Public Media Showcase

The range of “local” broadcast news used to be determined by two things: transmitter strength and the ratio of available advertisers to eyeballs. Now, with cheap digital production and anywhere/anytime distribution, “hyperlocal” projects can target clusters of users, block-by-block. Such granularity opens many new possibilities for public media 2.0.Read more...

Media literacy – the ability to access, analyze, evaluate and create media in a variety of forms – can often overlap with the production of public media 2.0. With school terms starting around the country, we decided to step away from showcasing a particular project and to take a broader look at how educators are introducing students to social media tools.Read more...

Both the proliferation of new platforms and the shrinking pool of funding for media outlets has driven a boom in collaborative journalism projects, which combine the strengths, skills, and resources of the partners in order to increase the depth of coverage and reach new audiences. Last year, public media organizations successfully collaborated in covering the election. This year, they've turned their attention to the economy.Read more...

“[G]ood stories have always been the most powerful way to engage and shape public dialogue, especially around the values that we really believe in,” notes Creative Counsel director Phoebe Eng in a podcast discussion, about the 1000 Voices Archive. Launched by the Creative Counsel and The Fledgling Fund in May 2008, this curated collection of short personal narrative films addresses social issues in the United States. Read more...

The citizen reporting and GPS capabilities of smart phones are powering a surge in place-based government watchdog projects. Some of these hyperlocal initiatives effectively use crowdsourced information to hold government officials accountable—see, for example, New York City’s Uncivil Servants. But crowdsourcing projects can also work with government officials to facilitate change, according to the people behind SeeClickFix.Read more...