From NCMR: Ideas for a media advocacy group for Boston

 Here are rough notes from the discussion;

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   Idea: A website where you can post examples of media failures and comment on them.

• Creating new venues for media content; creating a local fairness-doctrine. Encouraging the Globe or Herald have an enviromental section in their papers.
• Creating new media venues -- Can't always find what info is across the street. More than just media, a one-stop shopping for information about your community. A website where there were minutes for a group that met a long time ago.
• Get the city of Boston budget online.
• Bring different parts of the city together. "I see a lot of local community activists doing work in multimedia and print who are along and isolated." Create a common ground.
• Somerville Community Access television started a community access radio station; open to all, a free-speech venue. Would like to have a media-reform program.http://www.bostonfreeradio.com
• OPen Media Boston does an interesting job by letting people identify themselves as advocates; reach out to media makers within the grass-roots organizations.
• People talking about two areas: (1) Reforming current dominant media and (2) building connections with alternative media which exists and is emerging. Two different things. As neophyte, interested in having definition of what the media landscape already is in Boston and what are its problems. How about identifying alternative creators of content in Boston. Discussion about pro-choice viral effort.
• Need for community mapping to define strengths and weaknesses in the Boston area?
• Problems of organizing locally similar to problems elsewhere. Do you need to raise some funds to do media reform. What's needed to educate the public?

Libby Reinish from Free Press: An important bridge needed. Know of federal PTFP grant? Only capital grant for community radio stations to get on air -- up to 75% match to get stations going. Obama budget put it on chopping block. Continuing resolution zeroed it out for remaining of this year. Probably won't come back; 30 community organizations have construction permits for new stations -- have lost their primarily capital funding. She stresses importance of working on federal legal.

• How is it we can get a place to know what is going on. There are hundreds of media outlets out there. It goes to the question of mapping. Is there a center place for all these, a way to combine these, a place we can all go to that is reliable.

• Discusses Puget Sound Community Information Commons -- considering Skyping someone in or bringing someone in to talk about it. Good parallels to the Boston area.

• A word about open-source and standards-based development. But these public-access organizations don't always have a lot of interest in realizing they are all using the same thing. There are overwhelming politics involved.

• From Kansas City -- Very interested in local things and don't want to underplay that; but when you read Robert McChesney's newly edited book -- it says journalism is in a huge existential crisis and that means democracy is, too. So need to be interested in the federal/national like the PTFP issue.

QUESTION: If we were in control, what would be different and if we can't lay out what the difference would be then what is the point in being here?

• Some of the "hand helds" have done a great job of getting stories out ahead of MSM. An imperative to understand so people will join something that is different and has more going for them than what they "are being fed at the moment." It used to be radio/TV stations had to come before the community and explain what they were doing for public service. What level of political activity to we have to get into to assert that "we own those stations" and we have a right to those stations and that they have to be accountable to us. "And if we don't feel that then I'm not sure what we do will be different."

• Reinish from Free Press: Echoing previous commentator. Companies using airwaves for free have obligation to serve the public. Yet no accountability now -- basically post-card licensing for eight years at a time. FreePress has an action guide for how to challenge a license. In Massachusetts, radio stations come up for renewal in April 2014, TV stations in April 2015.

QUESTION: How are your NPR/PBS stations faring? Internet access? Openness in Boston?

• WBUR one of largest affiliates around the country, just raised the most money ever raised in a fundraising effort. People are showing upset about defunding with their wallets. "Great for us." But they have not been in danger. Problem is for the small affiliates who rely on larger affiliates' money and public money.

• Re broadband access: Boston and Cambridge governments have adopted it as an issue. There are commercial broadband monopolies in both now. Re state of Boston media -- a session at 9 a.m. yesterday was "extraordinarily entertaining and very sad." Very little about growing audience, except whether Boston Globe paywall would work; snipping between WGBH and WBUR partisans. Immensely entertainingly but complete irrelevant.

==QUESTION: Can we talk now about solutions?

• Shara Drew -- If we think the local news should reflect what the community wants it reflect then we need a tool for assessing what the community wants. Technically pretty easy, challenge is how to publicize it. Could we set it up?

• Most people familiar with "Counterspin" done by FAIR. Every city should have something like that and a way to gin up a response.

• Fellow from Hawaii: Organize community ownership of a local community license.

