NCMR08 6: Sustaining Independent Media

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the room in time, so I've arrived late for Tracy Van Slyke and Jessica Clark's presentation on their progressive media mapping and impact measurement project presentation.

Tracy: "It's a time of experimentation, but there are questions about how we measure the impact of our work."

Traditional metrics:

• Money
• Attention
• Buzz
• Credibility

New categories:

• Mainstreaming an issue
• Taking it to the Hill
• Combining pop and politics: pop culture as a "beat" to uncover political consequences
  
• Reaching nontraditional audiences
• Fighting the right
• Uncovering the news: covering missing stories
  
• Pioneering new journalism models: creating projects that push the boundaries of "traditional objective journalism," crowdsourcing, live blogging, etc
  
• Chasing the tech: harnessing new platforms
  
• Challenging the story
• Building infrastructure
• Poking the bear: from WAM! - to force reaction from the other side to generate buzz. Nice.

Check the work out at www.buildtheecho.net.

Adam Davis, Southern Illinois Universty on Current TV. Current is Al Gore's adventure in user-generated media, launched in 2005, reaching 41 mil homes in the US. Viewers are still only producing 1/3 of the content. Adam's question: "Is current TV a new model for public access and what do Gore and investors stand to gain?"

• User generated content is cheap
• Turned profitable in 2 years

Adam relies on Habermas' conclusion that the public sphere must be completely independent of the commercial sphere, and he has assembled an impressive collection of instances of commercial warping of the public-spirited concept of Current TV. His tone is pointed, but I have to wonder - why didn't we do it first? Is there room in our work for for-profit models for user-generated new media? What if that model was intended to create synergies between progressive media and socially conscious businesses? Respected progressive print outlets do this.

In the audience, there is scoffing when we are confronted with the enthusiastic blurbs of Gore and his marketing partners' commentary on their business model. I haven't investigated Current TV and have no judgments on it, but I don't know how productive knee jerk reactions to the realities of the corporate sector in this space can be.

There's a rarely spoken inconsistency unveiled here, today already, and I think I'll continue to see it throughout the conference. On the one hand, we recoil at the intrusions of commercial incentives in the media system. On the other hand, we know we are embedded in the system that generates those incentives and embrace measures like tax incentives to increase minority ownership of commercial outlets. Personally, I'm undecided, possibly ambivalent, on the issue, but there hasn't been a larger dialog that identifies and articulates this inconsistency. I don't know that such a dialog is immediately necessary or that community-wide consistency is possible or necessary, but I feel like I encounter this question all of the time.