Business, philanthropic, education and public broadcasting leaders from across the country gather in Washington, DC today for the Digital Future Initiative (DFI) Summit, an invitation-only event where participants will explore the future of America’s public service media.

The Summit features the release of the final report of the bipartisan DFI panel and the launch of working groups to implement key DFI recommendations to develop, fund and launch major new initiatives addressing America’s crises in education, civic engagement, public health and emergency preparedness. Co-chaired by James Barksdale, the former CEO of Netscape, and Reed Hundt, former Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the DFI panel is a distinguished group of 15 prominent experts from both inside and outside of the public broadcasting system.

The Summit occurs precisely one year after the panel first convened in December 2004 with a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The DFI Panel’s report, Digital Future Initiative: Challenges and Opportunities for Public Service Media in the Digital Age, calls for major new initiatives in several areas where the public broadcasting system’s strengths coincide with pressing national needs. The panel has identified education, civic engagement, health care and emergency preparedness as areas that are critically important to the future of our nation and where public broadcasting can make a unique impact by leveraging a combination of multimedia, on-demand content with new broad-based partnerships.

The report argues that public broadcasters should harness the on-demand and interactive digital platforms of the 21st century as they did analog TV and radio in the 20th century, using these new and powerful communications technologies to advance the public good in innovative ways.

In a Foreword to the 135-page report, Mr. Barksdale and Mr. Hundt emphasize that unlike many other leading nations, America’s public service media system currently does not have the resources to make a robust digital content transformation the nation needs. “[T]oday, public broadcasting cannot make realistic plans at any level – stations or network – commensurate with the challenges and opportunities of the new digital era. The system is too dependent on the vagaries of year-to-year congressional appropriations. It is also too dependent on the vagaries of various drives for charitable contributions. Public service media needs new, substantial and sustainable resources to be sure it can not only keep the doors open, but also keep pace with the public’s growing need for trusted, noncommercial media.”