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All Publications: Beyond Broadcast

Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics[PDF]

by Jessica Clark Director, Future of Public Media Project
Pat Aufderheide Director, Center for Social Media

Public broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts have all played a central role in our democracy, informing citizens and guiding public conversation. But the top-down dissemination technologies that supported them are being supplanted by an open, many-to-many networked media environment. What platforms, standards, and practices will replace or transform legacy public media?

This white paper lays out an expanded vision for “public media 2.0” that places engaged publics at its core, showcasing innovative experiments from its “first two minutes,” and revealing related trends, stakeholders, and policies. Public media 2.0 may look and function differently, but it will share the same goals as the projects that preceded it: educating, informing, and mobilizing its users.

Multiplatform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature of truly democratic public life from here on in. And it’ll be media both for and by the public. The grassroots mobilization around the 2008 electoral campaign is just one signal of how digital tools for making and sharing media open up new opportunities for civic engagement.

But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident, or for free. The same bottom-line logic that runs media today will run tomorrow’s media as well. If we’re going to have media for vibrant democratic culture, we have to plan for it, try it out, show people that it matters, and build new constituencies to invest in it.

The first and crucial step is to embrace the participatory—the feature that has also been most disruptive of current media models. We also need standards and metrics to define truly meaningful participation in media for public life. And we need policies, initiatives, and sustainable financial models that can turn today’s assets and experiments into tomorrow’s tried-and-true public media.

Public media stakeholders, especially such trusted institutions as public broadcasting, need to take leadership in creating a true public investment in public media 2.0.

Beyond Broadcast 2008 Rapporteur’s Report

by Kate Schuler and Jessica Clark

The 3rd annual Beyond Broadcast Conference, titled "Mapping Public Media," was held June 17th, 2008 at American University. Roundtable discussions, demos and exhibits examined the explosion of digital, participatory maps as public media, and as tools for visualizing the radical shifts in our media terrain. This rapporteur’s report offers highlights of the day’s events, and includes audio and video of speakers and multimedia presentations.

Beyond Broadcast 2008 Videos, Podcasts and Downloads

Downloads of the Beyond Broadcast podcasts, videos and other materials, for those who just can’t get enough of the 2008 Beyond Broadcast conference!

Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture Rapporteur Report 2006[PDF]

Barbara Abrash

Read the 2006 Rapporteur Report from Beyond Broadcast: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture, an event co-organized by the Center on the future of public media in an open digital environment.