New Media and Media Assistance: Where Do We Go From Here?
The media landscape is changing faster than many donors can process. New technologies are forcing change upon business models, regulatory structures, and basic patterns of information access and distribution. Yet how much have efforts to assist independent media really changed as a result? I recently tackled these questions in a short study for the Center for International Media Assistance at the National Endowment for Democracy.
The report, which can be found here, posits that media assistance efforts don't necessarily need to change radically to keep up with ongoing changes, but that donors, practitioners and scholars must keep abreast of current trends to be effective and relevant. There are certainly various schools of thought on this, and I'd like to hear from those who agree, disagree, or would like to continue the conversation in more detail.
At CommGAP, we're interested in exploring not only developments in new technologies and media, but the intersection between new technologies, citizens, and governance in developing countries as well. We'll be posting more on these and other issues in the near future, so please watch this space . . . and in the meantime, feel free to suggest particularly interesting or innovative topics to pursue.
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Comments
New media and media assistance...
Hmm, not sure I agree 100% with the idea that strategies don't need to change to accommodate new technologies. This is because even if you take (as I do) a view that media assistance is about encouraging journalism in the classical sense of attempting to produce reports which are neutral, balanced sourcing and the other features of the craft of journalism... the new tools could lead to a change in the essence of media assistance in two ways. First, they have the potential to lower dramatically the barrier to entry into journalism by institutions which may or may not be media institutions (staying fully within this classic definition of media)... so non-media entities could become credible media players - in other words, the "what" and "how" of journalism may not change but the "who" might. Second, within existing media outlets, there is a tremendous difference between individual use of these technologies and concerted adoption at an institutional level... and that difference may make a critical difference in kinds of media offered, business models, knowledge management of all kinds *within* the existing media industry.
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