A panel on "Little Media"
Increasingly the public has bemoaned the effects of "big media" - on
children, on spending, on values, on the quality of the news. The
assumption has been that big media is having big impacts on the public. But
Jon Funabiki, professor of journalism at San Francisco State University, has
a different theory: That increasingly it is "little media" that is
transforming the public space.
On Friday
afternoon of the Summit he led a panel discussion that drove home the point
he was trying to make. Jon himself has studied the growth of "little media"
for years when he was at the Ford Foundation - community newspapers and
radio stations, and the internet, often linked with ethnic media. He framed
out his hypothesis and then asked the panelists to speak.
Ryland
Fisher was managing editor at the Cape Times when he conceived of a
series to bring together the fragmented communities of Cape Town. He called
it "One City Many Cultures" and he convinced the Cape Town business
community to pick up the tab. With the funding in place he could afford to
put his best photographers and writers on the job. The result was a series
that ran daily for 12 weeks and eventually morphed into the Cape Town
Festival.
Gerardo
(Gerry) Villacres was at CBS for over 20 years when he decided to parlay his
experience into media to support the Hispanic community in Boston. He is
now Director Editor of three editions of El Planeta, the largest
Spanish-language weekly in the Boston area. He talked about how the
newspaper had become a critical way to help the Hispanic population in
Massachusetts (437,000 people) succeed in negotiating their way in a new
culture. The paper has also taken a strong stand in the current immigration
debates.
Nancy
Gruver, publisher of New Moon magazine, started the magazine for
girls 8 to 16. She described how and why she decided to start a magazine --
not just FOR girls, but BY girls, offering them a place to talk with one
another and to air their ideas with their peers. The editorial board is
entirely composed of girls who are forced to retire when they are "over the
moon" at 15.
By the
end of the panel, Jon was rethinking the name for his hypothesis: perhaps
"passion media" more closely describes the phenomenon he's talking about, he
mused. But whether it's "little media" or "passion media" or something
else, it is clear that this movement he has identified may be as big as "big
media."
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