Community Media's New Vehicle - the Web

Submitted by Bonnie on Thu, 12/21/2006 - 5:46am
Like what you read?

Stay current with nonprofit technology

Enews_thumb_peterson Kari Peterson, KAPmedia

According to Time Magazine, we collectively are "People of the Year" for 2006. And why? Because we've begun to reclaim the media. We've created and taken advantage of online tools to stake a claim in the vast, difficult to penetrate media landscape. This is good news for us all! Social networking and citizen journalism have allowed the average person to stake a claim in the media -- to have a voice, to share information, to frame the debate, and rally the troops in more powerful ways than ever before. Web tools are easier to use, cheaper, and more effective in helping nonprofits achieve their missions than anything we've used before.

Our mission, as media centers, is to serve as intermediaries between our communities and whatever media and communications tools exist that might help to serve nonprofit missions, empower average people to speak out, and generally to improve the quality of civic and community life. Our member centers are united by an organization - the Alliance for Community Media. The Alliance now has the formidable task of helping thousands of media centers that have long used conventional media tools like television and radio to transition to Internet tools. As we make this transition, we look to the NTEN community for tools and strategies to implement them, both for ourselves and for the
nonprofits we serve. It's time for the Alliance and NTEN to get to know one another.

We want to redefine and expand how community and participatory media serves people - to involve people in the making and sharing of local news and information in very new ways. We need to introduce our thousands of centers to the Web 2.0 tools of today. We need to introduce them to a whole new way of teaching media, which in turn will have an incredible impact on the availability of news and information in communities across the country. That's what we want to do, that's what we need to do, and we need you to help us.

NTEN and the Alliance for Community Media will jointly edit the spring 2007 issue of the Community Media Review for where we will feature a detailed primer on the future of community and participatory media.