MVM Consulting

Public Media Third Leg of Knight Funded News Project in Georgia

Unique, Joint Newsroom will Help Increase Local Journalism in Macon

Knight Foundation invests $4.6 million to expand local public radio, bring new journalism education model to Georgia and engage residents in critical issues

MACON, Ga. — A new effort will increase and strengthen local reporting by bringing professional journalists to work together with university students in a unique, joint newsroom in Macon’s College Hill Corridor.

The Center for Collaborative Journalism at Mercer University will bring the medical school model to the university’s journalism program.

Professionals from The (Macon) Telegraph and Georgia Public Broadcasting (GPB Media) will work alongside Mercer students to learn and employ digital-age storytelling skills to meet Central Georgia’s information needs. In coming years, the joint newsroom also will launch community engagement projects that will involve Macon residents in choosing important issues to cover, reporting the facts, debating the choices facing them and ultimately creating solutions. In addition, GPB Macon Radio will expand its staff in Central Georgia over several years and greatly increase the station’s coverage of news, business, arts, sports and culture.

The effort is being supported by $4.6 million in grants from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Mercer, GPB Media, The Telegraph and Knight Foundation announced the project today at the site of the new center in Mercer Village. via News.

Public media innovation boosted with millions in funding - Knight Foundation

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Dec. 8, 2011 – A new effort will provide funding and expertise to entrepreneurial teams with innovative ideas to increase the impact of public service media.

Called the Public Media Accelerator, the project will be launched and operated by the Public Radio Exchange (PRX) and supported by a $2.5 million grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Modeled on mentorship-driven technology startup incubators, the Public Media Accelerator aims to strengthen public media’s essential role in meeting community information needs across new platforms and devices.

via knightfoundation.org

Here's more on the Public Media Accelerator... one of the most exciting investments in my industry since perhaps CPB's LJC launch in 2009. The $2.5 million is enough to kick this off with a bang... but will take millions more to bring great ideas to fruition (of course, that's the beauty of great ideas, they attract more money). Congrats to PRX and Knight for taking this step.

Public Media Accelerator | Changing media for good

Public media plays a vital role serving communities with essential journalism and cultural content across broadcast and digital platforms. It is also an ecosystem in flux, facing fundamental challenges to its structure, business model, and relevance to audiences beyond the reach of its current services. The Public Media Accelerator invites mission-driven entrepreneurs to develop innovative ideas for expanding public service media. Learn more.

via publicmediax.org

Very big news! Just when I was wondering if the Knight Foundation no longer loved us (public media), they come through with just the right investment. I'll be contacting PRX to see how I can help this out!

MediaShift: Public Media's Quest for Integrity

Trust "is perhaps the most important asset public broadcasting carries forward into evolving public media future," writes Byron Knight.

Knight should know. He's had a long career in public broadcasting. Now, he is co-director of the Editorial Integrity for Public Media Project, a ground-breaking attempt to define public media's principles for a digital age.

Leading public broadcasters, NPR, PBS, and many stations have been drawing up a new ethics charter. At their website, www.pmintegrity.com, the project posts its draft guidelines.

Recently, my ethics center and Wisconsin Public Radio and Television co-hosted an evaluation of the draft guidelines. The project is an ambitious example of what I call "integrated ethics," the attempt to construct a new mixed media ethics.

Many other major news organizations are creating integrated ethics, from the BBC to the Canadian Association of Journalists. Within public media, there are many who believe that the future of citizen and government support rests on the successful articulation of what is distinctive and important about public media.

via www.pbs.org

Nice piece by Stephen Ward, a University of Wisconsin journalism prof who heads up an ethics institute in Madison.

I was at the evaluators roundtable in October (working as its "rapporteur"). Ward captures many of the salient elements of our dialogue there.

I like his term 'integrative ethics' because it captures the need to revise past thinking in light of new thinking. It isn't reasonable to assert past values as eternal and call it a day. Rather we need to take stock of what's primary for public media's purpose in society -- as it is today -- as it's changing.

Holding public trust is a good start.

Much more on this to come...

Schweigert: Here’s The Thing: It’s O.K. For Public Radio Hosts To Have Political Opinions…If They’re Alec Baldwin

Should the airing of political opinions be completely off limits for public radio hosts? Or should we cut Alec Baldwin a break?

There’s been a lot of talk recently about public radio hosts…and their opinions.

First, let’s quickly re-hash how we got here.

Host Lisa Simeone was fired ended her relationship with Soundprint, an independent documentary series that airs on a number of public radio stations after a Daily Caller story ”exposed” her involvement as a steering committee member of a group associated with Occupy DC.

Simeone is also the host of  World of Opera, a classical music program produced by NPR member station WDAV in Davidson, N.C. and formerly distributed by NPR. That is, until NPR parted ways with World of Opera after WDAV decided to not remove Simeone as host of the program.

This is not really a post about Lisa Simeone (Jay Rosen has a great one if you’d like to read more about that particular incident).

This is, however, a post about New York City public radio station WNYC.

via adamschweigert.com

I think Adam raises valid and pertinent questions in this blog post. Please click through to it. And Adam and I have been kicking this topic around a fair bit on the (closed) Public Media Facebook page.

In essence, he wants a consistent and reasonable standard to apply to public radio hosts. NPR, by its actions, abides by a rigorously neutral (journalistic) standard where hosts do not venture strong opinions on controversial issues. WNYC, by giving Baldwin his own show, seems to abide by a different standard in which star hosts can spout off freely on major issues of the day.

But there are many details which separate these two cases and those details matter when we are sorting out ethics in actual practice.

For one thing, Simeone was positioned in NPR's pantheon of hosts as a journalist. She violated NPR sensibilities by taking to the streets as an activist. She's out of the pantheon.

Baldwin is an actor, not a journalist, how can one apply the same criteria to him? It doesn't seem that we should. We know him as a big personality and we hope to be entertained by him.

To me, it comes down to knowing the difference between news and entertainment, between journalistic treatment and entertaining treatment. And that requires some labeling or other clues to the audience that they're tuned to one or the other.

In that regard, I believe the use of the podcast offers conventions that radio doesn't. The metadata and the processes involved with podcasting help convey some differentiation that is less possible (not impossible) over the air. This is not to say that Baldwin should not be on the air -- it's just that the potential for confusion is greater on-air, and that confusion or inconsistency is what Adam objects to in the first place.

But I'm also in favor of some experimentation in the news vs entertainment space. That is, I don't see the need to stamp all hosts out of the same gray cloth. News hosts are valuable. But entertainment hosts are valuable too. AM talk radio is mostly entertainment but serves an informational function (albeit through pugnacious and argumentative hosts). Public radio might provide something of public service value by giving talented communicators room to opinionate. Just don't disguise it as news! How do we know unless we try?

NPR experimented with an online program (Bryant Park Project) in which hosts were more playful, more personality driven, more opinionated. Of course, it was supposed to be a news show. Guess what? They dropped it.