Weigh In on Open Internet Access

The Internet for Everyone Coalition is asking for public input on the importance of universal Internet access. The brief survey asks for public recommendations to the Federal Communications Commission and the Obama Administration.

Free Press explains: “President Obama and Congress have tasked the FCC with developing a national broadband plan by the end of 2009. We want to be sure Washington is committed to finding people-powered solutions to bridge America’s digital divide… By taking the survey, you’re ensuring that people outside of the beltway have a say in America’s national broadband plan. Your top recommendations from the survey will help determine our next steps as Free Press and the InternetforEveryone.org coalition work to shape better Internet policy.”

Take the survey here.

I took it in under 5 minutes.

New Journal Looks at Media Reform v. Media Justice

The International Journal of Communication has a new issue critically engaging with the media reform movement (Vol. 3, 2009). It is edited by Dan Berger and C. Riley Snorton, both radical scholars at University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication.

As a new movement (just over 10 years in the making), media reformers have adopted a centrist lobbying strategy to influence national media and telecommunications rulemaking. While national, this focus on media regulation and D.C. politics makes for a narrow coalition. Berger and Snorton along with Makani Themba-Nixon are just a few of those discussing alternative strategies, notably the work of grassroots media justice organizers who are rooted in social movements led by marginalized communities. As Themba-Nixon writes, “for many activists working for racial and gender justice, addressing the way media content defames and denigrates their constituencies is a central part of their media change agenda” — one that the media reform movement has deliberately sidestepped in favor of bipartisanship.

For radical librarians, issues of national and local information policy along with conversations about equity of access that directly address structural injustice overlap a great deal with the vision and principles of media justice. This journal edition presents a critical history of media reform by Berger and Snorton with responses from four scholars including Themba-Nixon, Robert McChesney, Richard Collins and Peter Dahlgren.

Read: Rise of Watchdog Journalism Online

Check out this article on the role of nonprofit media in keeping investigative journalism alive. Particularly interesting are ProPublica and the New Haven Independent. Sadly, “citizen journalism” of the type we see on IndyMedia (even Alternet) is mistakenly dismissed. Still, there’s food for thought here. As librarians, non-corporate outlets provide critical information alternatives along with collection challenges since many subscription news aggregators and archives don’t include such content in news feeds. It’s worth considering how we make such sites accessible to the public through pathfinders and custom RSS.

Websites that dig for news rise as watchdogs

New York Times,

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA

November 17, 2008

[excerpt] As America’s newspapers shrink and shed staff, and broadcast news outlets sink in the ratings, a new kind of Web-based news operation has arisen in several cities, forcing the papers to follow the stories they uncover. …. But some experts question whether a large part of the news business can survive on what is essentially charity, and whether it is wise to lean too heavily on the whims of a few moneyed benefactors.