• Bill Densmore, http://www.newenglandnews.org / Mentions Shires Media Partners Inc., Bennington, Vt., 501(c)3 that owns WBTN-AM (http://www.shiresmedia.org /http://www.wbtnam.org)

• The Banyan Project, organized by Tom Stites, of Newburyport, Mass., seeks to build a co-operative ownership model for local news organization. http://www.banyanproject.com

Talking about Open Media Boston

• A consumer cooperative, people will join as a consumer coop. Organized like a cooperative, make arrangements to produce journalism on the web and branch out to other forms of media. Have some enthusiasm for the project and have made some progress. Haven't opened the doors yet but are getting close.

http://www.openmediaboston.org / R. Wayne Archer Clark / rwayneclark@igc.org / Auburndale, MA 617-467-4113 / Info_Co-op Associations.

Commercial progress radio station network

• Jeff Santos, president, CEO and morning house of 1510 kc commercial progressive media radio-station network. "We would like to be engaged with all of you here." Would be happy to have people in to talk about community media initiatives. They do live remotes. He is 7 a.m.-10 a.m. Monday-Friday.

• Followup to Santos: What is your tool of analysis? What sort of survey, polling do you do? It needs to be different from the major channels. Would like a sense of what we do that allows us to have a good analysis of how we are doing more about democracy and critical thinking that the folks we are complaining about.

• When looking at for-profit advertising models -- if you are seeing ads, you are the product. Bringin the audience to a non-profit, non-advertising-driven mechanism gives you a lot of freedom. When you change that it changes the content you are going to be airing. When you take grant money you are going to be less critical of that grant-giving organization, or advertiser.

• Q: But what if you are commercial but you agree to accept less money?

BACKGROUND: Media reform elsewhere: Media Council of Hawaii -- Chris Conybeare

http://www.mediacouncil.org / conybeare@msn.com (Christopher r. Conybeare) 808-225-6288

• Since 1970, some years gangbusters, some years out of business, some victories, some not. "We keep at it ... think global and act local." Next legislative access could cut out funding for local PEG access altogether. "Congress can wipe out funding for community television." No matter what your issue is, the media should be issue No. 2. "How do you get your issue, information about it, to the public." Latest Pew study -- 67% of U.S. public gets their info from local broadcast TV -- not internet or other sources. Important for community to influence what appears on broadcast TV. Look at station's public file anytime during regular business hours. Sometimes not available, sometimes not complete. Also deal with other issues: High-school media literacy training; free-of-expression First Amendment program has reached 1,000 students. Got a state shield law passed. Sometimes you feel really frustrated, but if you think about importance of information to democracy -- you can usually find enough people to go with you and take on the next task.

QUESTION: What are some of the things local groups have done?

In Kansas City: A "golden plunger" award. Hosting this year the Grass Roots Radio Conference. http://www.grassrootsradioconference.org

QUESTION: How do we come up with agenda?

• If we don't have an agenda will have a hard time keeping people beyond one meeting.
• Mel King: What I'm interested in knowing is how much are we involving high-school aged youth in this. They have their hand helds, they are doing lots of things with media and to the extent we don't figure out with them what is in the total community's interest -- which includes them -- then we are going to be having questions about the impact of media and democracy for the next 50 years. Right now the tools for changing that are in a lot of peoples' hands. There is a friend that says we complain about the dirt and we have the broom in our hands. We have to figure out how with these new tools we can work with them in a way to democratize, give access, get crucial stories out.

• Katherine Russo, Provincetown: She would come for a meeting even if there wasn't much of an agenda.

Goal? Media as 'interlaced with community life'

• Hearing Mel King sparks an idea about outreach and electing folks. Think about it as not the media and community as two separate kingdoms. We have to make the media part of community life so people find it easy to use the media and to make the media. The less comparatmentalized and remote the media area, it just has to become fine-grained enough to be part of community life and that's how you'll know if we're addressing what they care about and how things will get out to people that the MSM doesn't want out, that isn't in the interests of the owners to be news. Think of media as "interlaced with community life."

WRAPPING UP

Next meeting is in May. Want to call it. Everyone please go forth and multiply. CAll it in a section of the city that is accessible to the T and has good parking. Will set up the communication networks with the list compiled from today. Need to think about how to form a network. A body of empowered people to come up with agendas and form working groups. Get momentum going and build structure "or else we'll get stuck in internicine squabbling."

Next meeting 2 p.m. on Saturday, May 21. Local TBA.

Notes by Bill Densmore / bdensmore@newenglandnews.org