Turning off NPR: Media, Crisis and Kids

NPR used to be a morning ritual for me. Wake up, make coffee, turn on NPR. But for the last few months I have vacated that part of the radio dial, tuning in only occasionally, often when I’m alone in my car.

I was at the Boston Children’s Museum with my family on December 14, when I learned about the Sandy Hook shooting. Checking Twitter absent-mindedly while waiting in line, I saw the first tweets and news reports filling my stream. I looked up from my phone to a cacophony of kids laughing and playing around me, many of whom were the same age as the kids who were killed just minutes earlier.

Image via Flickr user Duane Romanell

On the drive home that day my wife and I were careful not to turn on NPR in the car with our two boys in the back seat. Since then, we’ve listened to a lot less public radio in our house. The Sandy Hook shooting coincided with my son turning four. While I’m sure he’s been aware of the media and discussions around him up to this point, recently he’s been a sponge for everything he hears.

For a lot of us who have children around the age of the Sandy Hook victims, that tragedy shook us to the core. But the endless media coverage of the event created new challenges as we tried to shield our kids from news of the tragedy.

This morning when I woke up, I made coffee and turned on the radio – it was tuned to NPR. My son was already eating his breakfast in the kitchen and before I could reach the dial words like “explosion” and “dead” came tumbling out. The devastation of Boston was brought into our little house so quickly. I changed the channel, I don’t think he noticed, but I don’t know. When I went to get the newspaper on my front steps images of the Boston marathon tragedy filled the front page. I folded it up and hid it from view.

Media Consolidation Won’t Save Journalism

The Federal Communications Commission is pushing a plan to gut its 30-year-old newspaper/broadcast cross-ownership ban. This proposal would allow one company to own a local paper, two TV stations and up to eight radio stations in a single market. Advocates of more media consolidation argue that allowing TV stations and newspapers to merge is critical to cutting costs and saving local journalism.

This is the same argument the Bush FCC used to try to push through the same bad rules in 2007. Back then, the Senate voted the rules down and the courts later threw them out. It’s time to put this argument to bed for good: More media consolidation won’t save journalism.

Three Media Issues We Can’t Ignore in 2013

I’m not one to make predictions about the future of our media. I’m much more interested in prescriptions. Rather than talking about what we think might happen, let’s discuss what we agree needs to happen and how we might get there. The media isn’t just something that happens to us — it is something we can and must be part of creating and reshaping ourselves. Here are three critical issues we must tackle in the coming year.

What Does It Mean to Be a Media Ally Today?

Last week I received the Lew Hill Media Ally award, named for the founder of Pacifica – the first non-commercial community funded radio network. Hill’s pioneering vision for nonprofit, community supported media in America is a constant inspiration in the work I do advocating for the next generation of public and noncommercial media our communities need. The media landscape has shifted radically since Hill founded Pacifica, but the need for fiercely independent journalism remains. Given that fact, what does it mean to be a “media ally” today?

Below is a version of the remarks I gave at the awards ceremony, hosted by Press Pass TV.

Three Resources for Newsrooms Measuring Community Engagement

The recent history of journalism in America is full of tectonic shifts, brought on by changes in technology and society. For too long, many of those changes happened outside of newsrooms, but increasingly we are seeing fundamental cultural shifts in news organizations that are changing how, and to sometimes why, journalism is done.

One of those shifts has been the emphasis on community engagement. The media landscape is shifting and becoming more participatory, and our communities want to do more than just read the news. They want to be co-creators, collaborators, distributors and they want to put the news to work, to improve their lives and communities. At the same time, financial challenges have forced news organizations to build new networks of support with their audience and community.

While newsrooms have invested in various forms of community engagement – from mobilizing local bloggers into coordinated networks, to robust social media strategies and community events – there is still a lot we don’t know about how to assess and measure the impact of community engagement.

Twitter is not a Typewriter: Ted Koppel’s Commencement Address at UMass Amherst

This weekend Ted Koppel, longtime host of Nightline, gave the commencement address to UMass Amherst, where I did my graduate work. His full remarks are copied below, but here are my thoughts on a few key passages on the state of journalism, politics and social media.

He opened his remarks with a familiar critique of social media: the requisite nod to the Arab Spring followed by a dismissal of Twitter and Facebook as too fast, too shallow, and full of too much noise.

If sclerotic dictators can be overthrown by messages of 140 characters or fewer, surely I should have been able to Tweet something adequate your way. But I won’t. It will surprise few if any of you to learn that I don’t Tweet and that I have, thus far, resisted all efforts to “friend” or be “friended.”

Billions upon billions of Tweets and text messages, most so lacking in substance that it is difficult to imagine any impact if they were all vaporized tomorrow. The new media clearly enable information to be transmitted more widely and efficiently than ever before.

