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News from the Future of Public Media
Stranger than Fiction: Beyond Broadcast, Iran’s elections and international public media 2.0
email discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on Jun 18, 2009 at 11:15 AM
At the 2009 Beyond Broadcast conference, hosted by USC Annenberg in early June, attendees from more than a dozen countries worked together to build scenarios predicting the evolution of public service media in regions buffeted by social, political and economic transitions. This week, however, the future long predicted by Beyond Broadcast organizers arrived a bit earlier than planned, as social media tools became the main source of news on Iran’s contested elections.
Twitter has become so crucial as a conduit for citizen media makers to communicate the breaking story that the U.S. State Department reportedly asked the site to postpone scheduled maintenance in order to allow messages to continue to stream in. The microblogging service has become a key platform for ground-level reporting despite efforts by the Iranian government to both block cell phone signals and ban traditional journalists from covering sometimes violent demonstrations. President Obama noted that Twitter (along with other social networking platforms such as Flickr and YouTube) had become a source of intelligence for government officials monitoring the situation.
Inside Iran, information is even more limited: Select Google search terms are being blocked, access to Facebook has been sporadically filtered, and the BBC World Service has accused the Iranian government of jamming broadcasts into the country. (See this useful guide for tips on communicating within and outside of repressive regimes for a sense of how people are working around such censorship efforts.)
A real-time aggregation tool, Twazzup, is offering a continuous stream of Iran-related messages. Such coverage is confounding definitions of journalism: CNN has relied heavily on social media reports to cover the situation, and has suffered derision from both Twitter users and late-night comedy shows as a result.
But does such ridicule make sense? Increasingly, Beyond Broadcast keynote speaker Henry Jenkins suggested, social media platforms are the new playing field for what he termed "public-enabled media"—the next phase for the “public service media” name-checked in the title of this year’s conference. Drawing upon our expanded definition of public media 2.0, the conference featured a broad spectrum of makers and outlets. Traditional public broadcasters from the U.S. and the U.K. intermingled with citizen journalists, mobile activists, media advocates and academics for the the fourth in this series of annual gatherings organized by a national consortium of academic and media partners—including the Center for Social Media; USC Annenberg; Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society; MIT’s Comparative Media Studies program; NYU’s Center for Media, Culture and History; the National Black Programming Consortium, and PRX.
Over the next several months, members of this consortium will work to decide what comes beyond Beyond Broadcast—stay tuned for announcements. Meanwhile, videos from the event are now available at beyondbroadcast.net, and prognostications from those scenario-planning sessions will soon follow. BB2009 also, of course, prompted a lively Twitter stream. I spent much of the event reporting on panels via Twitter, and have pulled out a few highlights below:
New leadership—a call, and many responses:
Ernest Wilson, the dean of USC Annenberg, opened the event with a call to attendees to serve as leaders in the creation of public media 2.0. “If not us, who?” he said.”We are at a moment in time which is ours to make with what we will make of it…but it doesn’t happen automatically.”
Many different kinds of leaders were on display in the sessions that followed over the next two days. Myoungjoon Kim from MediaACT in Seoul, Korea explained how activists there are building a new vision for public media that puts citizen reporting front-and-center. Daudi Were from ThreeStones Company Ltd in Kenya called blogging “probably the most African thing you can do online,” and described how local bloggers harnessed mobile and social media tools to monitor elections. Ronnie Goldfarb from Equal Access profiled media and outreach projects in a number of countries working to “create positive social change for millions of underserved people,” while high-school student Mayra Jimenez from the Bay area’s Youth Radio project explained how a tool called Utterli helped her to report on a controversial teacher’s strike. Throughout, the BB09 vibe was markedly different from many recent journalism and public broadcasting industry conferences, where gloom and doom are the order of the day. Fresh tools, approaches and faces livened up discussions both on the panels and in the hallways.
Redefining media impact:
Measuring the impact of public media 2.0—which is multiplatform and focused on convening publics rather than aggregating eyeballs—is a complex and evolving proposition. I organized a panel to examine different approaches to this question, and my opening presentation is available on SlideShare:
The discussion examined a number of different approaches to evaluating the impact of mission-driven media projects. Mark Feurst, who leads up the Integrated Media Association, described the Public Media Metrics project, which analyzes and compares traffic to public broadcasting websites using Google Analytics. Ellen Schneider from Active Voice talked about the role that media projects play in an “ecosystem of change” that includes funders, nonprofits, policymakers, researchers and more. “Assuming that media is the only change actor insults other members of the ecosystem,” she said. Shabbir Safdar of Virilion, Inc. urged attendees to “think different” about measurement—focusing first on the goal of the project rather than on numerical target: “Don’t measure activity, but outcome,” he said. Media researcher Kate Coyer, who has worked with community media projects in the U.S. and Eastern Europe, noted that the best measurement projects combine qualitative and quantitative approaches.
The question of media impact surfaced in a later panel, as Ethan Zuckerman described the Berkman Center’s new Media Cloud project. An online tool, Media Cloud offers researchers a chance to explore the flow of news across traditional and citizen media sources.
Maintaining quality while fostering participation:
Questions about the quality and reliability of online information threaded throughout BB2009. One panel on the topic provided a variety of perspectives on how to deal with this thorny issue, from fostering media literacy, to building trusted brands, to creating crowdsourced editing and ranking systems. Nathalie Applewhite of the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting described how they’ve created opportunities for students to interact directly with journalists via issue-focused portals called gateways. Kevin Klose, the former head of NPR, called journalism the “oxygen of democracy,” adding that “The simple declarative sentence with a beginning, middle and end, that doesn’t embroider…is a fundamental freedom.” Rachel Sterne from Ground Report talked about the difficulties of maintaining quality on a site that offers real-time, user-generated, multiplatform news. She noted that the site has certain vetted content partners who can post directly, while a core of Wikipedia-style editors work to verify other posts. David Cohn of Spot.us followed up on Sterne’s presentation with this interesting interview.
These are some snippets, but it’s difficult to capture the richness of the various discussions. As USC’s David Westphal tweeted, @davidwestphal: cool int’l folk testifying at #bb2009: You have to keep reshaping your brain’s old compartments to take it all in.
Discussion
Thanks Jessica for this great post. The face of public media truly is shifting from top down information dissemination to participatory engaging media. In the wake of the political demonstrations in Iran, social media is playing a lead role in organizing. Change.org’s article Iran, Twitter and the Social Media Landscape offers more great information about what’s going on.
http://tinyurl.com/m7gga3
While public media 2.0 developments are incredibly important for truly engaging democracy in our own country, it is even more compelling to watch this take place in Iran.