Welcome to the Free Press blog! We post several times a week on everything from Internet access to free speech to media mergers, so check back often to see what we’re up to.
“News is just too important to leave to those who shout the loudest
… or have the biggest purse.”
Caroline Thomson, chief operating officer of the BBC, made
these remarks at this week’s Washington, D.C. forum on innovation in public
media. “The Next Big Thing” featured a range of leaders from public and
community media, plus demos and videos of new projects and debate about how we
create and consume journalism in the digital age.
Other speakers included Jake Shapiro, the founding CEO of
the Public Radio Exchange, Sue Schardt, the CEO of the Association of
Independents in Radio, Joaquin Alvarado, head of innovation for American Public
Media, and Craig Aaron, Free Press president and CEO.
For footage of Tuesday’s event click the links below:
Last week Dennis Ritchie, the co-creator of UNIX, died — and
hardly anyone covered it. Ritchie lived quietly — he wasn't the showman that Steve Jobs was — and apparently he died quietly, too. While working at Bell Labs in the late ‘60s Ritchie wrote the C programming language with Brian Kernighan.
Rev. R. Henry Martin directs the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission, a
Louisiana-based ministry that “reaches out to feed, clothe, shelter and provide
healing services to homeless men, women and families with children.” The
ministry aided 1,200 people in 2010, served over 135,000 meals and is open to
those in need 365 days a year.
Last week, the Chronicle of Philanthropyreported
on a troubling trend that has many of the most innovative new journalism
nonprofits stuck in a bureaucratic black hole at the IRS.
The rise of local nonprofit news
organizations has been heralded as one of the most promising signs in the news
industry’s rapid transformation over the last four years. Veteran reporters,
tech-savvy journalists and citizens are starting vibrant local journalism
nonprofits to fill the gaps commercial media are leaving behind as they
consolidate and slash newsroom jobs.
In its relentless
effort to take over competitor T-Mobile, AT&T has been dangling the promise
of better service and greater access to broadband Internet to rural Americans
as an incentive for policymakers to support and approve the $39 billion deal.
But in eastern Kentucky, activists for rural broadband aren’t holding their
breath and waiting for AT&T to make good on this promise.
The Web is supposed to be different. More open, more inclusive.
Surely old ways of reporting on (or ignoring) people of color haven’t
transferred online ...
The last time I scanned through my local radio dial, I heard
the same pop song, Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep,” playing simultaneously on
three different radio stations. If a couple of senators and their friends in
the broadcast industry have their way, soon we could hear the same song on six
or more stations.
Here at Free Press we're celebrating the release of our colleague Joseph Torres' new book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. This October the authors are taking their book on the road on a national tour that includes stops in New York, California, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and Washington, D.C.
On NPR’s Morning
Edition this Wednesday, reporter Elizabeth Blair took
a hard look at the ways in which advertisers are flooding our media and
having more and more of a say in the content we see between the commercial breaks. New tools and technology have given
consumers more options for skipping the ads that have quietly come to fill as
much as 10 to 15 minutes of a half-hour program. With TiVo and online
streaming, people can increasingly choose what commercials they see — or skip
the ads altogether.
