Posts tagged with 'media consortium'
Media Consortium Annual Meeting Program!
Filed under: 
Make an Impact!
February 6-8, 2013
Baltimore @ The Wyndham Peabody Hotel
Not a member of the Media Consortium? Don’t worry, you are invited! Cost is $250. Get your ticket here!
Are you a Consortium member? Your meeting registration is included in your dues. However, please register so we know how many lunches to order!
Wed. February 6: Pre-Meeting Focus on Print (open to all meeting registrants)
8:30 Pre-Meeting Registration
9:00 Welcome
9:15 Why Stay in Print?
Moderator: Maxine Phillips, Publisher of Dissent with Rinku Sen (Colorlines), Dan Dineen (In These Times) and Bhaskar Sunkara (Jacobin)
A panel of your peers will discuss why they have chosen to stay in print
(or not); A lively discussion will follow.
10:30 Coffee Break
10:45 Best Practices for Building Single Copy Sales
Maire Walsh, VP for Next Steps Marketing
Frank Locantore, Green Paper Project
In an age of shrinking newsstands and newsstand sales, find out key ways to increase single copy sales in stores, online, and through tablet devices. This session will include information for you to better understand the changing retail environment and will provide creative solutions for you to build awareness, sales, and efficiency.
12:00 Lunch with Guest Speaker: Bo Sacks
Bo Sacks speaks regularly at Folio, MPA and other mega-publishing industry conferences, but as a co-founder of High Times has a soft spot for independent media. He’ll tell us what we can expect to see in 2013.
2:00 Print Grab-Bag
Rod Arakaki from Yes!
Steve Katz from Mother Jones
Join this informal discussion designed to look at the nitty gritty of print, from retaining subscribers to advertising to printing.
3:15 Coffee Break
3:30 Tablet Strategy for Print Publications
Bob Cohn, Editor of Atlantic Digital
Kit Rachlis, Editor of the American Prospect
Bob and Kit discuss the Atlantic’s strategy, then open the floor to questions.
5:00 Dinner on your own
6:30 Meeting Registration
7:00 Welcome from Steve Katz, Publisher of Mother Jones
7:15 Opening Plenary: Why You Should Be a Media Entrepreneur
Chris Rabb, author of Invisible Capital
Chris Rabb is a writer, consultant, and speaker on the intersection of entrepreneurship, media, civic engagement, and social identity. He is a visiting researcher at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as well as a Fellow at Demos. He formerly ran Afro-Netizen, a Media Consortium member outlet.
Thursday, February 7
8:30 Registration
9:00 Plenary: How You Made an Impact in 2012
Emcees: Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, TMC and
Marc Favreau, New Press
Hear presentations from the top 5 impact-making TMC publications of 2012, plus the Media Consortium’s own May Day effort
10:15 Coffee
10:30 Concurrent Sessions:
Create a Multiplatform Campaign with Steve Michelson, The Video Project
Understand what documentary filmmakers mean by a transmedia campaign, and how news organizations can use this strategy to their advantage to obtain high quality video content.
Tools for Online Donors with Joe Macare, Truthout; Kate Lezniak, Bitch Media; and Jason Barnett, The Uptake
How do you attract online donors? Learn from your colleagues with tips on email newsletter, social media, and crowdfunding strategies.
Fact-Checking without Fact-Checkers with Peter Rothberg, The Nation and Linda Jue, GWW Center
Face it. If we fact-check at all, we use interns. Learn when and what you really need to fact check, and how you can train interns to do the job.
11:30 Concurrent Sessions
Package that Content! with Sara Critchfield, Upworthy
Upworthy publishes “a steady stream of the most irresistibly shareable stuff [mainly video] you can click on without feeling bad about yourself afterwards.” Find out how to package your content so it’s irresistible too!
Working with Local Outlets with Tiffany Shackleford, Executive Director, AAN
The best news has a concrete, specific angle–which means it’s local. If you are a national outlet, get that content by partnering with someone already there. Four local outlets will talk about what they offer to–and what they need from– national outlets.
12:30 Lunch with Guest Speaker: Michael Copps
Now Common Cause’s Senior Advisor for its Media and Democracy Reform Initiative, Michael Copps served two terms with the Federal Communications Commission. His tenure was marked by a consistent embrace of the public interest. As a strong voice in opposition of consolidation in the media, he notably dissented in the Comcast-NBC Universal merger. He has been a consistent proponent for localism in programming and diversity in media ownership.
