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Too few emerging online journalists understand that the function of news publishing has changed in the Internet era. Simply reporting the news, however you might define that, is no longer enough, not when you are publishing in such a competitive environment. The journalists who succeed online are the ones who understand that they are no longer simply reporters... they've become community organizers.

you have to have a community that supports you, if you want to make a living online.

your past earns you nothing online. Whatever audience you will have there, you must build yourself

Welcome to the website for The Future of Media and the Information Needs of Communities in a Digital Age. The goal of this project: to help ensure that all Americans have access to vibrant, diverse sources of news and information that will enable them to enrich their families, communities and democracy.

The State of the News Media 2009 is the sixth edition of our annual report on the health and status of American journalism. Our goals are to take stock of the revolution occurring in how Americans get information and provide a resource for citizens, journalists and researchers to make their own assessments.

The Center for Future Civic Media is working to create technical and social systems for sharing, prioritizing, organizing, and acting on information. These include developing new technologies that support and foster civic media and political action; serving as an international resource for the study and analysis of civic media; and coordinating community-based test beds both in the United States and internationally.

We use the term civic media, rather than citizen journalism: civic media is any form of communication that strengthens the social bonds within a community or creates a strong sense of civic engagement among its residents. Civic media goes beyond news gathering and reporting. MIT students are experimenting with a variety of new civic media techniques, from technologies for protests and civil disobedience to phone-texting systems that allow instant, sophisticated votes on everyday activities. The Center amplifies the development of these technologies for community empowerment, while also serving to generate curricula and open-source frameworks for civic action.

“participatory culture”

more and more teachers are beginning to discover the enhanced, interactive learning experience that Skype’s free videoconferencing enables.

An analysis of controlled studies by the U.S. Department of Education in June 2009 found that “blended” instruction that combined online and face-to-face instruction had a larger advantage than pure online or face-to-face communication.

Tolisano insists that these calls are not about learning technology alone, because during these video calls, students are expected to do different jobs. Some prepare to present or ask questions of their online guests such as what the time difference is or what the weather is like. Other students film and photograph the conversation, while still others listen and write about the call. “It is not about using the webcam alone,” says Tolisano. “ It is about communication and presentation skills.”

Verizon Communications announced May 13 it would sell about 4.8 million access lines to Frontier Communications Corp., including those in West Virginia, in a move that could lead to expanded broadband Internet access throughout the state.

A relatively large percentage of West Virginia doesn’t have access to broadband Internet services compared to many other states. State officials have pushed for greater broadband access for the state’s rural areas, and the economic stimulus package recently passed by Congress includes $7.2 billion for expanding broadband throughout the country.

Every island in Maine is struggling to keep their schools vibrant and open. In the last 100 years, Maine went from supporting 300 year-round island communities to 15, according to Snyder.

The filmmaker splits her time between Washington, D.C. and the island. If it were up to her, she would be on Isle au Haut year-round, but her job requires her to sit in meetings with people to talk about her documentary projects. Despite this, Wurzburg said she can work remotely and does as often as possible.

The high-speed Internet that her island home is connected to helps a lot.

For many Americans, having high-speed access to the Internet at home is as vital as electricity, heat and water. And yet about one-third of the population, 93 million people, have elected not to connect.

the overwhelming majority of people who have Internet access have broadband.

“Now we’re at a point where, if you want broadband adoption to go up by any significant measure, you really have to start to eat into the segment of non-Internet-users.”

"This was not [built as a] marketing channel, but as a consumer relationship-building environment."

intersection between digital and physical

"The experiences you have online can translate to rich offline experiences."

“My Ohio State colleagues took the initiative last November to convene a community conversation to discuss the implications of the report for Columbus. They could not get a single mainstream media news outlet (print or broadcast) to participate—although public and alternative media were well represented…”

“What would it be like to organize an entire college or university education around the idea of journalism? I am not talking here about what we think of as vocational journalism education. The idea is not to make everyone a professional editor or reporter. I am talking, instead, about conceiving an entire program of liberal education that takes as its central theme the idea that the new media phenomenon is potentially making everyone a journalist.

I’ve long believed that basic journalism training would benefit everyone, and that journalistic assignments could start as early as elementary school. Shane points out that his vision of journalism-centered higher education could help solve three major social problems: The shortfall in local news production around the country. The well-documented deficiency in college student writing. Low civic literacy: Americans’ generally poor knowledge about how social institutions work, and who makes the policy decisions that affect their lives. Shane also observed that involving students in local journalism “wins the educational trifecta”: Students would tackle meaningful and intellectually challenging issues. Students enjoy dealing with such issues. Students would develop marketable skills while also learning to function effectively as citizens.