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A project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program
Renee Hobbs, national expert on digital and media literacy who leads the Media Education Lab founded at Temple University, this month took the helm of the new Harrington School of Communication and Media at the University of Rhode Island. The Media Education Lab also moves to URI. Hobbs is the author of the Knight Commission-inspired [...]
Free flowing news and information is essential to the health of democratic communities, but not all information environments are equally effective at meeting community information needs. What can a community do to measure the quality of its information environment, identify its information needs and take steps to build a more robust news and information ecosystem?
Assessing [...]
Today the FCC released the findings of its inquiry into the Future of Media, a project begun in early 2010 in response to the Knight Commission. In a report over 450 pages long, author Steve Waldman and the Working Group on Information Needs of Communities inspect the shifting media landscape and lay out how relevant [...]
At the 2011 Media Learning Seminar, an annual gathering hosted by the Knight Foundation, hundreds of community foundation leaders and journalism and technology experts previewed the beta version of the Community Information Toolkit, a set of tools and steps designed to help communities take stock of their news and information flow and take actionable steps [...]
The Knight Commission recognized that for there to be healthy news communities, all Americans need access to diverse sources of news and information. In the future, that means that all Americans will need access to broadband networks, and public policy should encourage broadband adoption. Yet current government programs to assure communication networks are available to [...]
“What’s at stake when local news and information flow doesn’t serve all members of a community equally well? How can people respond?”
These questions lie at the heart of Information Stories, a riveting new series of twelve three-to-five minute videos that show how people can overcome the powerlessness caused by living in an information vacuum. Combining [...]
At a time when government funding for public broadcasting is hotly debated, Rethinking Public Media: More Local, More Inclusive, More Interactive, a new policy paper by Barbara Cochran, offers five broad strategies and 21 specific recommendations to reform public media. The strategies include strengthening local news operations, sharing digital platforms among public entities, recruiting more [...]
The staff and fellows at New America Foundation’s Media Policy Initiative have been busy this year formulating policy and regulatory reforms to foster the development of media that satisfy the needs of democracy in the 21st century. Their work has centered on advancing the recommendations of the Knight Commission as articulated in the Commission’s report, [...]
Taking stock of the information resources available and identifying what information resources the community needs to remain strong, healthy and dynamic are the first steps toward building a healthy, informed community. Share what’s happening in your own community and join us in highlighting new and ongoing projects that measure and improve the information health of America’s communities.
Scranton, Pa. — The FCC has granted Scranton a grassroots opportunity. Armed with a temporary radio construction permit and guided by the Prometheus Radio Project, local non-profit organization Community Radio Collective, Inc. plans to launch full-power FM station WFTE 90.3 and they have five months to do it. Community Radio Collective has begun a capital campaign to raise $15,000 to be on the air by midnight Feb. 10, 2011, when its construction permit expires. The money will pay for a 60-foot tower to be built 10 miles away in Mount Cobb, creating an FM signal strong enough to reach the city and its suburbs clearly—that is, an area of about 200,000 people.
As part of the ongoing work to promote the Knight Commission’s vision for healthy, informed communities, the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program has commissioned a series of policy papers to detail specific steps for implementing the Commission’s 15 recommendations. The research and writing of these papers is now underway, with publication slated for the fall.
We recently invited a small group of forward-thinking journalists, news entrepreneurs, analysts [...]
While home broadband adoption continues to rise, with an average of well over 60% of Americans having high-speed internet available in their homes, African Americans, Latinos and people in low-income communities continue to lag behind by double-digit margins. As both the Knight Commission Report, Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age and the National [...]
We’ve just published our first two information ecology case studies, which take a close look at the local conditions in Seattle and Scranton. When we started investigating these media ecosystems, we used the Knight Commission Report, “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy in the Digital Age,” as our guide.
KnightComm is pleased to provide the Aspen Institute Communication and Society Program’s publication, Of the Press: Models for Transforming American Journalism. The report addresses a critical aspect of the Knight Commission’s deliberations: the need to develop innovative business models for “sustainable, meaningful, local journalism”. It is written by Michael R. Fancher, former executive editor of The [...]
Community connectedness and diverse revenue streams are critical ingredients for success for nonprofit news organizations. That’s my headline the conversation at the Knight Foundation’s “Seeking Sustainability” roundtable discussion of about 50 people representing 18 nonprofit news organizations Monday in Austin.
Benton Headlines
