A call for arms for the media to protect democracy

A call to action for the media to protect our democratic traditions by Eric Newton from the Knight Foundation over at Nieman Lab.

We are now deep into the second decade of the World Wide Web. It was our hope that when our leaders were finally ready to change things, they would consider a new perspective.

he writes harking back to earlier claims that

1.Our news systems are not good enough,

2.They don’t engage everyone,

3.We need alternatives.

The hard part is ahead of us: that is, involving every aspect of our communities in this issue, governments, nonprofits, traditional media, schools, universities, libraries, churches, social groups — and, especially, citizens themselves.

Knight's comes out in favour of public support for journalism

One of my pet projects is how to democracy and the role of the fourth estate can survive and prosper in the digital age.

Over at The Knight Commission they have looked at the issue and amongst their conclusions

1. Public media should provide better local news and information.

2. Not-for-profit and non-traditional media can be important sources of journalism.

They have come up with five recommendations

1.Direct media policy toward innovation,competition, and support for business models that provide marketplace incentives for quality journalism.

2. Increase support for public service media aimed at meeting community information needs.

3. Increase the role of higher education,community and nonprofit institutions as hubs of journalisticactivity and other information-sharing for local communities.

4. Require government at all levels to operate transparently, facilitate easy and low-cost access to public records, and make civic and social data available in standardized formats that support the productive public use of such data.

5. Develop systematic quality measures of community information ecologies, and study how they affect social outcomes.