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Public Media 2.0: Dynamic, Engaged Publics
Public broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts have all played a
central role in our democracy, informing citizens and guiding public conversation. But
the top-down dissemination technologies that supported them are being supplanted by
an open, many-to-many networked media environment. What platforms, standards,
and practices will replace or transform legacy public media?
This white paper lays out an expanded vision for “public media 2.0” that places engaged
publics at its core, showcasing innovative experiments from its “first two minutes,”
and revealing related trends, stakeholders, and policies. Public media 2.0 may look and
function differently, but it will share the same goals as the projects that preceded it:
educating, informing, and mobilizing its users.
Multiplatform, participatory, and digital, public media 2.0 will be an essential feature
of truly democratic public life from here on in. And it’ll be media both for and by the
public. The grassroots mobilization around the 2008 electoral campaign is just one
signal of how digital tools for making and sharing media open up new opportunities
for civic engagement.
But public media 2.0 won’t happen by accident, or for free. The same bottom-line logic
that runs media today will run tomorrow’s media as well. If we’re going to have media
for vibrant democratic culture, we have to plan for it, try it out, show people that it
matters, and build new constituencies to invest in it.
The first and crucial step is to embrace the participatory—the feature that has also been
most disruptive of current media models. We also need standards and metrics to define
truly meaningful participation in media for public life. And we need policies, initiatives,
and sustainable financial models that can turn today’s assets and experiments into
tomorrow’s tried-and-true public media.
Public media stakeholders, especially such trusted institutions as public broadcasting,
need to take leadership in creating a true public investment in public media 2.0.
Documentaries on a Mission: How Nonprofits Are Making Movies for Public Engagement
Read about how the Sierra Club, The American Civil Liberties Union and local environmental groups use documentaries for high-impact and action
Making Your Documentary Matter 2006: Report
In the Battle for Reality: Social Documentaries in the U.S.
What difference can a documentary make? This fact-filled report by Center co-director Pat Aufderheide, with many case studies of successful strategic use of social documentaries, answers that question. Funded by the Ford Foundation.
Articles
Making Your Media Matter 2010
Making Your Media Matter is a conference for established and aspiring filmmakers, non-profit communications leaders, funders and students looking to learn and share cutting-edge practices for making their media matter.
Socially Engaged Public Access TV Productions[PDF]
By Paula Manley
This paper defines the field of socially engaged media in public access television and provides a framework for how social media is being used in public access TV.
The Current State of the International Marketplace for Documentary Films[PDF]
By Diana Holtzberg and Jan Rofekamp
“This report focuses on the international marketplace for documentaries from the perspective of who buys and who sells them.”
Docurama[PDF]
Docurama, a leading distributor of documentaries on DVD, provides a market analysis of documentary distribution in 2004-2005, with trend analysis.