Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

11.4.08 | Puget Sound Off is a youth program, but it can also be considered an alternative source of news and opinion for a whole metropolitan area. Taking advantage of the Internet, and especially web 2.0, quite a few communities have created innovative news sources lately. The St. Paul City Newsdesk trains volunteer citizen journalists and gets their reports (in various media) into lots of local venues, including their own elaborate website. New Castle Now is a whole community newspaper entirely written and edited by volunteers, on a low budget. In the Kentucky mountains, Appalshop trains citizens who mostly use radio and the web to share their news and views. In urban Philadelphia, kids in the MURL project transmit their video and audio news from rooftop antennas to computers in the neighborhood. These projects all happen to be grantees of the Knight Foundation’s New Voices project, but there are many others that aren’t part of New Voices.

Previous waves of experimentation—such as the community web portals of the late 1990s—have mostly vanished because of sustainability problems: a lack of money, institutional partnerships, and stable audiences. In 2001, the Ford Foundation convened some of the key stakeholders (including the public broadcasters, libraries, the ACLU, and digital media experts) to envision a new federal program that would support community media in the electronic era. Their plan was called a Public Telecommunications Service, and a summary is still online. This plan is obsolete now and should not be implemented as such, but it is time to think about new policies for civic and community media—with a strong youth component.

We should consider various options. Youth media production could be considered a valuable form of community service and thus eligible for federal support through the Corporation for National and Community Service. Indeed, the Corporation recently made six grants to organizations (including mine) to experiment with online social networking and volunteerism. Youth media could become a more pervasive function of the public broadcasting system. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration could support freestanding community media platforms that trained and supported youth (and others) as media producers. The nation’s Land-Grant colleges and universities could take this job on, either with new federal funds or on their own. (This report on the role of the Land-Grants also came out of the meetings in 2001.) Municipalities could be the leading force, using new federal funds or perhaps drawing resources from cable-franchise agreements or other local sources. Libraries, newspapers, and schools are some other potential partners.

Discussing policies for youth media production would also provide an opportunity to think about fundamental issues that have arisen in Seattle: How should projects like this be governed? What counts as "learning"? What defines a high-quality product?