I am excited to announce that the second year of NeighborMedia (a New Voices Grantee) is getting started next week. We’re having an orientation at CCTV next Wednesday to welcome this year’s group of up and coming citizen journalists who will be sharing their stories about issues that matter to them and others in Cambridge.

Some of the individuals in the program come from professional journalism backgrounds and others do not have any experience producing media at all. This is why I am most excited about this group. They also share a common trait. They care passionately about local issues and want to express their views with others in Cambridge. All of them live, or have lived, in the community and can speak about their experiences in a way that uniquely separates them from many of the freelance journalists employed by our regional media conglomerates.

At a time when news organizations are investing large sums of money to retrain their staff to do more with social media tools, community media centers such as CCTV are uniquely positioned to help ordinary people have a voice using new and traditional media tools.

That’s why I feel so privileged to have the opportunity to help lead this important effort. I am thankful for the foundation that Julie Adler and my other co-workers established during the first year of the program. The evaluations conducted at the end of the first year (over this summer) were invaluable towards the planning and coordination of this year’s program. We’re excited to get started next week, and I hope you will follow their progress at NeighborMedia.org.

From “Fighting Poverty: Community Media and Communication for Development in the Digital Age”:

Access to the means of voice and communication is central to a people-centred approach to development both for its intrinsic human importance and its rola in shared culture, access to knowledge and education, civic participation in decision making, ensuring good governance through accountability and providing other tools that assist the achievement of development goals. This has been acknowledged repeatedly in major international development reports such as the World Development Report, the Final Report of the United Nations Millennium Project and the Commission for Africa Report among others.

Community media has a vital role to play in giving access to voice and communication for poor and marginalised groups. Frequently excluded from mainstream media. It has had a central impact on development and is of increasing relevance in the context of new information and communication technologies and the trend towards more liberalised communications environments. The impact and value of community media has been repeatedly demonstrated over many years most centrally in its central and critical role in Nepal in the recent peaceful transition to a new democracy.”

Download the full report at the AMARC website.

Reason #1134 why C-Span rocks: Podcasts (iTunes) & YouTube episodes of The Communicators, “C-SPAN’s new weekly series featuring a half-hour interview with the people who shape our digital future.”

Watch C-Span’s “The Communicators” episodes on Obama’s and McCain’s Telecom Policy Agenda for the next administration.

On Thursday, the Alliance for Community Media issued the following press release, entitled “U.S House Subcommittee will ask FCC to examine harm to public, educational, and governmental television“:

In response to testimony from Alliance for Community Media members yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee’s Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government voiced strong bi-partisan support for public, educational, and governmental (PEG) access for communities and asked the FCC to examine whether AT&T and other cable operators are in compliance with the Cable Act of 1984.

In opening remarks, Subcommittee Chairman Congressman Jose Serrano (NY-D) and Congressman Mark Kirk (IL-R) expressed concern that local PEG access channels are in danger of declining or disappearing as a result of the current regulatory and business environment.

Barbara Popovic, Executive Director of Chicago Access Network Television, representing the Alliance, and Michael Max Knobbe, president of the Alliance’s New York chapter, and Executive Director of BronxNet, presented testimony that detailed multiple problems with PEG access channel delivery arising out of recent actions by the FCC, state legislatures, the cable industry and AT&T. Problems that were outlined included a loss of funding and channels, movement of PEG to higher numbered channels (referred to as “channel slamming”), reduced quality and functionality of existing channels, and loss or reductions in public cable drops to schools, libraries and other public centers. Regarding the issues of AT& T’s treatment of PEG channels, Ms. Popovic said “Bottom line, AT&T, the company that promotes ‘choice’ in cable franchising, is giving viewers no choice when it comes to PEG.” Mr. Knobbe discussed the problems associated with channel slamming, which include additional costs to consumers to view PEG channels.”

Read the complete press release here.

Broadcasting & Cable published two good articles detailing the positions of McCain and Obama on some of the most pressing media policy issues of our time, including media ownership, the digital television transition, and network neutrality.

Read “Obama’s Media Agenda” here and “McCain Campaign Mum on Media Policy” here.

Thanks to Bob McCannon for the pointer.

(This is a cross-post - with a different title - from here)

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Jared M. Gordon from NewEnglandFilm.com. He was doing a piece about the Flip Mino cameras and contacted me to learn more about how we’re using them here at CCTV.

The article, entitled “Three Filmmakers, Three Cameras” is now online at their website. Here’s a bit from the article:

“What projects are you currently putting together?

