Reflecting on Public Media 2.0 in 2009 and Looking Ahead to 2010

[Source: Center for Social Media; December 22, 2009]

This year at the Center for Social Media we featured some truly innovative projects in the Public Media 2.0 Showcase.

As described in our white paper, Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics, public media 2.0’s core function is to generate publics around problems. Public media 2.0 projects are multiplatform, participatory, and digital. They incorporate features such as digital video, powerful databases, locative media, and open source tools, providing powerful platforms and tools for users to act as informed citizens.

Trends in 2009

Many of the projects that we profiled took advantage of low-cost audio and video production/distribution to address social issues. For example, The 1000 Voices Archive promotes discussion and action on social issues through short documentaries, Two Angry Moms uses documentary film to address school lunch reform and Back from Iraq: The Veterans Stories Project offers a series of student-produced videos focusing on veteran experiences. We also showcased MiroCommunity, a web service that helps organizations develop customizable video presentations with an emphasis on creating community through online discussions and open-source tools.

Public Media 2.0 producers are using powerful databases to provide vital information. For example, the Environmental Working Group harnesses the power of databases to publish little-known information on environmental toxins. We took a look at 10 government watchdog projects that use databases to aggregate information about government officials and make it searchable and customizable. Projects like the Interactive Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Veterans History Project use databases in a different way: to honor fallen soldiers and to capture the living history of those who have returned.

Locative media grew in leaps and bounds in 2009, and we noted some projects that use aggregation and mapping features to publish hyperlocal information, including EveryBlock, Outside.In, Topix, Twix, and SeeClickFix. We also explored several projects that emphasize the fast-growing local food movement.

“Open source” was a popular buzz phrase, used to describe not just software development, but an overall approach to content production, collaboration, and iterative improvement of projects. Many of the projects we profiled used open source tools and applications. Most notably, Deproduction applies open source practices to cable access.

As the discussion about the crisis in journalism grew ever-louder, we spent time exploring new models, including citizen journalism, funder-supported reporting and widespread collaborative projects. For example, GroundReport partners with media organizations to promote citizen journalism, Kaiser Health News exemplifies a new source in funder-supported investigative journalism, the News21 project helps journalism schools innovate and adapt to public media 2.0, and several newspaper projects use Web 2.0 tools to keep cold cases alive. We also looked at collaborative news projects such as NPR’s Argo Project, FluPortal, Economy Story, Facing the Mortgage Crisis and the Northern Community Internet Project. These explorations built upon the examination of new journalism models in our report, Scan and Analysis of Best Practices in Digital Journalism In and Outside U.S. Public Broadcasting.

Many of the projects we profiled this year were focused on expanding access to diverse publics. For example, One Economy Corp increases access to technology and information in low-income communities, and the Thousand Kites project specifically focuses on prisoner populations.

Gaming projects also aimed to expand interest and engagement in public media 2.0 among new and younger audiences, such as Consumer Consequences, which addresses sustainability; games addressing news and civic engagement, including Play the News, My US Rep: Role Play Congress, and Budget Hero Picture; and Picture the Impossible, a collaborative online/offline community-building game in Rochester.

Finally, we addressed the need for informed and media literate publics and the intersection of media literacy and public media 2.0. In order to participate fully in public media 2.0, users need to understand how and why media are constructed.

Looking Ahead

This year we used our white paper as a framework for finding and examining public media projects. In 2010, we’ll be turning our attention to impact assessment – how do we develop appropriate metrics and approaches for evaluating the impact of a given public media 2.0 project?

In other words—how can we tell when a media project has helped to inform and mobilize users around issues?

Tracking impact has become an increasingly complex proposition as platforms and content streams proliferate. A single piece of media—a documentary film for example—can now spread across a variety of screens, from a theater, to a university classroom, to the Web, to a home television, to a mobile phone. Each screening carries with it different expectations, different measurement schemes, and different potential publics. How can the film’s makers, funders and fans understand and assess its impact? This question has real consequences for the continued life of that project, as well as for making decisions about future investments of time and money in projects to come.

Simple audience metrics—viewers, listeners, site visitors—do not fully tell the story of how a media project or outlet changed minds, revealed falsehoods or made waves. Similarly, fiscal measurements—tickets or DVDs sold, dollars donated, advertisers attracted—are only partial and imperfect reflections of impact. For mission-driven media-makers, and those who support and consume their work, the accounts of impact that resonate are those that show how media can bolster and further the mission in question.

Throughout the spring, we’ll be taking a look at projects in the context of new impact measurement dimensions such as reach, inclusion, trust, engagement, influence and more. We’ll also examine if these dimensions become working goals for public media 2.0 outlets and projects—both at stations, and for innovators outside of the existing “system”—how might they then be effectively matched to both strategy and assessment? And how can more traditional metrics, such as audience numbers or income, be used to help assess whether these mission-based goals are being met?

We’ll be taking a break until January, when we’ll try to answer these questions by examining even more public media 2.0 projects!