for adults with disabilities in Massachusetts.  We were working in video class and searching for a format which could include as many people, with as wide an array of disabilities, as possible.  So we began making our own news shows.

One day we decided to bring some reporters downtown to interview people on the street.  These first two reporters were Bobby Bird and Sean Costello, two men with Down Syndrome.  The interviews they conducted were both funny, and sweetly revealing.  When we screened them for the camp community we got a great response.  We kept making videos with other reporters from the camp and at the end of the summer we compiled a vhs video tape of our favorite man-on-the-street interviews and made copies for our friends and family.  Those tapes got copied and passed around and one ended up in the hands of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who were simply two struggling filmmakers at the time.  They contacted HYN director Arthur Bradford and told him they’d love to see more videos like this.  The three of them struck up a friendship and when Parker and Stone hit it big with South Park, they offered to finance a short documentary staring the best reporters from the summer camp.  Bradford and some of the other counselors put together a team and the first “How’s Your News?” video was made in 1998.

In 2002 the team released a feature film about a cross country road trip with five reporters with disabilities.  This was financed again by Parker and Stone as well as Indie film legend John Pierson.  This film won several festival awards and was broadcast on HBO/Cinemax, PBS, and Channel Four England.

In 2004 we released a short documentary about our trips to the Democrat and Republican National conventions which featured very candid interviews with public figures such as Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Ben Affleck, Peter Jennings, Al Franken, G. Gordon Liddy, Andre 3000, and many more.  This half hour TV special led us to start thinking about the possibility of a HYN series.

We pitched the series idea to several networks and MTV agreed to finance a short pilot which we made in 2006.  In late 2007 MTV gave us the greenlight and we began shooting a six episode series in 2008.  It will hit the air on Feb. 8th, 2009 and we can’t believe our little project has made it this far!