1:15 Panel: What’s Next for Media Policy? with Bartees Cox (Public Knowledge), Matt Wood (Free Press) and Todd O’Boyle (Common Cause)
Media Policy impacts news outlets directly via issues like net neutrality and free speech. Even more, complex issues like data caps and spectrum purchases can have very direct–and negative–impacts on the low-income, minority populations that need the voice of the independent media.
2:00 Consortium Reports (sequential)
- Media Policy Project with reporters Ken Rapoza (ITT) and Alice Ollstein (FSRN)
- Natural Gas Reporting Project with editor Maureen Nandini Mitra (Earth Island Journal)
- Community Journalism Training Institute with Susan Mernit (Oakland Local)
- Metrics Innovation and Incubation Lab with Gary King, Harvard (via skype), Ariel White and Benjamin Schneer
3:00 Coffee
3:00 Affinity Groups
Open Space to network, create collaborations, and plan for next year.
Please feel free to join one of these networks, or create your own:
–Natural Gas Reporting Project
–Reproductive and Gender Justice Project
–Media Policy Workshop
5:00 Next Steps from Affinity Groups
Report Backs
5:30 Dinner on your own
7:30 Party at the Real News Network! Cash Bar and Bands
Friday, February 8
9:00 Plenary: Mobile Strategy
Amy Mitchell, Associate Director of PEW’s Project for Excellence in Journalism
Amy Mitchell is acting director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. She manages all aspects of the project including the design, analysis and writing the project’s in-depth research reports. This includes the Annual Report on the State of the News Media. She will break down for us her recent report, The Demographics of Mobile News.
10:15 Coffee
10:30 Concurrent Sessions
Why Stream? with Michelle Holmes, Ustream
Streaming often seems to be the province of citizen journalism. Michelle Holmes, a former Knight Fellow and newspaper editor, will describe how journalists can use streaming for high quality reporting.
Hybrid Business Models with Lark Corbeil, PNS; Zuade Kaufman, Truthdig; and Steve Piersanti, Berrett-Koehler
Independents need to find new ways of bringing in revenue. Hear from three colleagues who have experimented with simultaneous non-profit and for-profit organizations.
11:30 What’s the Role of Advocacy in Impact Journalism?
Moderator: Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, Media Consortium with Maya Schenwar, Truthout; Alex DiBranco, Public Eye; and tba
After two days of talking about impact, let’s reflect on the meaning of impact. To what extent must journalists become advocates in order to move audiences to action? We will parse the difference between “solutions journalism,” “engaged journalism” and “advocacy journalism” and talk about what journalists gain–and lose– from going from informers and educators to “solvers” and advocates.
12:30 Lunch
1:00 Public Meeting Ends; Media Consortium Members-Only Meeting Begins
1:00 Report from the Executive Director
1:15 Reports from Committee: Finance, Development, Program, Membership
1:30 Nominations and Votes for Coordinating Committee
2:00 Workshop
3:00 Next Steps and Vision for 2014
3:30 Media Consortium Annual Meeting Concludes
3:30-5:30 A Coordinating Committee meeting will follow the end of the annual meeting.
Nonprofit status for News Media: problems and consequences
News organizations are increasingly turning to a model that was pioneered by independent media, a nonprofit model based on individual donors and foundation-funded projects. The two barriers to non-profit status have been based in IRS questions around politics and mission.
Weekly Diaspora: After DREAM Act Defeat, Advocates Fight for Educational Equality
by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger
The Senate failed to pass the DREAM Act Saturday, as Democrats fell five votes short of the 60 needed to advance the bill. The final vote was 55-41. While a Republican filibuster diminished the bill’s chances of success, five Democrats sealed the measure’s fate. Max Baucus (D-MT), Kay Hagan (D-NC), Ben Nelson (D-NE), Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Jon Tester (D-MT) crossed party lines to vote against the bill that would have created a conditional path to legalization for immigrant youth who attend college or serve in the military.
President Obama, who came out in full support of the DREAM Act in the 11th hour, wasted no time speaking out against the bill’s defeat. As ColorLines’ Julianne Hing reports, the president called the Senate’s failure to pass the measure “incredibly disappointing,” adding that “There was simply no reason not to pass this important legislation.” Obama further promised that his administration would continue supporting the measure. Hing aptly notes, however, that the president’s support belies the Department of Homeland Security’s resolve to continue deporting DREAM Act-eligible youth in the event of the measure’s failure. (more…)
Weekly Pulse: Health Bill Poised to Suck
by Lindsay Beyerstein, TMC MediaWire Blogger
The Senate Finance Committee is reportedly very close to finishing its healthcare legislation. But as the bill’s details leak, anticipation is quickly turning to dejection in progressive healthcare circles. Early word has it that the almost finished a bill includes no public option, no employer mandate, and no insurance exchange. Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly explains why the Senate Finance Committee bill is going to suck.
