FCC Future of Media: Submit Your Comments by May 7

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.

Last Friday, the FCC held its second public workshop under this inquiry and has recently posted workshop materials. The workshop focused on Public and Other Noncommercial Media in the Digital Era and included an impressive set of panels and presenters exploring a vision for public media in the digital era.  FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski and Commissioner Michael Copps provided the welcome and opening remarks before turning over the agenda to co-moderators Steven Waldman and Ellen P. Goodman who set out to explore the following issues:

• The possibilities for greater collaboration among noncommercial media entities such as public broadcasters, PEG channels, noncommercial web-based outlets, and other new media entities;
• The role of public and other noncommercial media in serving the information needs of the underserved, including minorities, children, the disabled, and the economically disadvantaged;
• Evolving business and organizational structures of public and other noncommercial media entities and the ways these are impacted by government policy;
• Innovative uses of social media, gaming, Internet applications, citizen journalism, mobile technologies, and other technological and organizational innovations;
• The possibilities for new kinds of noncommercial media networks and associated funding models

Huffington Post (Craig Aaron, “Journalism’s Crisis is Public Media’s Opportunity“) and Broadcasting & Cable (John Eggerton, “Genachowski: FCC Should Not Dictate Programming“) have coverage of the workshop, which was live streamed but has not yet been archived on the Commission’s website.