Broadband & Community Broadband

Native Public Media and the New America Foundation today announced a new partnership to strengthen and expand Native American media capacity, and to raise the visibility of those efforts inside the Beltway.

Native Public Media -- an Arizona-based organization founded, staffed by and serving the Native American community -- will work with New America’s Open Technology Initiative on a wide range of media issues, including better broadband access on tribal lands and continued support for Native public radio.  It will remain an independent 501c3 organization.

The New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative is very pleased to announce that Hannah Sassaman, a longtime leader in community media organizing, has joined the organization as a senior field analyst.  Previously, as campaign director for the Prometheus Radio Project, Sassaman helped coordinate the successful campaign to pass the Local Community Radio Act signed into law by President Obama in January 2011.  Through this work, Sassaman has created an opportunity for thousands of new low power FM radio stations to be founded in cities and counties across th

This paper, developed by the Open Technology Initiative of the New America Foundation at the request of the Alliance for Community Media (ACM), offers a policy framework that responds to the situation ACM finds itself thrust into and recommends actions to secure the future of community media.

At a Nov. 30 event at Columbia University, “Big Media: Pro and Con,” Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann analogized media policy to a football field: Just as the size and shape of the field dictates the way the game is played, so too does media policy dictate the development of American telecommunications. And on the heels of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s announcement last week of a new net neutrality proposal, we see more clearly than ever that government legislation and regulation are crucial to this field. In that vein, Columbia Journalism School Prof. Richard R. John’s book Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, published in May, makes the case that policy intervention has been commonplace throughout American history with a sweeping survey of the history of electrical communications from the early Republic to the modern day.

At a Nov. 30 event at Columbia University, “Big Media: Pro and Con,” Journalism School Dean Nicholas Lemann analogized media policy to a football field: Just as the size and shape of the field dictates the way the game is played, so too does media policy dictate the development of American telecommunications. And on the heels of FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski’s announcement last week of a new net neutrality proposal, we see more clearly than ever that government legislation and regulation are crucial to this field. In that vein, Columbia Journalism School Prof. Richard R. John’s book Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications, published in May, makes the case that policy intervention has been commonplace throughout American history with a sweeping survey of the history of electrical communications from the early Republic to the modern day.

Before we all become completely distracted by the Thanksgiving turkey, here is a pre-holiday rundown of MPI’s many activities.

With the budget cuts looming in the United Kingdom, it is interesting to look at the future of both wide-scale broadband policy and the possible changes to public media institutions there. On Oct. 20, the Westminster Parliament announced the first of several budget cuts in its Comprehensive Spending Review, totaling to £81 billion ($128 billion) that affects nearly every aspect of public spending except for education and public health. (For an in-depth look at the recent budget cuts in the United Kingdom, please see the BBC’s breakdown by Ministry.) As George Osbourne, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer, stated while announcing the cuts, “Today is the day that Britain steps back from the brink.”