At TAPPED, Scott Lemieux argues that if the Senate legislation doesn’t have a public option or an employer mandate, we’d be better off not passing a healthcare bill. Conventional wisdom is that even a bad bill would be better than nothing: Once we get the basic infrastructure for universal healthcare in place, it will be easier to build on that rather than starting from scratch. However, as Lemieux points out, a bill with no public option would only further entrench the insurance industry and make it easier for them to block reforms in the future.
Remember that the bill that comes out of the Finance Committee still has to be reconciled with other versions, like the version from the Health Education Labor and Pensions Committee. So, it’s possible that progressive Senators will win some concessions. However, as we’ve discussed before, the Senate is the key to passing healthcare reform, and the Blue Dogs are the key to passing the bill in the Senate. Whatever comes out of the Finance Committee is going to carry a lot of weight with the Blue Dogs.
It’s no wonder we’re fighting over a bunch of lackluster options. As Isabel MacDonald observes in AlterNet, corporate-run media has virtually banished all talk of single-payer healthcare. If you’re a single-payer advocate and you want to get on TV, you have two options: Be Bernie Sanders or get arrested in the Senate.
Democrats should try implementing a radical progressive agenda one of these days—they’ll be accused of doing so, anyway. Amanda Marcotte of RH Reality Check notes that even though universal healthcare is more likely to cover iPods than abortions, mainstream media and the anti-reform brigade insist on discussing abortion funding as if it were a live option. Here in the real world, pro-choicers don’t even have the votes in Congress to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which bans the usual sources of federal funding for abortion. According to some experts I interviewed a few weeks ago for a forthcoming article, there might be a clever legal way to set up the healthcare program so that its funding wouldn’t fall under the Hyde Amendment, but no one expects the Democrats to even try.
Make sure to keep an eye out for Ms. Magazine‘s summer issue, which contains a moving profile of assassinated abortion provider Dr. George Tiller by Michele Kort. The piece is titled “The Man Who Trusted Women” after Dr. Tiller’s credo, a phrase that one admirer paid their last respects with, via a funeral wreath with the words “Trust Women” emblazoned in the center. Kort quotes Tiller explaining what that quotation means in practice:
Chromosomal abnormalities make up about 24 percent of our [late abortion] patients, and sometimes the heart, the lung, the intestines, all of this is outside of the body [of the fetus]. Most places in the United States say that even if you have this kind of a problem you may not have a termination of pregnancy. …What this says is that…women are not smart enough, they are not tough enough and they do not love enough to make these family decisions about their children and their families.
James Ridgeway of Mother Jones reported that Tiller’s alleged assassin, Scott Roeder, was savoring his moment in the media spotlight while he sat in prison, awaiting his first court date on Tuesday. Roeder has been bragging lately about his bigshot anti-choice friends and hinting at a broader conspiracy. Maybe he’ll take a few more terrorists down with him. That would be a bright spot on a bleak healthcare landscape.
If the Finance Committee produces a bill with no public option, no employer mandate, and no insurance exchange to bring down costs, then insurance industry gets everything and we get nothing but orders to buy their crappy product. Let’s hope things shake out for the best.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about health care. Visit Healthcare.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on healthcare affordability, healthcare laws, and healthcare controversy. For the best progressive reporting on the Economy, and Immigration, check out Economy.Newsladder.net and
Immigration.Newsladder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Audit: Filling FDR’s shoes
The Great Depression permanently changed the government’s role in the U.S economy, and it appears increasingly plausible that the current recession will have an equally lasting policy legacy. The bailouts orchestrated by the Bush administration have been an absolute mess, but they present an opportunity to create new consumer protection-oriented economic programs the likes of which we haven’t seen since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
As Mark Schmitt explains in a piece for The American Prospect, establishing a government entity in any sector—banking, health care, education, etc.—that serves as a gold standard for consumer protection will force the private sector to offer similar services to compete with the attractive government program.
In essence, the goal is to align private sector profits with public benefits, not unlike what FDR did with housing during the Great Depression, when the government started offering people radical new 30-year mortgages at affordable interest rates. In short order, banks switched from five-year loans to long-term loans, and a new class of homeowners was created.
