Media

Guest post from Colin Rhinesmith, Community Media and Technology Manager for Cambridge Community Television and an Affiliate with the New America Foundation's Media Policy Initiative.

For over thirty years, people living in big cities and small towns across the United States have used Public, Educational, and Government (PEG) Access Television to inform, engage, and entertain others in their community. The Cable Act of 1984 mandated that cable operators in the 100 largest markets set aside channels, equipment, and facilities for PEG Access TV in exchange for commercial use of public rights-of-way.

This is a map of some of the providers of local cable access television channels in the United States, drawn from data collected by th

We have created a map that shows the location of over 300 journalism schools, communication schools, and journalism or communication departments at universities across the country.  The data came from a list compiled by researchers at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg's Department of Journalism and Media Studies.

In the summer of 1993, fresh out of college, I watched as my peers entered law school or medical school or took their first jobs pushing paper in the private sector.

Others, the ones with a bit of wanderlust, found themselves studying art in Paris, doing charitable work in Central America, or following their literary dreams in Prague or Budapest.

"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back," John Maynard Keynes observed in 1936. And not only madmen in authority; lightweights in mass media, too.

Please join the New America Foundation for a wine reception with Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall.

Two simple questions. No simple answers. The speakers at Columbia University’s “Media Concentration Around the World” launched the two-day event last Thursday, March 11, 2010  by taking a step back from the gloom and doom view that media concentration jeopardizes quality content and asked the most basic preliminary questions: what is media concentration and why should we care?

Presenter Tim Wu, Columbia law professor and Schwartz Fellow at The New America Foundation, took on the “what” question. Is the concentration of Warner Communications with varied assets like DC Comics and Home Box Office the same as an AT&T or a Google? To demonstrate the range of media concentration types, Wu went to the chalk board and drew basic five models:

NPR's "All Things Considered" covers broadband on March 15, 2010 North Coast communities in California are featured.

National Public Radio correspondent Laura Sydell was in the "Redwood Coast" region of Northern California this week for a story about Broadband and challenges for universal service, including for remote rural communities in Humboldt and Trinity counties.

[Note: This post is one of a series that will document Scranton’s information ecosystem and how it is changing.]

Scranton, PA – One of the tests for an informed public advanced by the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy is: Does the community have at least one high-quality online hub?

Until 2009, the newspaper of record here avoided the drastic cuts already underway or completed in other metro area, and each of the three major commercial television networks aired local news. But by spring, the family-owned Scranton Times-Tribune would reduce its staff by 15 percent through buyouts and layoffs (I was among those laid off), and CBS affiliate WYOU replaced its lagging local newscasts with Judge Judy and Hollywood Insider.

What do high-impact projects look like? What are the common goals against which success might be measured in the progressive media sector?
--FROM BEYOND THE ECHO CHAMBER