New Media Models

Before we all become completely distracted by the Thanksgiving turkey, here is a pre-holiday rundown of MPI’s many activities.

Data visualization leverages the universal grammar of images. When it succeeds, it delivers its impact concisely with elegant design and transmits complex data with split second-efficiency. Numerous blogs are dedicated to data visualizations, such as Information is Beautiful, Flowing Data, Cool Infographics, and Visualizing Economics. The Twittersphere was buzzing last July with this striking Clay Shirky-inspired “Cognitive Surplus Visualized” representation of hours of TV watched plotted against hours spent to create Wikipedia. Companies like IBM employ researchers and computer scientists at their Visual Communication Lab, whose Many Eyes research experiment encourages the public to “upload data, visualize it, and talk about their discoveries with other people.” 

Disaster, fraud and crime reporting sites provide information to civic authorities. AmberAlert has more than 7 million users who help with information on child abductions, and SERVE.GOV enables citizens to volunteer for national parks, museums and other institutions. These are just a few examples of digital tools -- from social networking applications, to microblogging (e.g. Twitter), to recommendation sites like Ushahidi -- that represent the new frontier of technology-mediated social participation.

New America Foundation President Steve Coll was a guest on NPR’s On the Media two Fridays ago, commenting on his open letter to the FCC in the The Columbia Journalism Review and the accompanying op-ed in The Washington Post. In these publications and on NPR, Coll made the point that it is in the best interest of Americans for commercial media to give up the existing public interest obligations, and instead pay spectrum usage fees that could go towards strengthening the public media to provide the information the commercial media hasn’t been providing.

How hard would it be to go a week without Google? Or, to up the ante, without Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, eBay and Google? It wouldn't be impossible, but for even a moderate Internet user, it would be a real pain. Forgoing Google and Amazon is just inconvenient; forgoing Facebook or Twitter means giving up whole categories of activity. For most of us, avoiding the Internet's dominant firms would be a lot harder than bypassing Starbucks, Wal-Mart or other companies that dominate some corner of what was once called the real world.

As barriers that once defined the field of journalism―between writer and audience, community and editor―continue to morph, one of the great challenges facing the field is how to navigate these new intersections. And while it’s no secret that all kinds of media players―from large, established, mainstream media outlets to much smaller, community-based groups―could use additional funding given the transitional state of the industry, a recent announcement may signal a brighter future for some: A number of previously unheralded media players received Philadelphia Enterprise Reporting Awards to perform some particularly innovative journalism. The awards of $5,000, announced by J-Lab: The Institute for Interactive Journalism and funded by the William Penn Foundation, will help get 14 collaborative, public affairs-oriented journalism projects off the ground in the city of brotherly love. 

Especially in recent weeks—when the purpose and tone of the media has been a topic of heated discussion (and rallying)—there has been chatter about the need to reevaluate public media in the U.S. In this vein, there has been a fair amount of reaction in the blogosphere to New America Foundation President Steve Coll’s piece in the The Columbia Journalism Review, which MPI discussed in the last Week in Review. Here are some comments on two responses from MPI collaborators:

Though we focus on media policy here at the New America Foundation’s Media Policy Initiative (MPI), such policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It must address the needs of the day. As the FCC explores policies in its “Future of Media” inquiry, understanding the changes in technology and designing the policies to address these changes is crucial to successful media policy.

The past week has been an eventful one for those working in media policy and the media more generally in Washington. Those of us who were looking ahead to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” on Saturday couldn’t help but find ourselves wondering about the role of the media today, especially after Jon Stewart declared, “The press is our immune system.” How blurred the lines between news, politics, and entertainment continue to be.

National Public Radio's decision to fire news analyst Juan Williams after he made controversial comments on Fox News about Muslims has become — for some Republican lawmakers, at least — a teachable moment. NPR, House speaker-in-waiting John Boehner (R-Ohio) said recently, is a "left-wing radio network" and should be stripped of federal funding. Eric Cantor, Mike Huckabee, Sarah Palin, Bill O'Reilly and other conservative voices have issued similar calls.