President-elect Barack Obama’s economic stimulus legislation looks to make the same kind of bold economic overhaul, and while the proposal has some real problems, it seems clear that Obama is going to take serious action to reverse the economic slide.
Writing for The Progressive, Matthew Rothschild applauds virtually every policy point Obama has presented in making the case for his first major piece of legislation, from financial regulation to expanded broadband access.
This is not to say that significant hurdles are not ahead. Rothschild echoes economists of varying ideological stripes by expressing concerns that the bill is too small and will not be enacted fast enough. Congressional Democrats are already voicing uneasiness over the potential effectiveness of some of Obama’s proposed tax cuts, and the stimulus bill itself is not likely to tackle every policy priority Obama has advocated (Congress is likely to tackle regulatory affairs in separate legislation, for instance).
But as Steve Benen articulates for The Washington Monthly, the current policy debate is very different from the political bed-wetting among Democrats that we have grown accustomed to over the past eight years. Democrats are actually governing.
“It’s important for policy makers to act as quickly and effectively as possible, but there’s nothing wrong with a collaborative process in which an administration and leading lawmakers engage in some back-and-forth,” Benen writes.
In at least one sense, the stimulus bill has already notched a meaningful victory. Namely, everyone from CNBC to The American Prospect is talking about economics as a realm in which the government can play a constructive role. The victory is not total: there are still nay-sayers on spending over at the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and members of the reality-proof economics department at George Mason University will be quoted extensively in AP-style newspaper reports for the next few weeks to give stories illusory ideological “balance.” Nevertheless, there is a general consensus for aggressive government action the economic front, and the public discourse is now focused on which courses of action are appropriate.
Josh Marshall offers one such critique over at Talking Points Memo. Marshall notes that while the debate between Congress and the Obama administration has been constructive in some ways, the negotiating strategy remains something of a gamble. Obama is starting small—Paul Krugman, for instance, believes Obama’s proposed $775 billion bill will only close about one-third of the economy’s output gap. Obama may be hoping to allow the legislative process to build the bill into something large enough to withstand the current economic headwinds. But if that is the case, Marshall contends, Obama also risks loading the package down with politically damaging and economically unproductive pet projects.
“If you get deep into a lot of bidding and horse-trading you get more parochial interests in the mix,” Marshall writes.
Over at The Washington Independent, Mike Lillis details problems with various tax cuts Obama has rolled out for the stimulus. Major losers include a $3,000 incentive for companies not to lay off current employees, which appears unlikely to change any HR habits, and a corporate “net operating loss carryback” extension, which results in a huge giveaway for companies that take losses this year—notably banks who have already been bailed out (at least) once in recent months.
There can be no doubt that the economy is getting worse. The U.S. lost 524,000 jobs in December, bringing total yearly job losses to 3.6 million, and boosting the unemployment rate to 7.2%. New America Media highlights a report by Hispanic Business detailing how minorities have been disproportionately affected by the downturn. The unemployment rate among blacks soared to 11.9% in December, while 9.2% of Hispanics looking for a job didn’t have one.
The unemployment rate covers one of the most damaging aspects of the recession, but it’s also important to remember that Wall Street’s success in pushing workers into the sham 401(k) industry has also decimated the retirement savings of millions of Americans who were about to leave the workforce voluntarily.
In a 401(k) account, a worker pledges a certain amount of his wages every paycheck to a fund managed by an investment manager. Over time, these investment experts are supposed to maximize the returns in this fund, to provide better-than-market growth in the employee’s retirement account.
But 401(k) plans almost never actually work like that–they consistently score lower returns than broad market indexes like the S&P 500. You’d be better off in many cases just betting on the Dow than turning over your money to these guys. What’s worse, you pay them a fee to screw you over. As Dan Solin puts it for The Huffington Post:
“The 401(k) system is a disgrace. Employers get paid off in the form of subsidies to select brokers and advisors who control the investment options in the plan. They, in turn, get paid off by fund families and insurance companies which limit employees’ investment options to costly, under-performing funds.”
None of the major 401(k) managers saw this year’s stock declines coming, and as a result, most people whose retirement is bundled into a 401(k) plan can’t retire any time soon.
The current economic climate leaves very little room for forgiveness on almost any policy, which makes living up to FDR’s economic standard an extremely difficult task. Fortunately, Obama seems to recognize there is no other choice.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit Economy.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical health and immigration issues, check out Healthcare.NewsLadder.net and Immigration.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Electing the New Economy
Welcome to the Media Consortium’s Economy MediaWire project! Check this space every Tuesday for a discussion of the best economic coverage available on the information superhighway.
