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Will Public Media Survive Where Mainstream Media Failed?
Published on The American Prospect Web site: April 30, 2009
By Jessica Clark and Patricia Aufderheide
Public broadcasting, newspapers, magazines, and network newscasts have played a central role in our democracy, informing citizens and guiding public conversation. But the top-down dissemination technologies that supported them are being supplanted by an open, many-to-many networked media environment. What platforms, standards, and practices will replace or transform legacy public media?
Answers are already emerging out of a series of media experiments taking place across legacy and citizen media, which we examine in depth in Public Media 2.0: Dynamic Engaged Publics — a Ford Foundation-funded white paper from which this article was adapted. After taking a hard look at this "first two minutes" of experimentation, we concluded that the first and crucial step is to embrace the participatory — the feature that has been most disruptive of current media models.
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