Koppel links the speed of social media (and news media) today to a larger erosion in our ability to engage in constructive dialogue. This is born out, for him, most clearly in our political discourse.

Does Media Ownership Still Matter

The Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism just released their annual State of the Media, a massive report that outlines major content, audience and business trends across news media.

As more and more content has moved online, and the sources for news and information expand and multiply, many have wondered if it matters who owns our media anymore. Pew’s 2010 report is a startling reminder of just how much sway Big Media has over just about everything we watch, read and hear – even in the digital age.

As Comcast Files Merger Paperwork, Future Bleak for Local News

Comcast just filed its merger paperwork with the FCC. As part of its takeover, Comcast wants to get its hands on local NBC and Telemundo stations owned and operated by NBC across the nation. More media consolidation in local news is never a good thing, but this deal is particularly bad for certain communities.

NBC owns local stations in eleven communities that are already have Comcast cable and Internet service. If this merger goes through, in each community one company will control content online, on cable and over the airwaves.

Here are the stations that are in Comcast’s crosshairs:

10 Journalism Resolutions for 2010

Co-authored by Josh Stearns and Tracy VanSlyke

If 2009 was a year of study and debate about the future of journalism, 2010 must be a year of action. We must come together around a core set of ideas to create a better ecosystem for sustainable and high-impact journalism. Based on the various reports and conferences from the past year, we’ve compiled the five most important areas that journalism organizations (and those invested in the future of journalism) must tackle in 2010—and suggest some initial steps to begin moving forward.

Celebrating the Life of C. Edwin Baker

We at SaveTheNews.org and Free Press learned today that the eminent communications law scholar C. Edwin Baker died this week at the age of 62. Baker was a passionate defender of the First Amendment and a longtime advocate for media and democracy.

Baker took part in the early planning meetings before SaveTheNews.org was launched, and his ideas have helped to shape much of our work. Robert McChesney and John Nichols, the co-founders of Free Press, offered remembrances of Baker.

Eight (or Nine) Values for the Future of News

I just returned from the Future of News conference in St. Paul, Minn. Although the conference inspired Richard Gingras to cheekily tweet, “The future of news is a future of conferences about the future of news,” there were some interesting threads worth noting.

One presenter who stood out to me was Tom Rosenstiel, from the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism, who proposed eight values he believed were core to the future of news. Some, he noted, were long-held values of legacy media organizations that we should carry over to new models. Others were values rooted in the changing media system and people’s responses to it.

Editors Make the Case for Smart Journalism Policies

The editors of the Columbia Journalism Review published an important editorial this week outlining why they feel public policy must be a central part of the discussion about the future of news in America.

They wrote: “The idea that a purely commercial media alone can continue to deliver the journalism we need is becoming difficult to swallow. If we don’t get beyond the rational but outdated fear of government help for accountability journalism—if we just let the market sort it out—this vital public good will continue to decline.”

College Media and the Future of Journalism

Today I gave a presentation at the National College Media Convention here in Austin, Texas. I had a great crowd, some challenging questions, and overall a good discussion. All in all, a short one hour conference session is a tough venue to have an in-depth discussion about an issue as complex as the future of journalism.

I’m embedding my presentation here in hopes of continuing the conversation in the comment section of this blog blog. The presentation is below (sorry the videos don’t work at this point, still tweaking those).

In Defense of Journalism Policy

This was originally posted on Nov. 30th at SaveTheNews.org

Today’s Washington Post op-ed by Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols recovers a past too many Americans have forgotten and sets the record straight on the government’s role in protecting journalism.

“We seek to renew a rich if largely forgotten legacy of the American free-press tradition, one that speaks directly to today’s crisis,” they write. “The First Amendment necessarily prohibits state censorship, but it does not prevent citizens from using their government to subsidize and spawn independent media.”

McChesney and Nichols, two of the co-founders of Free Press, are responding to a common misconception about government involvement in journalism is antithetical to freedom of the press. Policy has always shaped journalism, and for a long time it was policy that helped ensure freedom of the press.

Part of the Problem

I have been traveling for work a lot lately and I feel as though, passing through airports, train stations, and a wide variety of other public spaces, there are fewer and fewer unbranded places left. We are quickly reaching a state of hyper commercialism where every bat of the eye is a transaction at once physical, cultural, and economic. In a world filled with ads we are unwitting (and often unwilling) consumers, traded and bargained for by ad execs and sales reps betting we’ll pass through their branded space.

Already fed up with TVs blaring from every lobby corner and storefront window, computer screens embedded in walls and kiosks, and old fashioned billboards and banners everywhere, I was dismayed recently when I turned the corner in my local airport and saw enormous ads being projected onto a formerly clean white wall. However, once I walked by I realized that these projections were much worse than just big ads.