We Report, We Decide: Civic Media's Impact on Mainstream News
NeighborMedia presents "We Report, We Decide: Civic Media's Impact on Mainstream News," recorded live on March 16, 2009 at Cambridge Community Television.
In recent years, civic media projects have increased in numbers around the world. Ordinary people armed with inexpensive production equipment are using the web to share news and information with others in their communities and beyond. What can mainstream media learn from these experiments in community news-gathering?
NeighborMedia, a civic media project at Cambridge Community Television, presents this special event recorded in CCTV's studio. Veterans in the fields of print, television and online journalism presented their views and responded to questions from a studio audience.
Moderator
Ellen Hume, Research Director for the Center for Future Civic Media, MIT
Panelists
Laura Kuenssberg, BBC News Network Political Correspondent
Persephone Miel, Senior Adviser at Internews Network
Katherine Powers, Senior Editor at GateHouse Media
Download the MP3
Music by Wicked Allstars available on Magnatune.com.
Participant Bios
Ellen Hume is research director of the Center for Future Civic Media at
M.I.T. and publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire, which she founded in 2007 while teaching at UMass Boston. She serves on the board of the Center for International Media Assistance and is an international media analyst and trainer. Hume was a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, executive director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, executive director of PBS’s Democracy Project, and senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program. More information is available at www.ellenhume.com.
Laura Kuenssberg is one of BBC News' network political correspondents, reporting mainly for the UK's flagship TV news bulletins - the 6 and 10 o'clock news. She is a member of the Westminster Press Lobby, and has reported for BBC TV, radio, and online from all corners of the UK and many other European countries. Laura has worked on the last two US presidential elections, reporting from Washington DC and presenting the BBC's election night coverage from Times Square in 2008 for BBC One, BBC World and BBC America.
Persephone Miel recently finished a year as a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University where she directed the Media Re:public project, examining the impact of participatory journalism on the news and information environment. The project issued a series of publications in December 2008. She has returned as a Senior Advisor to Internews Network, an international NGO supporting independent media around the world, where she spent 12 years prior to her stint at Berkman. In her previous work at Internews, she designed and managed a variety of projects to support the growth of non-state news media, including TV, radio, print and online outlets, in the former Soviet Union and participated in program design and development for Internews projects in other parts of the world. From 1993 to 1994 she was also the host of an English-language morning news show there.
Kat Powers is the manager of the local news site, Wicked Local Somerville, despite her job title reading Somerville Journal editor. She has been in and out of the news business since 1991, starting off as a freelancer for the Somerville Journal, working at the Cambridge Chronicle and a turn on the overnight desk at the Daily Evening Item. In Somerville for the last eight years, she has been the Journal editor and for the last three years, has been making WickedLocalSomerville.com a breaking-news website that competes against the big dailies but also with local blogs.