published on
“What role can (and should) media policy play in supporting a strong, sustainable, vibrant local media sector in the United States?”
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on the U.S. news industry, especially at the local level, accelerating trend lines evident since the early 2000s. Yet our information needs, and the future of journalism, remain reliant on a sustainable local media ecosystem. As a result, our need for new thinking to ensure local journalism’s future is more important than ever.
This series will explore the role that media policy has historically played in supporting – and shaping – local news, how it can be leveraged to ensure access to information (including tackling digital divides), it’s contribution to facilitating community media, and what role it can play in encouraging new ownership and revenue models.
Discussing whether existing regulatory frameworks are fit for purpose, given changing media habits, new platforms and the ease of creating digital content, our expert panels will examine the instruments that policymakers at a state and federal level have in their arsenal, and which ones they should deploy.
Moderator: Damian Radcliffe
Panelists:
Graciela Mochkofsky
Director of the Bilingual Journalism Program, Executive Director, Center for Community Media at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism
A native of Argentina, she is a winner of the 2018 Maria Moors Cabot prize for outstanding reporting across Latin America and the Caribbean. Mochkofsky has worked as a professional journalist in South America and the U.S. She was a political correspondent with La Nación in Argentina, has been a columnist and blogger for El País in Spain, and a contributor to publications in Latin America, Europe, and the U.S., including The California Sunday Magazine, The New Yorker online, and The Paris Review blog.
Tracie Powell
Founder at The Pivot Fund
Tracie Powell is a leader in philanthropic efforts to increase racial equity and diversity in news media. She is the founder of The Pivot Fund, which seeks to support independent BIPOC community news. Powell is a Fall 2021 Shorenstein Center Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, where she is researching mechanisms for funding and capacity building for media outlets run by and for BIPOCTM (Black, Indigenous, other people of color, and traditionally marginalized) communities. Powell is also the board chair of LION Publishers, a professional journalism association for independent news publishers where she has served on the board since 2017.
Simon Galperin
Founding Director of the Bloomfield Information Project and of the Community Info Coop
Simon Galperin is a journalist, technologist, and organizer working in media and policy to strengthen democracy. As a Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow, Simon launched and continues to run the organization’s Info Districts Project to establish special improvement districts as a model for funding local news and information now with partnerships in New Jersey, Colorado, Massachusetts, California, Brazil, and the UK.
- Genre
- panel