Modeling Policy for New Public Service Media Networks

An article in the Fall 2010 issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology by Center for Social Media Research Fellow and Rutgers Law Professor Ellen Goodman and researcher Anne H. Chen explores new policy structures for networked public media.

Building on the "layered model" of network policy, the authors argue for policy structures that would more accurately reflect shifts in the communications enviroment, and support the transition of public media into a broadband-based, multiplatform system that provides access to a range of digital content, more flexible curation of that content to meet user needs both nationally and locally, and more meaningful engagement with users. They write:

Despite information abundance, broadly inclusive social media, and the distributed means of communication that characterize the digital age, society may lack the informational tools necessary to involve everyone in democratic decision-making and to foster widespread economic and social flourishing. Information gaps are especially keen in the areas of investigative journalism and content directed to underserved, minority, and poor populations. Experts are calling on digital public service media — building on, but transcending the legacy public broadcasting system — to respond to these deficits. In theory, and in the highest aspirations of American communications policy, public service media is tasked with generating a 'social dividend' from innovative communications technologies.

For public service media to fulfill this function — indeed, for public service media to make constructive and sustainable contributions in the digital future — policymakers will need to restructure and rethink what public service media is.

The new picture of public media that this article paints is very different from the station-centered, hub-and-spoke model of the broadcast era. The image below suggests the functions and structure of public media "in the cloud," and depicts the "network layers" that Goodman and Chen describe. New policies, they suggest, are needed to support and regulate public communications infrastructure, new forms of content, distributed curation not only by national programmers and stations but by online platforms and individuals, and new forms of public "connection," via participatory and mobile technologies.

Reframing public media this way will help it to fill current market gaps in news and civic information. "We have to assume that citizens confronted with information overload and stretched to keep up with commercial media content will not come to this information without a 'nudge.' If they would, the commercial marketplace presumably would produce this information," they write. "Thus, intentional connection strategies forged outside of the marketplace are usually necessary to capture the positive externalities that the information is capable of generating."

Goodman and Chen argue that reformulating public policy for public media would yield "greater efficiencies, greater diversity and inclusion, and greater impact." Along the way, they examine a number of the public media 2.0 examples that Center for Social Media researchers have identified and unpacked in reports and case studies over the last few years.

The article concludes with two concrete policy recommendations: amending the Public Service Broadcasting Act to become the Public Service Media Act, and mandating interconnection throughout the currently fragmented public service media system. In this moment when legislators are considering a reduction of funds for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, these suggestions to leverage decades of federal investment in public broadcsting for greater relevance and effectiveness are well worth considering.