Future of Public Media

Social documentaries are a great example of media designed for public knowledge and action. The Trials of Darryl Hunt--watch for it on HBO on April 26 and also in theaters this spring--is the latest example of the difference they can make.
Our friend David Magdael, who is publicizing the film, tells the story:
"Darryl Hunt was a 19 year-old black teenager in 1984 when he was wrongfully accused of murdering and raping a white woman in racially divided Winston -Salem, North Carolina. Read more...

I attended the Knight-backed We Media conference in Florida last week, an annual confab of journalists, CitJs, digital media execs, educators, big thinkers and beyond. The focus was supposed to be on community, which digital honcho Merrill Brown called the "most important" topic on the Web today. Read more...

Last September, mega-station WGBH in Boston held a conference for public broadcasters about how to cope with the astonishing new world opening up in the land of Web 2.0. Now, reports and podcasts from that conference are available at http://opencontent.wgbh.org/index.html. Conferees listened to network pioneer Mitch Kapor talk about the peril of being an "incumbent" as a new media model arises--"you need to be 'fast followers,;" he advised. Read more...

Do experiments in new kinds of public media matter? Yes, according to Jeff Chester, the indefatigable dynamo who heads the Center for Digital Democracy (http://www.democraticmedia.org/). He has just issued a book-length manifesto for media reform, Digital Destiny: New Media and the Future of Democracy (The New Press). Read more...

Those of us who got to go to the Center's Making Your Documentary Matter conference met Katerina Cizek, the National Film Board of Canada filmmaker who's creating videos in collaboration with the staff of a major public hospital in Toronto. Now her website has launched, at www.nfb.ca/filmmakerinresidence, so we can track the evolution of the NFB's latest experiment in participatory media. Read more...