Josh: Media Reformers Pack the Room

Just finished with my morning session on “Student Action for Media Reform” and met a ton of amazing people. The little classroom was packed with almost 50 people from all over and with a range of interests: journalism, technology, anthropology, media studies, and much more.

However – I forgot to had around a sign up sheet so if you were in this session drop me an email: jstearns@freepress.net so we can continue this conversation.

We talked a bit about what was wrong with the media – but focused most of our time on what we can do about. Folks in the room were already working on a number of exciting projects and from what I could tell were really interested in how media reform intersected with the other issues they cared about.

After a quick discussion of the StopBigMedia campaign – we broke into pairs and discussed the how the media was serving us and what a better media might look like. The media gets a free license to use the public airwaves and in return are supposed to serve the public, so we spent some time talking about what it would look like to serve the public. People called for more investigative journalism, more diverse viewpoints, more context and local issues, more youth oriented reporting, and more.

Once we have a vision of a better media we talked about a few ways to get there: 1) Write Your Local Stations: Stations all have to keep a public record of any complaints they get so you can help build the case for a better media by writing your station. 2) Inspect Station’s Public Record: you can view a stations public record and write up a report about what you find there – publish it in the local paper and spread the word about how the station is serving your community. 3) Fight a License Renewal: use that info to petition the FCC to deny a station its license to broadcast. 4) In-district Meeting: Then meet with your policy maker and ask them to hold these stations accountable to serve the local community.

You can find tips and tricks on how to put a campaign like this together at www.freepress.net or www.stopbigmedia.com.

More to come soon…

Josh Stearns Free Press/Stop Big Media/ Save the Internet