About PTP
The Pay Transparency Project (PTP) is a community-driven database that offers nonfiction video professionals timely insight into constantly evolving hiring trends and pay parity practices. Additionally, it serves as a tracking tool for structural industry shifts and recommendations. This grassroots initiative grew out of an urgent desire by our collective communities to move the documentary and nonfiction video fields towards greater equity, justice, inclusion, and transparency.
PTP is intended to benefit all professional nonfiction video storytellers, from early-career individuals to industry veterans who may be transitioning from full-time employment to freelance work. Staff department heads and hiring executives looking to formalize and strengthen standards across the field are also encouraged to contribute and use PTP, to promote a more equitable and sustainable industry for all.
We’re at a pivotal moment in time. We know that marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by inequitable workplace practices and that countering existing systems is not enough; we must reimagine what is possible and right. Our industries are being called upon to re-examine who is in front of the camera and behind the scenes. This reckoning demands intentionality, compassion, and the utmost care in how we tell stories, who is shaping these narratives, and how filmmakers can create sustainable and long term careers. For an industry that depends heavily on freelance labor, the bottom line is equitable pay, fair credit, and expanded access.
Origins
PTP was born in 2019, when a group of video journalist-members of The Video Consortium (VC) was frustrated with the industry’s lack of transparency around pay standards. Looking at the many secret pay rate spreadsheets floating amongst professional peers, they huddled together and dreamt of a tool, a central place, where everyone could come to give and get information that could better serve nonfiction video professionals working to earn a sustainable living, doing what they love. Sharing the same vision, Brown Girls Doc Mafia (BGDM) joined the effort as an implementation partner in the summer of 2022.
Together, the VC and BGDM look to welcome organizations and communities across the industry to join as partners in calling for equitable pay transparency in the nonfiction space.
Join us and help build a more transparent future!
