This is a collaborative blog post between Hailey Lee and I about our final project for CMS.360, Intro to Civic Media. Our project is entitled “Television Newsroom Diversity and Civic Engagement.”

Abstract

The week of 11/28, we discussed Failed Civic Media projects with Benjamin Mako Hill. We discussed why some projects fail, what could have prevented them from failing, why some projects succeed, and what we can learn from both failure and success. At the time of this lecture I didn’t think I had participated in any civic media projects that had failed. Then I took a look back to the dreaded years: high school.

When I was in high school, I was very involved in student broadcast journalism. Our show, The Newsdesk, was broadcast on a channel maintained by the school board and local city government, TPS-14. I decided to pursue an individual project aside from anchoring and writing for The Newsdesk in my senior year of high school. I wanted to make a documentary. I think my documentary is a great example of a small-scale civic media project that failed, although at the time I had no idea what “civic media” was.

This week, we were asked to re-read our first blog post for Intro to Civic Media, and to reflect upon whether or not our views have changed.

What remained the same?
My definition was “Any medium that creates information flow to a community or communities in order to foster participatory spirit in decision making.” The last part of my definition "to foster participatory spirit in decision making" was meant not only to mean government decision making, but any decisions an individual or community will face. I still agree with this definition, as I have learned the types of media covered in this course have been extremely broad.

What Changed?
In the beginning of the course, I didn’t think that the act of participating was a required part of my definition of civic media, and my definition of Civic Media was more focused on "spirit" than action. However after fourteen weeks of this course, I have come to see that activism and action are central to the field of civic media.

The topic for Monday November 14th’s class was Hyperlocal civic media. This post is a summary of that discussion, which was facilitated by Ania.

Raw notes can be found here: http://etherpad.brownbag.me/p/hyperlocalcivicmedia

We read two pieces that focused on geoethicnic and hyperlocal media. We also discussed community websites in the Boston area.

This blog post is a project update in collaboration with Hailey Lee. Our project outline can be seen here.

Over the past week, Hailey and I have been developing questions for our video component. We have also been reaching out to various Boston news organizations for appearance requests. Here’s a working list of organizations we have contacted:
• New England Cable News
• WCVB
• WBZ
• WHDH
• WFXT
• WUNI Univision
• Boston Neighborhood Network
• Cambridge Community TV
• Roxbury.TV
• Boston Latino Television
• Center on Media and Society at UMass Boston
• Boston Regional US Census Bureau
• National Association of Hispanic Journalists
• National Association of Black Journalists
• National Association of Asian Journalists

Any additional suggestions for organizations to contact would be appreciated.

This post is an update on the progress of my and Hailey Lee’s final project. Our original proposal can be found here.

Our Working Title: Minority Representation in the Boston Television News Industry

One interesting fact that was pointed out to Hailey and I in class was that Boston is now a “minority” dominated city, so the terminology of our paper might get tricky. Once we collect more data, we will decide what terminology to use. Terms suggested in class were “people of color” or “marginalized groups” as an alternative to minorities.

The three groups we have decided to focus on are blacks, Asian Americans, and Hispanics.

Another distinction we will make in the paper is the separation of mainstream media, public media, and community media. We will focus on mainstream media.

On the question of how to measure democratic participation, we will look to census data and voter turn-out, although Sasha pointed out voter-turn out data may be inadequate in some areas.

Now for an outline of our paper:

Radical Media in Relation to Hegemony, Ideology, and Resistance

This post is a collaboration of the class in our group note-taking. Thanks to Julia for facilitating. Below are the main ideas from our class on Monday 9/26/11. The raw text from our notes can be found here.

Information about the authors of this week’s readings:

The theme of today's class is Hegemony, Ideology, and Resistance. "Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements" by Robert Downing discusses the radical media, or "media, generally small scale and in many different forms, that express an alternative vision to hegemonic policies, priorities, and perspectives," (Downing, v). Radical media exists not necessarily as an opposition to mainstream media.

I think a “networked counterpublic” is a networked space where marginalized or minority members of a society can create discourse. I think the concept of networked counterpublics is a useful concept and important to understand. By putting information on the web marginalized or minority groups or individuals can make their views and discourses available to countless people.

I think the primary purpose of these networked spaces is discourse, but the counterpublic does create the opportunity to attempt to reform the dominant public sphere. A counterpublic does not have to be well organized or create political change, like Catherine Squires argues. Yochai Benkler defines “tools of networked communication” in his work The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom as E-mail, the World Wide Web, Blogs, and “larger-scale, collaborative-content production systems” such as Wikipedia and MoveOn.org.

Hi,
My name is Mary and I am a junior at Wellesley College. I am a History major and Middle Eastern Studies minor. When I saw this course listing I became very excited. This area of media is not one that I know a lot about, but have wanted to learn more about for some time. I’d also heard great things about the MIT Media Lab and the Center for Civic Journalism from professors at Wellesley. Before I get to my personal definition of Civic Media, I’ll let you know a bit about my media interests and why I took this class.