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New Media, Civic Media

Moderator: Pat Aufderheide
Jessica Clark Ellen Hume Persephone Miel Dean Jansen Jake Shapiro: April 24, 2009; Running Time: 1:17:54

About the Lecture

About the Lecture

As old media die, new forms are emerging, but it’s not clear they will serve such vital civic functions as “helping people form publics,” as Pat Aufderheide puts it. These panelists point to promising experiments in “Public Media 2.0,” but caution that new media are not guaranteed to shore up democracy or invigorate public culture.

After two years of research, Jessica Clark has reframed the notion of public media as “outlets that provide context/content that allows publics to form around shared issues without political or corporate interference.” Instead of a centralized producer (old media), user-producers collaborate, forming networks with the use of digital tools. Some novel ventures that “break out of the old zones:” cell phone reporting in forbidden areas of war-torn Gaza, and streaming iPhone feeds of local news from U.S. cities.

Ellen Hume faults traditional journalism to some degree for its own demise, because it did not “connect the dots between news and action.” It stirred up emotions with stories but didn’t give people “a place to go” with their passion. In contrast, new civic medium SeeClickFix.com enables the public to report a problem in a community (from potholes to graffiti), spurring government response. HeroReports.org encourages people to report instances of kindness. Says Hume, “These new media offer enormous opportunity for creativity, and unleash the ability to participate in public.” But we haven’t yet entered the era of full media literacy, where people become “part of the public, rather than cruising through.”

Persephone Miel has been searching for “all that democracy we were supposed to get.” In spite of the proliferation of new types of reporting media, including news aggregator, author- and audience-driven web sites, Miel believes the “old media model still does unique things for us.” As traditional journalism fades, there’s no new media replacement yet for its “editorial intelligence,” its persistent, watchdog functions. Miel sees no evidence that “the volunteer energy of the blogosphere” will step into these roles. She notes several attempts at hybrid journalism forms: websites Spot.us, a nonprofit project for community-funded reporting; Global Voices, where correspondents in developing nations send out web dispatches; and Town Meeting 2009, a New Hampshire public radio web venture that reported on local governments’ budget process.

On the technology front, Dean Jansen has developed a free open source HD video player, Miro, so people don’t have to go through proprietary gateways or load specialized software to access web video content. He hopes to swell the ranks of user-producers in a more inclusive, participatory webspace.

Jake Shapiro’s public radio exchange, PRX.org, invites independent radio producers to connect with local public radio stations through his aggregating site. Citing the “current collapse of traditional forms,” particularly public television, Shapiro hopes to reconfigure public broadcasting. He says his marketplace enables content creators to find an audience, receive royalties from interested public radio buyers, create social networks, and potentially find alternative channels of distribution via podcasting.

Lecture Details

Location: Wong Auditorium

“The old media model still does unique things for us. It’s what people mean when they say we have to save newspapers -- the watchdog function, and constancy of reporting... Our conclusion is those functions are definitely going away in the traditional media world and are not being replaced one to one. For-profit, ad-supported mass media that was the way America got its reporting is a strange historical accident. I think it’s over; it’s not going to happen anymore. ”

Persephone Miel

About the Speakers

Moderator: Pat Aufderheide

Professor, School of Communications, American University
Director, Center for Social Media

Pat Aufderheide is the author of several books including Documentary: A Very Short Introduction (2007), The Daily Planet (2000), and of Communications Policy in the Public Interest (1999). She has been a Fulbright and John Simon Guggenheim fellow and has served as a juror at the Sundance Film Festival. She received a career achievement award in 2006 from the International Documentary Association.

Jessica Clark

Director, Future of Public Media Project, Center for Social Media, American University

Jessica Clark is researching the evolution of public media, and is also collaborating on a project to document and analyze an emerging national network of independent, progressive media outlets.

Clark has been researching, creating, writing and fighting for independent media for more than a decade. From 2002-09, she worked on every facet of In These Times, a national monthly magazine of news, analysis and cultural reporting, serving as its editor-at-large, executive editor, managing editor, associate publisher and assistant publisher. From late 2001 through 2002, Jessica was the co-editor for LiP Magazine, which championed “dangerous humor, liberated eroticism and informed revolt.” She served on the steering committee for the Midwest office of the Independent Press Association, and has worked on a wide variety of media activism efforts with such organizations as The Free Press and Media Matters for America.

Clark has also held editorial positions at Britannica.com, the Library of Congress, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and marketing positions at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago Press. She earned an M.A. in Social Sciences and a B.A. in English from the University of Chicago.

Ellen Hume

Research Director
MIT Center for Future Civic Media

Ellen Hume is also the Founding Editor and Publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire and the Founding Director of the Center on Media and Society, UMass Boston. As the founding Executive Director of PBS's Democracy Project, from 1996 to 1998, she developed special news programs that encouraged citizen involvement in public affairs. She oversaw PBS's 1996 and 1998 election coverage, creating PBS Debate Night, a nationally televised Congressional leadership debate, as well as local candidate debates on PBS stations across the country. She also created Follow the Money, PBS's weekly television and Web series on the role of money in American politics. At PBS, she developed "resource journalism," a multimedia approach to news coverage.

Hume has more than 30 years of experience as a reporter and analyst for American newspapers, magazines and television. She was a White House and political correspondent for The Wall Street Journal from 1983 to 1988, and a Washington-based national reporter with the Los Angeles Times from 1977 to 1983.

Hume was a Senior Research Fellow at UMass Boston (2003-2008). From 1988 to 1993, she served as Executive Director and Senior Fellow at Harvard University's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

Persephone Miel

Fellow, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School

Persephone Miel directs the Media Re:public project, examining the impact of participatory journalism on the information environment at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center.

Prior to joining Berkman, she spent more than 12 years with Internews Network, an international NGO supporting independent media around the world. She designed and managed a variety of projects to support the growth of non-state news media, including TV, radio, print and online outlets, in the former Soviet Union and participated in program design and development for Internews projects in other parts of the world.

Miel lived in Moscow from 1992 to 1998. From 1993 to 1994 she was the host of an English-language morning news show there.

Dean Jansen

Outreach Director, Participatory Culture Foundation

Dean Jansen is part of the Special Projects team at the Participatory Culture Foundation. The PCF is the non-profit organization which has developed and promoted Miro, the open source internet TV platform.

Jake Shapiro

Executive Director, The Public Radio Exchange (PRX)

Jake Shapiro previously served as associate director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He was a producer for The Connection with Christopher Lydon, a nationally syndicated public radio talk show. Shapiro, a fluent speaker of Russian, has also developed web resources for a variety of Harvard research groups, including the Davis Center for Russian Studies, the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies and the Moscow Institute for Advanced Studies. Shapiro graduated from Harvard in 1993 with a B.A. in History and Literature.