Digital Future of Public Media

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's second annual "Internet freedom" speech on Tuesday showcased how the U.S. government is grappling with the question of what it means to be both a superpower and a democracy in the Internet age. 

On YouTube on Jan.

When asked what he thought of the French Revolution, China's first premier Chou En-lai famously replied: "It's too soon to tell." What role did the Internet play in the Egyptian Revolution? People will be arguing about the answer to that question for decades if not centuries.

Wael Ghonim, the Google executive whose anonymous online activism helped bring people into the streets for those fateful protests on January 25, told CNN's Wolf Blitzer that "the revolution started on Facebook," and "if you want to liberate a society just give them the Internet."

The main thing about the latest trove of secret WikiLeaks documents is this: It exists, it's out there for the world to see, and it would be regardless of whether the editors of the New York Times, Le Monde, the Guardian, Der Spiegel, and El País chose to print the news (and much of this trove is newsworthy) or shut their eyes.

On a chilly December night, a few hundred people gathered at San Francisco's Palace of Fine Arts for an event called Breakthrough Philanthropy. For an hour the guests engaged in the familiar social rituals of Silicon Valley, trading business cards and startup ideas over sushi, spring rolls, and pinot noir, before filing into an auditorium to listen to fundraising pitches from eight nonprofit organizations. The groups had disparate agendas, but all shared a fantastic vision for changing the world—defy death through regenerative medicine!

Amici Public Knowledge, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Media Access Project, and Open Technology Initiative (a project of the New America Foundation) are public interest organizations concerned with maintaining an open, competitive, and diverse communications infrastructure.

Many news organizations have a love-hate relationship with the Internet. While the abundance of free, online news has helped wreak havoc on the industry, the Internet itself has created incredible possibilities for news outlets to expand their reach and spark innovation. Thanks to the Internet, audiences can contribute to reporting and news in ways that would have been unimaginable a generation ago. Even the most venerable papers are experimenting with crowdsourced journalism.

At the end of 2010, the "open-source" software movement, whose activists tend to be fringe academics and ponytailed computer geeks, found an unusual ally: the Russian government. Vladimir Putin signed a 20-page executive order requiring all public institutions in Russia to replace proprietary software, developed by companies like Microsoft and Adobe, with free open-source alternatives by 2015.

Guest Post by Rob McCausland

In his response to my first guest blog post mapping community television on December 17 (How many cities have access TV?), Access Humboldt Executive Director and Knight Media Policy Fellow Sean McLaughlin said "Many operations are not appearing on the map due to smaller populations." On the Alliance for Community Media's LinkedIn group forum, he wrote, "This is very useful. Now we need to add the smaller cities and micropolitan areas."

When, on a 2009 trip to China, Barack Obama proclaimed that “the more freely information flows, the stronger the society,” he was only echoing Ronald Reagan’s pronouncement (made in 1989) that “information is the oxygen of the modern age.” Most American politicians spent the two decades in between these statements — right until they hit the WikiLeaks iceberg — under the mysterious spell of information technology and its power to spread democracy.