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A project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program
A new report out this month finds that, while President Obama’s Open Government Directive has been a catalyst for thinking about new ways to engage the public in governance and experiment with new tools and techniques to do so, the plans proposed by most agencies lack important elements and key features to fully and meaningfully [...]
In an interactive world, journalism must be a trusting partnership between journalists and the public. Building that partnership will require enlightened leadership within traditional and emerging news organizations. And partnerships will require involvement by local governments and foundations, schools and universities, libraries and churches, social groups and, most important, individual citizens.
What can journalists and libraries do to create opportunities for local news and civic engagement?
Leading-edge thinkers in both fields have come together recently in several different venues to explore answers to this question. The early feedback on these discussions is that this is a worthwhile topic to discuss at a critical time for both institutions.
In [...]
Re-Imagining Journalism: Local News for a Networked World, a new policy paper by Michael R. Fancher, identifies five strategic areas and specific ideas for promoting experimentation, collaboration and public engagement that are critical for reforming local journalism. The paper calls upon a variety of stakeholders in business, the nonprofit sector, government and community institutions, and [...]
Following on the release of Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication by Peter Levine earlier this month, Norman Ornstein at the American Enterprise Institute has published a new white paper that also takes a critical look at the challenges to boosting civic participation and improving the [...]
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of the 2011 Knight News Challenge at the MIT-Knight Civic Media Conference in Cambridge, Massachusetts today. Sixteen ideas that push the future of news and information will receive a total of $4.7 million to foster innovation at “the intersection of journalism and technology,” according to Knight Foundation President Alberto [...]
This Friday the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation release the sixth in a series of white papers aimed at implementing the recommendations of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. The paper—“Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive [...]
The National Association for Media Literacy Education (NAMLE) Summer Conference, June 22-25 in Philadelphia, moves into action a key recommendation of the Knight Commission Report, Recommendation 6, calling for the integration of “digital and media literacy as critical elements for education at all levels”. The conference is offering over 150 workshops, demonstrations, and presentations [...]
U.S. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke today announced the launch of a new government initiative aimed at promoting digital literacy resources and collaboration. The federal Digital Literacy Initiative represents a major advance toward implementing the Knight Commission’s recommendations for enhancing the information capacity of individuals through new collaborations, public policies and investments in [...]
The fierce rhetoric surrounding the debate over federal funding for the current fiscal year gave the appearance that public broadcasting is a partisan issue. But public broadcasting clearly enjoys more support across the country than the recent debates and media coverage over the funding battle and the controversies swirling around NPR would suggest.
Please join us for a webinar on the newly-released “Community Information Toolkit” 2 to 3:30 p.m. EDT April 14 The toolkit helps leaders like you harness the power of information to advance their goals for a better community. It offers a simple, easy-to-use set of tools to help take stock of your community’s news and information resources, and take action to improve them.
When we announced in late February that we were moving our successful local blog, Rockville Central, entirely to our Facebook page and that we would no longer be updating our standalone web site, a number of readers were surprised and dismayed. And we ourselves were surprised when this move gained some national attention as people who think about journalism weighed in on whether Facebook was “the future of news” and whether our move was a harbinger of things to come. (See here for a wrap-up of some of the key reactions.)
The one-year anniversary of the National Broadband Plan was marked by a number of conferences. I spoke at several. In each, I tried to address a different question. In the first, hosted by the Joint Center for Economic and Political Studies, I looked at how we should approach increasing adoption. While I am very proud of the plan, on this issue, I have rethought what we did and think the approach we proposed will not work, and that there is a better way. Our approach, based on the voice-related issues of availability and cost are not the right foundation for broadband related issues in which, in addition to availability and cost, we must address use and training. I set out a four-step program that I hope will help reframe the debate, as we need a workable program to solve this problem.
Barbara Cochran, author of Rethinking Public Media, a white paper that proposes strategies for implementing the Knight Commission’s recommendation on public media, has gone on MSNBC to discuss the justification for public funding of public media. Cochran sat down with NBC’s Andrea Mitchell and told her that funding public media is “an investment in information [...]
The firestorm raging around federal funding of public broadcasting has led to the resignation of Vivian Schiller as president and CEO of NPR, following the release of a video that showed the head of NPR’s fundraising unit criticizing the Republican party while also referring to Tea Party supporters as “seriously racist, racist people.” The video [...]
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