Aufderheide: Reflections on the Future of Public Media Project

Center for Social Media Director Pat Aufderheide sums up lessons learned and next steps for public media research in advance of our upcoming ICA preconference: 

In 2005, the Center for Social Media took on a six year gig providing a think-tank function for the Ford Foundation’s initiative on the future of public broadcasting. The project involved more than a dozen partners, mostly public broadcasting entities. It was our goal to help people both within and outside public broadcasting imagine public media for a participatory era.

When the project began, we encountered, of course, the unpleasant realities of that moment: public broadcasters hunkering down trying to avoid the winds of change and muttering about how nobody appreciated what they did, contrasting with brash and entrepreneurial media startups of all kinds—entirely unaware that there had ever been a discourse of the public interest and not interested in finding out, but quite sure they were democratizing/liberating the media space. It didn’t help that public broadcasting in the U.S. is profoundly balkanized, by design; we wrote all about it, to help policy makers and activists baffled by pubcasters.

We made a simple argument in many ways. The argument was that public media could now, for the first time, be user-centric, which meant that for the first time public media could properly prioritize its raison d’être—to engage people as potential and actual members of the public. Public media could now be defined not by zoned sectors but by mission and activity. We wrote an FAQ that took complex ideas brought into our project via John Dewey and Habermas and Nick Couldry and Ben Barber and more. We hoped we made them relevant and real for practitioners. We held conferences, had convenings, attended and spoke at endless meetings, contributed to federal government policy dockets, wrote academic articles, and synthesized our arguments in white paper that influenced high-level policy deliberations, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics.

And we saw that notion take on a life both within and outside U.S. public broadcasting, not entirely of our doing but as part of the mix we were certainly stirring. Within public broadcasting, organizations such as ITVS, PRX, the National Center for Media Engagement and the National Black Programming Consortium became hot centers for experiment, finding new young talent, and collaboration. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, long notorious as the place where good ideas go to die, became an aggressive funder of interactive, collaborative and participatory work with the very small portion of its budget it could allocate for digital experiments.  An informal network formed of pubcasters who embraced change in technical and business models as an opportunity to get down to mission. Some media makers outside the pubcasting silo, including journalists, became more engaged with public broadcasting, partly because journalism’s own business models were threatened.

Nonetheless, the public broadcasting silo at its core remains remarkably stable and reluctant to imagine a public media that has public engagement at its heart, for very expectable reasons. There is the institutional lethargy, compounded by the fact that many leaders are just old and comfortable enough to want to coast out. There is the fact that public broadcasters carry heavy maintenance costs they will continue to incur during a transition, and therefore don’t really benefit from reduced transaction costs. And there is the very real fact that public engagement is at its base a political act, a commitment to greater agency in a democratic system. While at one level this is Mom-and-apple-pie, in practice this often comes down to enabling people to have a voice that is unfamiliar, sometimes raucous (or at least sounding not like the others), and making demands for inclusion, participation and access to resources that disturb the known universe.

And the media explosion outside the pubcasting silo continues to be anarchic, exuberant, and mostly disconnected from a conversation about public purpose, public mission, and public engagement. The same thing is true in journalism, an overlapping category with public broadcasting, where there is exciting ferment at the digital edge, but still remarkable stability at the center. (Watch the documentary, Page One, to get an inside look at the New York Times’ tentative transition.)

The WikiLeaks phenomenon is an example of how messy the moment is. WikiLeaks supporters proclaim the absolute right to make public all information, while the site itself collaborates with leading mainstream media in order to make sense of the wash of information. Whereas mainstream media may be afflicted by a proclivity to bow to power, WikiLeaks enthusiasts show no evidence of understanding competing values in the sphere of the public interest.

Still, there are many, many interesting initiatives, all still awaiting the opportunity to be nodes on a network, and still currently standing as valiant experiments. The Mozilla-Knight News Technology Partnership is an active and creative example of attempts to design open, participatory, digital applications for journalism. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting has funded six collaborative Local Journalism Centers, which so far have a “fits and starts” record. National Public Radio’s Argo project creates intensive local, web-based and user-informed journalism on nationally-important topics; it is funded by CPB and the Knight Foundation. The CPB-funded Public Media Corps, which we helped to incubate and document, is serving as an instructive inspiration for a nationwide public media initiative aimed at keeping kids in school. Public access television, a local form of citizen-made media that exists wherever cable franchises and localities agree to host it, is developing a pool of shareable material.

Jessica Clark, who was research director of the Center’s participation in the Ford initiative for the last five years, identifies five hopeful trends:

• Increasing ability to “create once, publish everywhere;”
• Knowledge sharing, often through unconferences;
• An increasing number of projects featuring community engagement, including those showcased by the National Center for Media Engagement;
• Strategic partnering/collaboration; and
• Paying attention to policy.

When we look up from hopeful trends and valiant experiments, though, we see what is still utterly lacking:

• National coordination or even shared standards among existing forms of public media to articulate a contemporary, shared public mission;
• Awareness among the general public of the significance of reliable, trustworthy, participatory media for public knowledge and action;
• Significant taxpayer support for participatory public media.

We believe that the six years of work within the Ford initiative, which overlapped to some degree with good work done in similar initiatives sponsored by the MacArthur and Knight foundations, resulted in a shift from complaining to vigorous and creative experiment within rigid, isolated structures and unpromising financial conditions. There is no doubt that the vision that energized us at the Center and that we articulated in Public Media 2.0 is shared by many creative and entrepreneurial practitioners, as well as scholars.

We think that the next phase of scholarly work can creatively explore, document, analyze and provoke in the following areas, and we expect to learn more during the pre-conference:

• Research on policy options to support media and communication platforms for public knowledge and action, including those applied in other but related areas such as Internet governance and seemingly unrelated areas such as anti-trust.
• Research on the success and even more critically, failure of experiments to create reliable, trustworthy and also participatory public media;
• Research on decision-making and participation in social and political process to better understand the role and function of media/communication for public knowledge and action;
• Research on the shifting dynamics of news production and dissemination, and the ways in which content becomes embedded in political and cultural debates.
• Research on rhetoric, framing, and agenda-setting around the mission, purpose and function of public media.

In the area of public media, scholarly research need not be engaged research, done in conjunction with practitioners or policy-makers. It need not be conducted as a public-intellectual exercise, with an aspect of the work committed to connecting the conclusions to public awareness and action. But we cannot imagine meaningful research on public media that is not grounded in a commitment to agency in public life—the ability of a society’s members to act as members of a public to address issues that affect the structure of their social lives. To that end, research projects that explore how people understand the function of public media in their societies and lives, how policy encourages and constrains public media, how public media can act most effectively to connect a society’s members to the issues that concern them all are grounded in the same commitment and concern.