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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 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”

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.

Virtual Gaza is a website where ordinary Palestinians under siege can describe their experiences in their own words, and where the destruction can be documented by those experiencing it directly. It was created as a response to the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip in January 2009.

Quality photojournalism is expensive - researching the story, gaining access, spending time with your subjects, post production and editing - there are no short cuts. Newspapers and magazines spend a tiny proportion of their income on content and they certainly don't want to spend it on photography.

Success now lies in being multiskilled, merely taking photographs is not enough. My advice to aspiring photographers is that they need to be able to design a web page using html, know their way around a multitude of publishing software programmes shoot and edit video, record audio and most importantly research and pitch stories.

rather than sourcing funding from the print media or distributor of a story, photographers are working with organisations who have a message they want to disseminate.

The altered roles of the teacher and the student substantially change teaching itself. Learning with digital media isn’t about giving our well-worn teaching practices a hip appearance; it is, more fundamentally, about exploring radically new approaches to instruction. The future of learning will not be determined by tools but by the re-organization of power relationships and institutional protocols. Digital media, however, can play a positive role in this process of transformation.

Re-Imagining Learning in the 21st Century, described good contemporary teachers as learning experts, mentors, motivators, technology integrators, and diagnosticians.

The most burning problem for digital learning is technological obsolescence and the attendant need to learn and readapt to new technological milieus and cycles of transformation. Openness, flexibility, playfulness, persistence, and the ability to work well with others on-the-fly are at the heart of an attitude that allows learners to cope with the unrelenting velocity of technological change in the 21st century. Digital media fluency also requires an understanding of the moment when technological interfaces hinder learning and become distracting.