Community Media in Transition

Continuing the trend in community foundation support for community media, the Knight Foundation announced yesterday $2.26 million in matching grants for news and information projects.  The 2011 Knight Community Information Challenge Winners winners are listed at the Knight Blog. One of the recipient’s include Long Beach Community Foundation to support the following project, entitled “Rethinking Public Broadcasting in Long Beach”

Summary: In returning public access television to Long Beach, this project will create hyper-local, multilingual programming on a variety of platforms. Programming, some contributed by residents reporting from a network of neighborhood studios, will be presented in English, Khmer and Spanish. A nightly program will showcase professional and citizen-created content, aiming to get more people engaged in local issues. In addition, an outreach and training program will encourage people of all ethnicities and age groups to participate.”

It’s been two and a half years since my last post for this site. It’s time to restart the conversation.

Since my last post, I’ve been following transformations within community media organizations, particularly public, educational and government (PEG) access television stations. I’ve been interested in the impact of the Internet on PEG access organizations and the communities they serve.

More recently, I’ve decided to broaden the scope of this blog to include studies of other community-based media organizations including public libraries, community radio, citizen journalism websites, etc. These organizations face both daunting challenges and exciting opportunities in considering community use of information and communication technology. There is also an interesting convergence taking place among these institutions. For example, many public libraries now offer media training and several public access television stations offer public access to computers and the Internet.

This blog will be devoted to tracking these and other developments. I also hope this site will serve as a place to engage community media producers, scholars, government officials and other citizens interested in considering the potential of community media in the digital age.

Thank you for reading. I look forward to hearing from you.

Since I’ve been busy blogging at work, I’ve decided to move from blogging here to my other site @ colinrhinesmith.com. However, I’m leaving this site up to keep the information, used primarily for my thesis, available online.

This site has been a wonderful learning experience for me. Those who left comments helped shape my thinking for my research while at Emerson College, which also prepared me for my work at CCTV. My intention here was to share some of what I learned during that process with others visiting the site. I hope others have benefited along the way.

I’ve also been applying many of the topics discussed here to my work with the community in Cambridge. To follow along with the process, I encourage those who are interested to check out both my CCTV blog and my musings on community media and technology at my blog.

I hope to see you there.