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A project of the Aspen Institute Communications and Society Program
“Informing Communities: Sustaining Democracy & Citizen Participation in the Digital Age” was the opening workshop at the June 11-15 League of Women Voters National Convention in Atlanta Georgia attended by three members of the LWV of Montgomery County.
A recent study by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy found that U.S. educators are not very good at teaching digital literacy. The commission, a collaboration of the Knight Foundation and the Aspen Institute, reports that “although virtually every school in the United States is connected to the Internet, many local communities have not integrated either digital or media literacy into their K-12 curricula.”
The call to action came last October in reports issued by the Knight Commission on Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. The Knight report asked the government to “direct media policy toward innovation, competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.”
When a big newspaper goes bankrupt — or shuts its doors for good — what’s really at stake? This year, great American cities asked themselves that question. In Philadelphia and Chicago, papers filed for bankruptcy protection. In Seattle and Denver, the “second daily” closed. But what does it really mean, for the city in question, for the greater community, for us, as consumers of news? Does it matter?
An august body of experts, everyone from a First Amendment lawyer to a software engineer, traveled the nation to answer that question.
[From Knight Foundation Press Room]
Leaders, Citizens Gather at Knight/FCC Forum to Discuss Recommendations in FCC’s National Broadband Plan
Washington, D.C. (March 9, 2010) – A diverse group of citizens and leaders gathered Tuesday in support of strategies that will provide 93 million Americans who have been left behind in the digital age [...]
The FCC announced it is responding to the calls by the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy for “new thinking and aggressive action” by appointing Steven Waldman, an online pioneer and journalist, to explore the information needs of communities and “promote a vibrant media landscape.”
In a [...]
Source: Associated Press
Get everyone in U.S. online, panel says
Free flow of information ‘vital to the healthy functioning of communities’
By David Bauder
Associated Press
Friday, October 2, 2009
NEW YORK – The nation needs to give the same urgency to making sure all Americans have broadband access as the Eisenhower administration did in building an interstate highway system a [...]
Source: The Washington Post
Access to News Wildly Unequal in U.S., Study Says
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 2, 2009
Saving journalism and achieving digital democracy might seem like a pretty tall order.
But that is the task of a high-powered commission that says, in a report being released Friday, that the country’s growing hunger for [...]
