Future of Public Media

New sites for public media—far outside the realm of public broadcasting—are burgeoning. Now here comes the Iraq Veterans Memorial, which showcases videos made by the family, friends and comrades of fallen soldiers in the Iraq war. This non-partisan site honors the fallen in a way that takes advantage of participatory media technologies, and the site is a platform from which we as members of the public can begin and continued informed discussions about the meaning and cost of U.S. geopolitical strategies. What an excellent example of public media made by and for the public. Read more...

Public broadcasting has been a protected media zone that provides some higher-quality opportunities for people to learn about each other and their problems, and to share a common cultural experience of consuming the same media. But public broadcasting is still a stand-in for public communication, because it is a mass medium. The broadcasters speak to the many, who then talk to each other.

Can digital media change this? Can new technologies bring media made by, with and for the public? Read more...

PANEL: Station Social Media Experiments

Blogs, podcasts and wikis are just some of the tools that are taking radio beyond commercial and noncommercial broadcast into what Jake Shapiro calls an emerging "third zone": social media. Read more...

The Beyond Broadcast conference last Saturday, held at MIT, featured a brilliant vision of public media as truly participatory media with a democratic heart, by Henry Jenkins. (He was drawing from his equally brilliant book Convergent Culture, which reminds us among other things that powerful democratic communications tools are often incubated in improbable environments such as fanzines.) Go to beyondbroadcast.net to catch up a little. Read more...

I just spent the first day at the "Public Media Conference" in Boston. This conference, previously called the Public Broadcasting New Media Conference, is a gathering of more than 450 public broadcasters from across the U.S. who discuss and share their experiences with online services and community engagement tools as well as the strategic challenges that lie ahead. Being from Germany and therefore with a somewhat different public broadcasting history, I was curious to learn how the U.S. public broadcasting landscape is evolving around the internet. Read more...