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All Articles: Future of Public Media
Beyond Broadcast ‘08 Keynote: Larry Irving[PDF]
Larry Irving, President, Irving Information Group
Widely credited with coining the term “the digital divide,” telecommunications consultant Larry Irving formerly served as Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Communications and Information under the Clinton administration. In his remarks at the June 17, 2008 Beyond Broadcast conference, he urged public broadcasters and their allies to craft a clear policy agenda for the next administration that reflects both technological and demographic shifts. He suggested that “new media” has now become simply “media,” and that public media makers will need to adjust quickly while maintaining a commitment to serving a diverse array of Americans through high-quality noncommercial productions. Read more in the transcript of his remarks.
Mapping the Money in Public Media[PDF]
Diane Mermigas, Editor at Large, MediaPost
Public media’s opportunities exceed its challenges. Digital interactivity is tailor-made for public media projects that incorporate grassroots creativity, deep-dive examinations of complex issues, and connections to civic activism. Participatory tools and platforms give public media makers the means to secure their own financial futures, and to compete with large commercial outlets. This briefing, commissioned in conjunction with the Beyond Broadcast conference, examines models for monetizing digital, interactive public meda.
Field Report: OneWorld’s Virtual Bali
Kate Schuler, Research Fellow, Center for Social Media
This is the second in a series of “field reports” that the Center for Social Media is producing as part of the Future of Public Media project, funded by the Ford Foundation. The field reports examine innovative media projects for public knowledge and action, with a particular interest in exploring how publics form around such projects.
The Rise and Fall of the Public Service Publisher[PDF]
Des Freedman, Department of Media and Communications and Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy, Goldsmiths, University of London
This briefing examines the rise and fall of a proposal for a Public Service Publisher (PSP) in the U.K.— a new organization that would have commissioned independent public media content across a range of participatory digital platforms. This central policy debate in one of the largest and most influential public broadcasting systems in the world provides useful parallels for U.S. policy and public media makers. They too face the rise of Web 2.0 models, questions about how copyright restrictions should apply to public content, the shift to digital broadcasting, and the widespread commercialization of the media sector.
Field Report—Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes
by Barbara Abrash, Director of Public Programs
Center for Media, Culture and History
New York University
This field report—the first in a series that the Center for Social Media will be producing in 2008—demonstrates how a social issue documentary film campaign that radiates outward from a PBS broadcast can serve as a test bed for innovations that support civic dialog and expand the spaces and practices of public media. Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes is a personal film that examines representations of gender roles in hip-hop and rap music through the eyes of filmmaker Byron Hurt.
The National Black Programming Consortium Technology Now! Leadership Summit
by Barbara Abrash
Filmmaking and computers have come together. This is an opportunity for black people who have little power in the television industry. In a computer-based environment, everyone has a voice.
-Kevin Brooks, MIT Media Lab
Vlogs, iPods and Beyond: Public Media’s Terrifying Opportunities[PDF]
by Pat Aufderheide
The Graham Spry Annual Lecture on Public Broadcasting honors the founder of Canadian public broadcasting. This year, Center director Pat Aufderheide was chosen to give this prestigious lecture. Calling it ” Vlogs, iPods and Beyond: Public Media’s Terrifying Opportunities,” Aufderheide argued: Public media are blooming and evolving, but not necessarily within public broadcasting. If Graham Spry were around today, he’d be a blogger, and he’d be pushing for municipal wiMAX.
Click here for a PDF of the presentation.
The Infinite Mind
by Elizabeth Angell
Eager to be among the first adopters of new technology, producers of the award-winning public radio program The Infinite Mind have branched into 3D virtual broadcasting. They have “built” a spacious broadcasting complex in Second Life, a burgeoning online world where the rules of three-dimensional commerce and coexistence are just being established. Will their public radio audience follow them to this unfamiliar new world?
The Densho Archive: Harnessing the Power of Digital Media
By Deborah Matzner
The Densho Archive –a vast, free online multimedia collection of materials related to the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II –is a model of what public media can be. Created by retired executives from Microsoft with family histories of wartime incarceration, it marries sophisticated digital archive design with innovative donor arrangements that allow it to host media without the originals leaving private institutions and collections. Where other online digital media projects fail or are forced to charge prohibitive fees to end-users, the Densho Archive has created a successful, truly public, digital resource.
The WGBH Laboratory
By Elizabeth Angell
“The revolution will not be televised. It will be podcast, video streamed, time shifted, remixed and remashed, blogged and uploaded.” That is the opening salvo from the WGBH Laboratory, a three-year old incubator for creative experiments in new media. The Lab’s three “pillar programs” foster the work of independent media makers and media innovators using digital technologies to develop groundbreaking content and attract young audiences.
