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A project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program
For the sake of our children, and for the competitiveness of the nation, America ought to be aggressively developing a new category of educational content, delivered using high-speed Internet access.
The New York Times recently ran an article (”High Speed for the Sparsely Wired,” July 9, 2010) reminding us that the September 30th deadline for awarding broadband stimulus grants is approaching. The Times article by Susannah G. Kim highlights the pending impact of federal stimulus money to extend high speed Internet access to rural areas.
Now that grant-winning [...]
The League of Women Voters took up the Knight Commission’s challenge to help meet the information needs of America’s communities during a workshop at its 2010 convention in Atlanta last month. The session, entitled “Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy and Citizen Participation in the Digital Age,” provided an opportunity for LWV members to explore what role the national [...]
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 [...]
A couple of things became clearer at this week’s third and presumably final Federal Trade Commission workshop on the future of journalism (“How Will Journalism Survive the Internet Age?” June 15, 2010, at the National Press Club, Washington, D.C.). For a good summary of the meeting, see Fiona Morgan’s “A subtle victory for policy interventions [...]
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 [...]
The League of Women Voters will feature the work of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy at its annual convention in Atlanta this month. The 2010 Convention, with the theme “Making Democracy Work,” will be held June 11-15, 2010.
Charlie Firestone, executive director of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society [...]
Since the release of the report of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, we’ve seen efforts in communities across the country to take stock of their unique information needs and assets. One of the great things about these case studies is that they are bringing a discussion that has [...]
New America Foundation, Free Press and Media Access Project submitted the following comments to the Federal Communications Commission’s examination of The Future of Media and Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age. Heeding a call by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy, the FCC established the Future of [...]
The Federal Trade Commission announced yesterday that it has scheduled a third and final workshop on the Future of Journalism at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on June 15, 2010. Information about the FTC’s workshop series on the Future of Journalism is available on the project website at http://ftc.gov/opp/workshops/news/index.shtml. The workshop will be [...]
Last week FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski presented “The Third Way: A Narrowly Tailored Broadband Framework,” an approach that would reclassify broadband services in order to preserve the consensus on the FCC’s role in protecting Net Neutrality. In the wake of the Comcast ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, the third way approach would distinguish broadband transmissions from broadband “computing functionality”, and tailor Title II’s requirements to “the internet age”.
Like all large-scale communications networks, the Internet does not work without governance. The battle of China versus Google tells us not that existing institutions have failed, but rather that new issues require new consideration of appropriate ways to assure the freedoms of the Internet.
The public comment period for the Federal Communications Commission’s inquiry on the Future of Media & Information Needs of Communities ends this Friday, May 7th. Comments may be submitted directly to the Future of Media website, where the FCC has posed these questions to direct comments to the issues that are of central concern to inquiry: How should media companies change their approaches to delivering news and information? What government policies could improve the news and information media? Media in Your Community: Tell us about your community and its media.
The American public is expressing increased satisfaction with federal government services that are offered online, according to the latest quarterly report of the American Customer Satisfaction Index E-Government Satisfaction Index. The e-government satisfaction index is produced by the market research firm ForeSee Results. This survey and previous research conducted by ForeSee show that citizens who are very satisfied with a [...]
The Wall Street Journal today unveiled its new, expanded coverage of local news in the greater New York region, where the newspaper will go head-to-head with its national news rival, the New York Times, to compete for local readership and advertising dollars. The Greater New York section features coverage of politics, real estate, sports and culture.
If the New York edition proves successful, Dow Jones [...]