This Tuesday, of course, is no ordinary Tuesday, but the day of the most important U.S. election in generations. Poll after poll has shown the economy to be the top concern for voters this year, as an epic financial crisis and the bursting of the housing bubble have ensured that the next president will have his hands full come January.
But while there is plenty of bad news to go around of late, Ezra Klein notes for the American Prospect that economic downturns can be extraordinary opportunities to overhaul national infrastructure, as the government steps in to fund projects that support what the private sector can no longer afford.
“Right now, there’s something damn close to political consensus for a transformational investment package,” Klein writes, arguing that, “the next president should be thinking hard indeed about how to make the most of the opportunity.”
During Congressional hearings over the last two weeks, two influential economists have urged the government to embark on major infrastructure projects as a means to stimulate the economy. Both Nobel Prize-winner Joseph Stiglitz and NYU Professor Nouriel Roubini, who accurately predicted nearly every development in the recent Wall Street implosion, argued that the best way to ease economic malaise is to pour money into green energy projects. Preventing a recession appears out of the question, but why not set our sights on something “transformational,” in Klein’s words, that could fend off ecological destruction even more comprehensive than the recent financial hemorrhaging?
David Morris emphasizes the potential for environmentally friendly infrastructure development for Alternet, suggesting that a President Barack Obama may “institute a massive public works program focusing on infrastructure that lends itself to a green orientation.”
Morris notes several frightening parallels between today’s green energy movement and that of the early 1980s, when environmentalist momentum from the Carter administration collapsed under the weight of the most wrenching recession since the Great Depression. We have witnessed a similar drop-off in green interest this fall, according to Morris, as the financial crisis has deepened and gas prices have declined dramatically. But renewable energy industries are a much stronger political force today than they were in the early Reagan years, and Morris believes the sheer efficiency of green projects will give the next president more bang for his outlay bucks than other programs. Environmentally conscious investments can sharply reduce operating costs, while creating armies of new jobs.
Writing for The Nation, James S. Henry and Jim Manzi claim that it is time not only for the government to boost research and development, but to “nurture a national culture that reminds young people of their country’s innovation heritage and encourages them to become engineers, designers and scientists, rather than just lawyers, accountants and bankers.”
Beyond infrastructure, The Progressive’s Matthew Rothschild discusses research from Mark Zandi of Moody’sEconomy.com, which reveals that many traditional lefty priorities are also among the most efficient methods for stimulating economic growth. Expanding food stamps programs and unemployment benefits puts money in the hands of people who will actually spend it, instead of making long-term investments that keep the funds out of the general economy, Rothschild writes. Priorities touted by conservatives this election cycle, like slashing the capital gains tax and lowering income tax rates for the wealthiest corporations, are much less effective.
Speaking of throwing money at big corporations, the Treasury Department is currently funneling hundreds of billions of dollars to banks in an effort to boost lending so other firms can borrow money buy supplies, pay workers and fund research. It’s not a terrible concept, except, as Robert Kuttner notes back at the Prospect, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson isn’t actually requiring banks to lend the money out, and the banks would rather use the cash to finance acquisitions and pay dividends.
This is, of course, an outrage, but it is far from inevitable. Kuttner cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “yardstick competition” programs, where a public entity would compete with the private sector and provide products oriented toward the general social good, creating incentives for industries to offer better products.
Under Roosevelt, the government invented the long-term fixed-rate mortgage, which was so effective that it quickly came to dominate the private marketplace. Taxpayers would get better results from their present bailout burden if the government would actually takeover one institution outright and have it make new loans without wasting money on dividends, Kuttner argues. Other banks would have to boost their own lending activities in order to keep from losing market share to the government, and billions of taxpayer dollars wouldn’t be squandered.
Jim Hightower has an excellent breakdown of the five greatest villains of the current financial crisis here.
With President George W. Bush set to host an economic summit with international leaders on the financial meltdown this month, OneWorld.net carries an excellent story by Jim Lobe on a call from almost 600 non-governmental organizations for fundamental economic reforms aimed at protecting the most vulnerable members of the global economy. Bush is widely expected to oppose reforms to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which many NGOs claim have imposed policies that have benefited Western companies at the expense of the international poor.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the economy. Visit economy.newsladder.net for a complete list of articles on the economy. And for the best progressive reporting on critical immigration and healthcare issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.
