For the People -Community Media

In the recent JOUR1111 lecture, Public Media was discussed. It its my belief that if one wants intelligent and comprehensive news coverage, one turns to Public Media instead of the likes of Today Tonight or A Current Affair. Institutions such as the ABC and SBS may not be known for their variety of entertainment programs, yet their news and current affairs programs are nationally renowned.

Excuse the rant about news integrity but Commercial Media news is a real hatred of mine, especially the less than intelligent current affairs programs. They may address public issues, however they do it in a way that I believe is always one sided and completely lacks information.

Anyway, the real point of this post was for me to talk about the new and exciting opportunities for Community Media.
In previous posts, I have said that this new online based media world we live in provides countless opportunities for journalists to grab hold of. I also believe this new domain holds exciting possibilities for advances in Community Media.

One could say that this blog is a form of Community Media. The key point here is that with new technology comes the ease to create new, user generated content and broadcast it to an audience. Youtube is a perfect example of this. With limited resources you can set up your own channel and create content for an incalculable audience. Not for profit groups benefit from these outlets immensely as well.

Even though sites like Youtube may not be considered in the same league as TV, the argument still stands that you have to start somewhere.

A year ago I completed a week of production workshops with Bris31. (now 31 Digital) Many of the producers I worked with would not have been more than 5 years older than me and all of which had their own Youtube Channel.

I believe that Community Media is the way forward for one reason. User based and approved content. For the time being, there is little politics, little money matters and few programming issues for the generators of Community Media as their soul aim is to develop and put on air content that local audiences are familiar with.

Hopefully we will see the progression of this brand of media in the future. It is disappointing that media now days is heavily influenced by the likes of Fairfax ad News Limited, however it is good to see that Public Media and Community Media still hold their own in this developing environment.