media literacy

The future of news?

Submitted by ehume on June 18, 2009 - 10:11pm

The lucky and talented Knight News Challenge winners have joined us here at MIT this week to explore “The Future of News and Civic Media.” As they arrive, I am preparing to depart. This farewell post for C4FCM is inspired especially by them and by four experiences here this spring:
…MIT Prof. William Uricchio observed that old media make us feel like “a passenger in the back seat of the car, howling at the driver.”
…Phil Balboni debated a skeptical MIT student about news “objectivity” at Balboni’s new online GlobalPost venture http://civic.mit.edu/watchlistenlearn/video-c4fcm-lecture-series-the-fut...
…Harvard’s Shorenstein Center handed out prestigious Goldsmith investigative reporting prizes to mostly old media folks http://www.hks.harvard.edu/presspol/news_events/archive/2009/goldsmith_a...,

Couch Potatoes and Journalism Culture

Submitted by ehume on December 17, 2008 - 5:59pm

Journalism requires not only a business model, but a culture. At the Center for Future Civic Media, we sometimes take a moment to reflect on the online news experiments begun in the pioneer digital media days in the 1990s, to keep a clear head about how journalism and social networks intersect. But perhaps we shouldn’t use the j-word.
The precipitous slide of journalism from iconic cultural power status to cultural irrelevance during the past decade is stunning. When the Shorenstein Center’s Prof. Tom Patterson told his board last month that the nation’s premiere think tank of, by and for top-notch news media was going to think less about journalism and more about public policy, it was a real wakeup call. The Harvard students just aren’t as interested as they used to be in journalism, he explained.

It’s hard to find anyone these days who promotes the notion of the journalist as public hero. With the exception of George Clooney’s “Goodnight and Good Luck,” the popular culture has written off the MSM as just so many hacks bought to you by corporate imperialists or libertine liberals.

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part Two)

Submitted by Henry on August 21, 2007 - 1:00am

What kinds of skills and knowledge are young people acquiring through their involvement with the production of youth radio?

Response from Ayesha Walker, Online Project Associate. If you want to check out some of Walker's work for Youth Radio, try "Bathing Ape", Marketplace
and "From Blacksburg to Bay Area."

I unconfidently discovered radio my sophomore year of high school at El Cerrito's KECG station. I was determined to break through my introverted shell and find comfort behind
the microphone. Somehow in my senior year I was elected Director of Communications,
hosting my very own radio crew, playing my voice through every speaker in El Cerrito
high school. By the time my senior year came around, I fatefully stumbled across Youth
Radio. I studied all of the features and fell in love with web, photography and journalism.

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part Two)

Submitted by Henry on August 21, 2007 - 1:00am

What kinds of skills and knowledge are young people acquiring through their involvement with the production of youth radio?

Response from Ayesha Walker, Online Project Associate. If you want to check out some of Walker's work for Youth Radio, try "Bathing Ape", Marketplace
and "From Blacksburg to Bay Area."

I unconfidently discovered radio my sophomore year of high school at El Cerrito's KECG station. I was determined to break through my introverted shell and find comfort behind
the microphone. Somehow in my senior year I was elected Director of Communications,
hosting my very own radio crew, playing my voice through every speaker in El Cerrito
high school. By the time my senior year came around, I fatefully stumbled across Youth
Radio. I studied all of the features and fell in love with web, photography and journalism.

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part One)

Submitted by Henry on August 20, 2007 - 1:00am

When I spoke at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis earlier this summer, I was approached by Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep and Ayesha Walker. Soep is the Research Director and Senior Producer f and Walker is an Online Project Associate for an organization called Youth Radio, which defines its mission as: "to promote young people's intellectual, creative and professional growth through training and access to media and to produce the highest quality original media for local and national outlets." As it happens, Soep is a regular reader of this blog and as it happens, because I like to listen to NPR and PRI podcasts when I walk every day, I had heard several of the segments her team had produced.

The Power of "Collegial Pedagogy": An Interview with Youth Radio (Part One)

Submitted by Henry on August 20, 2007 - 1:00am

When I spoke at the National Media Education Conference in Saint Louis earlier this summer, I was approached by Elisabeth (Lissa) Soep and Ayesha Walker. Soep is the Research Director and Senior Producer f and Walker is an Online Project Associate for an organization called Youth Radio, which defines its mission as: "to promote young people's intellectual, creative and professional growth through training and access to media and to produce the highest quality original media for local and national outlets." As it happens, Soep is a regular reader of this blog and as it happens, because I like to listen to NPR and PRI podcasts when I walk every day, I had heard several of the segments her team had produced.