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News from the Future of Public Media
Beyond Broadcast: Visualizing Public Media Futures
email discuss Posted by Kate Schuler on Jun 17, 2008 at 12:27 PM
As the role of traditional news aggregators changes as technology emerges to allow ever-increasing numbers of people and communities to create their own media, Calvin Sims, Program Officer at the Ford Foundation and moderator of this morning’s panel “Visualizing Public Media Futures,” began the discussion by asking “Who will curate this new space?”
Dennis Haarsager, Interim CEO at NPR, said that as more people create content, the goals and mission of traditional media outlets are changing.
“We’re trying to envision a world in which everyone can be a producer, but thinking about how to visualize this new world can be a challenge. Haarsager said his organization is looking at their work in layers, the top being the goal of “enhancing human understanding.” The next two layers that are considered, then, are “what we do and where we do it,” Haarsager said.
“I don’t know that there’s any one of us, even a national network, that’s going to be able to set an agenda for public media. We’ve now given voice to anyone that has an internet connection,” Haarsager said.
The bigger challenge is finding the voices out there and making sure they’re heard. “You can nominally distribute something by throwing it on YouTube, but making sure someone finds it requires techniques that are beyond the capabilities of many individual content producers. So there is still a role of an aggregator.”
Anthony Hamelle, Vice President of RTGI/Linkfluence, said that maps of media websites that his company has developed show that media sites are becoming part of communities. The map of the “U.S. Political Blogosphere” shows the interconnections and relative influence of various media, as well as the borders of communities.
Because of such interconnectedness and dispersion, he said, “it will be much harder for any single actor to set the agenda because they would have to be present in every community.” “Media actors will have to work with local outposts in terms of providing information and setting agendas,” Hamelle said.
Wendy Levy, Director of Media Arts and Education at the Bay Area Video Coalition noted the explosion of interest in public media mapping projects. BAVC last year had one mapping project being developed at their producers institute. This year, six of the nine projects are devoted to developing maps, she said.
The panel also considered questions of citizen journalism and ethical standards for the exploding number of public media projects.
Levy suggested that it starts early with education and a sharing of best practices rather than legislation. “We need to let a certain natural evolution emerge in that space,” she said.
Hamelle noted that community pressure is very strong. “If you want to exist within a community, you have to abide by the code of that community. It’s a very effective way to correct what a new media actor is going to do or say,” he said.
Sims also raised the point that media conglomerates might still try to acquire many of these entrepreneurial startups. But Hamelle suggested that they will never have enough money to buy them all. “Given the dispersion, that its very decentralized, it will be impossible to get all of them.”
Haarsager added there is a space for both commercial and non-commercial ventures. “It all comes down to being found. We create information faster than we can assimilate it. We have to have increasingly sophisticated ways of finding that information and sharing it among ourselves,” he said. “The role of public media is to find a way for those to rise to the top.”
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