Participated in two related and interesting sessions:
1) Will Public Media 2.0 Help Grow Community Media session - hosted by Jason Pramas, Openmediaboston.org
This session began with an overview from Jason of the current media landscape - in the U.S. and in other countries - and the role that public and community media are playing and can play in supporting our democracy. The rest of the session was a group discussion of the question "Will public media (writ large; public broadcasting and community media) expand its mandate to better include community media in the community media in the years to come? Several models and references were mentioned - this is not a complete list:
- MBCWEIS (sponsored by WGBH 15 years ago)
- pegmedia.org
- Public Radio Kitchen
- openmediaboston.org
- The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again by McChesney and Nichols (I just finished reading this book and found their analysis and suggested models compelling)

2) Setting the Stage for Collaboration between Public Media and Public Access - hosted by Nilagia McCoy of CCTV Cambridge
During this session, the group brainstormed lists of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Challenges for Public Media and the for Community Media. Nilagia then facilated a brainstorming session about ways in which PM and CM could start collaborating right now. A couple of the models/sites above were referenced, and there was also a discussion that as CM already has local news capacity and content through community grounding, that content could enhance public media coverage, while public media could support capacity-building and infrastructure, along with joint production.

I found participating in this event to be enriching and energizing and look forward to helping to move some of the great ideas forward in the coming months!

For presentations and detailed notes from these sessions, please go to: http://wiki.publicmediacamp.org/PubCampBoston