Vanderbilt’s Open Web Project
A Step Closer: Vanderbilt’s OpenWeb Project and the Future of Public Media
by John Cheney
The Vanderbilt Television News Archive’s recent OpenWeb project to expose their collection of video tape abstracts to Web search engines presents an interesting way that digital search technology can help facilitate public media use. Increased access to the Vanderbilt archive helps both the consumer and Vanderbilt provide an important public good, and has increased Vanderbilt’s revenues dramatically.
Testimony on the Smithsonian Controversy to the House Committee on House Administration 5.25.06
Written Testimony
Patricia Aufderheide, Professor and Director
Center for Social Media, School of Communication, American University
Patricia Aufderheide, director of the Center for Social Media, testified on May 25, 2006 before the House Committee on House Administration to raise concerns on the Smithsonian’s 30-year joint venture with Showtime Networks Inc.
Socially Engaged Public Access TV Productions[PDF]
By Paula Manley
This paper defines the field of socially engaged media in public access television and provides a framework for how social media is being used in public access TV.
Community Technology and Public Discourse[PDF]
By Felicia M. Sullivan
Community technology expert Felicia M. Sullivan provides an in-depth analysis of community technology centers and community networks as tools for public discourse and action.
Local Public Media Engagements[PDF]
Noëlle McAfee reports from an October 2005 meeting held at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio were participants outlined a strategy for future research on ways in which local publics and local media might best work together to engage citizens in the civic life of their community. This research is related to the larger question of how those individuals and organizations in public media (and any media with a public mission) best understand their own practices and relationship to the public.
Making Your Documentary Matter 2006[PDF]
Barbara Abrash reports from the 2006 workshops on the latest in public engagement strategies for social issue media makers.
Digital Media and the Public Sphere[PDF]
Barbara Abrash reports on a January convening held at the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. New citizen media are, in some bold experiments, creating strong and vibrant public spaces, the very kind of public spaces that traditional public media has long sought to foster and nurture. At the same time, some public broadcasters are experimenting creatively with more open and participatory environments.
Public Accountability in Public Media[PDF]
By Mylene Moreno
Participants at a recent Center convening addressed recent studies that confirm—even as some parties inside the Beltway have criticized public media for a supposed liberal bias—that the public values and supports public media. For a list of participants, click here.
Global Voices Summit Notes[PDF]
By Marty Lucas
Read a report by New York-based filmmaker and media activist, Martin Lucas, on why the blogosphere matters.
Insights for the Future of Public Media[PDF]
A report by Noëlle McAfee from the 2005 Global Voices Summit.
What makes pubcasting ‘public’ is engagement[PDF]
By Pat Aufderheide and Noëlle McAfee
Published in Current, Sept. 2005, this article explores the difference between engaging communities as a public versus as consumers.
Skolar.pdf">Fear, Loathing and and the Promise of Public Insight Journalism[PDF]
By Michael Skolar
Public Broadcasting in the USA[PDF]
By Willard D. Rowland, Jr, PhD
Rowland, president of Colorado Public Television KBDI TV, shares a history of public broadcasting in the US from the Encyclopedia of Communication and Information, 2002.
What’s Public about Public Media?
By Pat Aufderheide and Noëlle McAfee
A brief article on the how public media serves a democracy.
In the “Global Village,” Where is “The Public Square”?
Remarks delivered by David Liroff
Read David Liroff’s comments from the first of the Center’s Public Media Roundtable discussions. Liroff serves as the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Boston’s WGBH. Visit WGBH for a downloadable recording.
Keynote Address from the We Media Conference
Delivered by Al Gore
Organized by The Media Center, this day-long conference brought together leading thinkers and organizers into a series of discussions on participatory media.
Public Television Now and Later
By Pat Aufderheide
Public television is a rare example of noncommercial media in a commercial environment, and by its very existence it tests the limits of expression in a democracy every day. In this entry for The Encyclopedia of Television, edited by Horace Newcomb, I outlined how the unique and complex institution of public television came into being and is structured, as well as how public television is facing the challenges of advanced and interactive TV, the Web, and competition for viewers.
Keepers of the Public Domain in Electronic Media: Keep It Up!
Keynote address by Pat Aufderheide
Keynote address at the annual convention of Alliance for Community Media, the member organization of cable access stations nationwide on July 10, 1999, Cincinnati, Ohio.