Call for Action!

Last year I joined NeighborMedia, a civic media project at Cambridge Community Television. Click here to watch a video about the stories I have covered for the program.

NeighborMedia presents a special Panel Discussion, Monday, March 16, 7pm, at Cambridge Community Television, 675 Massachusetts Ave, Central Square (entrance on Prospect).

In recent years, civic media projects have increased in numbers around the world. Ordinary people armed with inexpensive production equipment are using the web to share news and information with others in their communities and beyond. What can mainstream media learn from these experiments in community news-gathering?

NeighborMedia, a civic media project at Cambridge Community Television, invites you to attend this special discussion which will be televised on CCTV. Veterans in the fields of print, television and online journalism will share their views and take questions from a live studio audience, of which we hope you can be a part.

Space is limited. Please RSVP by Thursday, March 12, by emailing colin(at)cctvcambridge(dot)org.

Moderator

Panelists

Participant Bios

Ellen Hume is research director of the Center for Future Civic Media at
M.I.T. and publisher of the New England Ethnic Newswire, which she founded in 2007 while teaching at UMass Boston. She serves on the board of the Center for International Media Assistance and is an international media analyst and trainer. Hume was a political reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, executive director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard, executive director of PBS’s Democracy Project, and senior fellow at the Annenberg Washington Program. More information is available at www.ellenhume.com.

Laura Kuenssberg is one of BBC News' network political correspondents, reporting mainly for the UK's flagship TV news bulletins - the 6 and 10 o'clock news. She is a member of the Westminster Press Lobby, and has reported for BBC TV, radio, and online from all corners of the UK and many other European countries. Laura has worked on the last two US presidential elections, reporting from Washington DC and presenting the BBC's election night coverage from Times Square in 2008 for BBC One, BBC World and BBC America.

Persephone Miel recently finished a year as a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University where she directed the Media Re:public project, examining the impact of participatory journalism on the news and information environment. The project issued a series of publications in December 2008. She has returned as a Senior Advisor to Internews Network, an international NGO supporting independent media around the world, where she spent 12 years prior to her stint at Berkman. In her previous work at Internews, she designed and managed a variety of projects to support the growth of non-state news media, including TV, radio, print and online outlets, in the former Soviet Union and participated in program design and development for Internews projects in other parts of the world. From 1993 to 1994 she was also the host of an English-language morning news show there.

Kat Powers is the manager of the local news site, Wicked Local Somerville, despite her job title reading Somerville Journal editor. She has been in and out of the news business since 1991, starting off as a freelancer for the Somerville Journal, working at the Cambridge Chronicle and a turn on the overnight desk at the Daily Evening Item. In Somerville for the last eight years, she has been the Journal editor and for the last three years, has been making WickedLocalSomerville.com a breaking-news website that competes against the big dailies but also with local blogs.

"The Nile perch sector, once described as the saviour of Lake Victoria`s economy, is now collapsing as the global economic recession ravages Europe, leaving 300,000 Tanzanians without jobs..." Read More

Source: Sunday Observer via www.ippmedia.com