During this year I’ve been the project manager of what we call Bridging the Digital Divide. We’re putting computers and Internet access into the hands of people who need it the most in Cambridge. Another project, the Neighbor Media Program, is a citizen journalism program (neighbormedia.org) in which ordinary community folks are reporting on local news. A lot of what will be involved segues into the Flip Mino…

Tell me about your experience with your current camera of choice. What sort of work have you done with it?

We’ll be distributing [Flip Minos] to neighbor media journalists on a monthly basis. They’ll take them out, hopefully use it to cover stories, and we provide support, training, and all kinds of production skills that can help augment their stories. Some journalists weren’t ready for the advanced cameras and they wanted an easier way to start involving themselves in media production. We bought the Flips for that purpose, then realized that we could use them for our summer institute (youth program).

I have spent enough time to get to know some of its quirks, what it’s good for and what it’s not good for. For the money and for what it is, it’s absolutely worth it. It’s a cool little camera.”

Read more at NewEnglandFilm.com.

I just learned from Rob McCausland via the Alliance for Community Media listserv that Dee Dee Halleck and Dan Gilmor discussed the question, “Is Public Access TV Still Relevant?” on The Leonard Lopate Show on WNYC today.

I haven’t had an opportunity to listen to it yet, but since the topic was the subject of my graduate thesis at Emerson College, I look forward to hearing the discussion. I am sure it was a lively one.

After my final class of Videoblogging Production last night, I’m already thinking about how I can do things differently next time. Thanks to my students who provided precious feedback about the course, I’ve decided to organize the sessions much more practically. For example, I’m thinking that the three sessions should be organized as follows:

• Session I: Shoot
• Session II: Edit
• Session III: Upload

This probably seems obvious for folks with experience. My intent with the last course was to focus more on storytelling and less on editing. However, I found that students were interested more on editing to help the storytelling apects of their pieces. So, next time I think I will re-focus the course to follow in a more natural progression.

In the meantime, I posted a link on my CCTV blog about how to capture stills (image above) from a Flip Mino Video camera using QuickTime Pro.

Also, here are two of the finished video blog posts for the course, one by Paula Cohen and another by Susan Needleman.

I look forward to teaching the course again in the fall.

One of the best things about my job is being able to teach courses like Blogging 101 and Videoblogging Production to people in the community.

In my Blogging 101 course, I spend time a good deal of time talking about RSS, including how to subscribe to feeds, how to make it easier for your readers to subscribe to your blog’s feed and the significance of tagging.

I also talk about why Creative Commons matters.

During the second session of Blogging 101, students set up their own blogs on CCTV’s website and also get a chance to start their own free blog at Wordpress.com.

I also talk a bit about podcasting, photo blogging and other ways for students to share their media through social network sites, such as Facebook and MySpace. It’s a great introduction to Web 2.0 and Social Media.

Two weeks ago, I started teaching our new Videoblogging Production at CCTV. The course is three-sessions and tomorrow night is our final class. We started off the course talking about a number of topics included in my Blogging 101 class. We also dove right into watching and critiquing other video blogs.

The class is also a great opportunity to put aside the more technical video production stuff that we teach in our field production classes and focus on storytelling with less fancy equipment.

I think students are having a really good time with the Flip Mino cameras. By using a point and shoot video camera they’re able to focus more on how to tell a story in 3 minutes or less. I think this approach really encourages them to think about the focus of their video and how to make it locally-focused and relevant to others in the community.

At the end of the course, students will submit their videos both to their CCTV blogs and for a new series I’m producing for our public access channels, entitled “Cambridge Stories.” This is exciting for me because CCTV producers often create video for our channels and use the web to distribute their video online afterwards. Videoblogging Production flips it around. It starts with video blogs submitted by students for the course that ends up on our channels.

This approach also gaurantees both a local (public access channels) and global (video blogs online) audience for students work in their course. The course also encourages our members to use our public access computer lab to not only gain basic computer skills, but also media production skills in the process.

I’m looking forward to our final class tomorrow night and working on the post-production for the “Cambridge Stories” premiere on our channels.

The video above is something I shot while I was out over this weekend. I did it as an opportunity to learn more about my Flip Mino and compressing its video for the web. I also figured if my students had to do the work, I might as well join the fun.

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to figure out how to get this site jump started again. Since a lot of what I’m writing about these days is about community media and technology, it made sense to use my CCTV blog and thesis blog to do that. But, in doing that I found myself spread across too many sites.

So to make it easier on myself, I’ve decided to leave Community Media in Transition aside for now and get back to using this site to write about community media and technology, and hopefully more music-related, stuff moving forward.

That’s my decision and I’m sticking to it.