The Field & What's Needed

White Liberals and Glass Houses: A Reminder that Black Radical Journalism is a Tradition

By Jared A. Ball

Even as they decry the practice of exclusion among the mainstream
press, the white left-led media reform movement does the same to Black
American and domestic or local news. While just a brief overview, one
far from being exhaustive in its study, this commentary is both a
postscript to past analysis performed on the subject and a prelude of
more in-depth forthcoming work. However, following a recent study
published by the white-left media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting or FAIR and in advance of my own participation at next year’s Media Reform Conference in Memphis, I would at least like to propose the following for consideration.

(see link for complete article)

Dr. Jared A. Ball is an assistant professor of Communications/Media Studies at Morgan State University. He is editor of the Words, Beats and Life Journal of Hip-Hop and Global Culture and is also the founder and creator of “FreeMix Radio: The Original Mixtape Radio Show,” a rap music mixtape committed to the practice of underground emancipatory journalism. He and his work can be found online at VOXUNION.COM.

The Beyond Broadcast report (which is also available as a PDF version
for downloading) is divided into three parts, encompassing ten sections
that examine a variety of traditions, technologies, and platforms for
an expanded system of public media:

Part One:

Expanding Public Media in the Digital Age  (released 1 February 2006)

Introduction

I.      Edgewise:  The Media Landscape's New Geography

II.     Back to the Future: Public Broadcasting in the Digital Age

III.    "Do-it-Ourselves" Media: New Opportunities for Alternative Voices

Part Two: New Technologies and New Venues for Independent Media
(to be released 1 July 2006)

IV.     Digital Town Squares: Community Bandwidth in the Broadband Era

V.      Twenty-first Century PEG:  The Future of Cable Access Channels

VI.     Web 2.O'Reilly: The Future of Online Communications

Part Three: Building a More Democratic and Participatory Media System

(to be released 1 September 2006)

VII.    Rewriting the Rules: Public Policy in a Deregulatory Age

VIII.   Paying the Piper:  Funding Opportunities for New Media

IX.     Beyond Borders:  International Models of New Media Support

X.      Next Steps: Ten Keys to the New Public Media

In a city notorious for unscrupulous landlords and the unchecked
power of corporations,  there is one group that easily inspires the
most angry whispering among the heads of many community organizations
-- philanthropic foundations.

Tales are
told and told again about program officers who don't understand the work they
fund; about community groups being made to dance on strings by their
foundation patrons; about the capricious way that foundations dole out grants,
particularly to small organizations.

For years critics of foundation practices
have argued that because foundation dollars are tax-sheltered monies, much
of which would otherwise be sitting
in the US Treasury, the public has a right to exercise greater control over
foundation
grant making.  Indeed, members of Congress are attempting to increase
the amount that foundations are legally mandated to give away every year, though
their efforts are meeting resistance.
And groups like the National Committee
for Responsive Philanthropy,
which  was created in 1976, promote "public
accountability and transparencies among foundations". ...

New report for the Center for Social Media's Future of Public Media Project (funded by the Ford Foundation).

Noelle McAfee reports from an October 2005 meeting held at the Charles
F. Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio were participants outlines a
strategy for future research on ways in which local publics and local
media might best work together to engage citizens in the civic life of
their community. This research is related to the larger question of how
those individuals and organizations in public media (and any media with
a public mission) best understand their own practices and relationship
to the public.

Hipatia thinks that The Other World is a world where an ethical option for spreading knowledge and power is made.
According to what we believe, we propose ethical choices for the
Information Technology infrastructure of the WSF:
* databases
* software
* web sites
* Internet communication tools.

Key documents from the Geneva prep phases, regional conferences and summit. This link includes Principles, Action Plans & Final Reports, as well as background materials organized thematically (see related link).

Our vision of the 'Information Society' is grounded in the Right to Communicate, as a means to enhance human rights and to strengthen the social, economic and cultural lives of people and communities.

Crucial to this is that civil society organisations come together to help build an information society based on principles of transparency, diversity, participation and social and economic justice, and inspired by equitable gender, cultural and regional perspectives. Communications Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) is a campaign to ensure that communication rights are central to the information society and to the upcoming World Summit to the Information Society (WSIS). The campaign is sponsored and supported by the Platform for Communication Rights, a group of NGOs involved in media and communication around the world.

http://www.crisinfo.org/content/view/full/97/ (Spanish)
http://www.crisinfo.org/content/view/full/95/ (French)