Momentum Builds for Reforming Public Media Policy
[Source: Center for Social Media at American Univeristy, by Jessica Clark, November 1, 2010]
Calls to rethink the policies that undergird public media are on the rise, matched by an increase in the pace of innovation by traditional public broadcasters.
At the New America Foundation (NAF), where I'm a Knight Media Policy Fellow, we've been exploring a range of policy proposals for expanding support for digital public media. In the current Columbia Journalism Review cover story, NAF president Steve Coll notes:
From the country’s founding, American media and journalism have been continually remade by technological innovation. Political pamphlets made room for industrially printed newspapers, which made room for the telegraph, which made room for radio, which made room for broadcast television, which made room for cable and satellite services, which made room for the World Wide Web, which is making room even as we read this for the Kindle, iPad, and mobile phone applications.
When such technological, industrial, and economic changes dislodge the assumptions underlying public policy, the smart response is to update and adjust policy in order to protect the public interest. And politically plausible reforms that would clearly serve the public are within reach. It is time to reboot the system.
But how will the new operating system of public media function? At both NAF and CSM we've been imagining public media futures through a series of convenings with practitioners, researchers and policymakers. On October 5, NAF hosted a panel, Public Media in a Digital Age: Broadcast, Broadband and Beyond.There, BBC Director General Mark Thompson made this observation, which mirrors many of the conclusions of CSM's white paper, Public Media 2.0:
Public service broadcasting is founded on a belief in ‘public space,’ in other words on the belief that there is room for a place which is ‘neither’ part of the state ‘nor’ purely governed by commercial considerations, which everyone is free to enter and within which they can encounter culture, education, debate, where they can share and swap experiences.Right now even the idea of public space is being challenged, especially on the web, as commercial media struggles with the immense challenge of monetization. In fact it seems to me that digital media and its open, democratizing spirit, represent an almost perfect fit with what I mean by the term ‘public space', and that if the BBC and other public broadcasters can migrate successfully into this new world, that -- far from slipping to our audiences' peripheral vision, our eye and ear contact with them can grow deeper and more valuable.
U.S. public broadcasters are now testing out a variety of new ways to create such public spaces—both online, and through community-based engagement. Many of the most innovative practitioners will be joining us on November 20, as CSM hosts the second annual Public Media Camp. However, they still are hamstrung by policies that funnel the bulk of federal and state support to broadcast operations. As CSM Director Patricia Aufderheide and I write in a recent FCC submission, "public content providers will require new infrastructure support in order to reach citizens who are increasingly seeking news and information via mobile and digital devices."
We also note that public broadcasters are only part of the story. To advance, they will need to recognize that they are "now clearly a node in a larger web of public interest organizations that support the ability of citizens to participate actively in society." Establishing a broader vision for public media will be crucial for policy reform. Libraries, museums, nonprofit news sites, educational institutions, government transparency projects, community media organizations, and even individuals are all now viable partners for producing digital public media. Collaborations such as the one recently announced between the Public Insight Network, Pro Publica, and the Center for Public Integrity can and should become standard operating procedure.
The FCC's forthcoming Future of Media report will offer a clear moment for public media reformers to make their case. In the meantime, we'll keep tracking promising experiments in our Showcase, and on MediaShift, where I'll be coordinating a week of coverage about public media projects and trends in late November. Keep track of our coverage and related events at futureofpublicmedia.net.
