Future of Public Media

User-centric journalism creates new challenges for journalists, about accountability, fairness and accuracy. But it also offers public media, as we noted in our white paper Public Media 2.0, great opportunities. Now, Chicago public radio station WBEZ’s CEO Torey Malatia issues a challenge to all creators of public media, and disentangles engagement from advocacy.  (It was triggered by his decision to yank a show he found tilting toward advocacy.) Read more...

What kinds of information help us connect to each other on the most important issues of our day? Not polls, says Center co-director Matt Nisbet in his latest blog post. In fact, they’re hurting, not helping. It’s polling addiction that is keeping important issues like climate change off media’s radar—until, say, a hurricane takes out New Jersey. Read more...

Read more...

Beyond our digital-age access to videos of dancing kittens, the potential for raw videos to galvanize public opinion, set the media agenda, and sometimes shock us into new awareness may not have been fully anticipated by YouTube’s founders (or maybe it was).  In the mere seven years since we saw YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim talk about elephants at the zoo in the first-ever YouTube video, the growth in the depth, range and sheer volume of available raw, user-generated videos has been nothing short of breathtaking – matched only by our apparent appetite for them. Read more...

Twitter is changing the face of diplomacy; in fact, it’s creating an entirely new concept in foreign relations that is changing the way publics are informed by governments. “Twi-plomacy” is a term that many in the social media world may not yet be familiar with, but it is becoming prevalent among government offices. Read more...