Imagining New Public Media Networks for Families and Communities

How can emerging public media networks best engage users? We've worked with Center for Social Media Research Fellow and Rutgers Law Professor Ellen Goodman to create a video exploring how people are using and conceptualizing such networks. It’s a first effort to depict emerging systems of creation, curation and connection as they might operate in the life of a single fictional family.

Watch the video here.

The video is based on the research and convenings we have done in the fields of media and law with support from the Ford Foundation, critically examining the meaning, value and appropriate structures of emerging public media networks in the digital age.

Join the Conversation

We hope the video will spur discussion—both online and face-to-face. (See the #pubmedia tag on Twitter for an ongoing dialogue.) Please distribute and use it freely  for noncommercial purposes and with attribution. Also available are related graphics, as well as handouts on public media functions and the imagined family featured in the video. Or make your own videos about how public media works and how it should evolve to serve you.

In addition, there are many different courses of action that people can take with respect to public media, including:

• Pressing for reform of public media law and policy at the national level—for one proposal, see this article from the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology
• Holding local public media outlets to higher performance standards—to find local public stations, see this map from the National Center for Media Engagement
• Producing their own public media through some of the networked platforms we’ve highlighted—for example, see the Public Radio Exchange

Thanks for watching, and for spreading the word. Questions? Post them here.