The media is dead. Long live the media!
Local media has been destroyed from the outside by a demolished revenue ecosystem and corporate takeovers, and also from the inside by complacency and unacknowledged privilege. Today, a new wave of community news and storytelling initiatives — some driven by journalists, some driven by artists and activists — are taking up the reins, driving a budding local media movement focused on citizens over profit, community interest over page views, and innovative forms of storytelling.
We’ve heard a lot about top-down attempts to revitalize local news, but what about these bottom-up experiments? Might these kinds of disruptive local media be an antidote to the spread of authoritarian and racist movements in our country and around the world? What can larger, more mainstream outlets learn from these projects? And what else can be attempted that no one has tried yet? In this session, we’ll explore the role of grass-roots, people-focused media in fighting fascism, with a focus on journalistically-sound methods for doing so.
Suggested Speaker(s)
- Anjali Khosla and Heather Chaplin
Assistant Professor, Journalism + Design, The New School - Heather Chaplin
Founding Director, Journalism + Design, The New School