Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere

By Fordham University Press

A synergy between academia and activism has long been a goal of both scholars and advocacy organizations in communications research. The essays in Communications Research in Action demonstrate, for the first time in one volume, how an effective partnership between the two can contribute to a more democratic public sphere by helping to break down the digital divide to allow greater access to critical technologies, democratizing the corporate ownership of the media industry, and offering myriad opportunities for varied articulation of individuals’ ideas.

Essays spanning topics such as the effect of ownership concentration on children’s television programming, the media’s impact on community building, and the global consequences of communications research will not only be valuable to scholars, activists, and media policy makers but will also be instrumental in serving as a template for further exploration in collaboration.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Feb 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780823233489

Book preview

Communications Research in Action

DONALD McGANNON COMMUNICATION RESEARCH CENTER’S EVERETT C. PARKER BOOK SERIES

This series seeks to publish research that can inform the work of policy makers, policy advocates, scholars, and students as they grapple with a rapidly changing communications environment and the variety of policy issues arising within it. The series employs a broadly defined notion of communications policy, in that it considers not only scholarship addressing specific policy issues and processes but also more broadly focused communications scholarship that has direct implications for policymaking.

EDITORIAL BOARD

Patricia Aufderheide, American University

Ellen Goodman, Rutgers University School of Law, Camden

Allen Hammond, Santa Clara University School of Law

Robert B. Horwitz, University of California at San Diego

Robert W. McChesney, University of Illinois

Jorge Schement, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Communications Research in Action

Edited by

Philip M. Napoli and Minna Aslama

SCHOLAR-ACTIVIST COLLABORATIONS FOR A DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC SPHERE

Copyright © 2011 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Communications research in action : scholar-activist

collaborations for a democratic public sphere / edited by

Philip M. Napoli and Minna Aslama.

p. cm.— (Donald McGannon Communication

Research Center’s Everett C. Parker book series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8232-3346-5 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8232-3347-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8232-3348-9 (ebook)

1. Communication policy. 2. Communication—Social aspects. 3. Mass media policy. I. Napoli, Philip M.

II. Aslama, Minna.

P95.8.C645   2011

302.23—dc22

2010033994

Printed in the United States of America

13   12   11     5   4   3   2   1

First edition

CONTENTS

Foreword

Becky Lentz

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Minna Aslama and Philip M. Napoli

PART I: EXPLORATIONS OF MOVEMENT ACTORS:

STRATEGIES, IMPACTS, AND NEEDS

1. Digital Inclusion: Working Both Sides of the Equation

Dorothy Kidd with Eloise Lee

2. Engaging in Scholar-Activist Communications in Canada

Leslie Regan Shade

3. Toward a Taxonomy for Public Interest Communications Infrastructure

Dharma Dailey and Alison Powell

PART II: MEDIA OWNERSHIP: BRIDGING RESEARCH AND REGULATION

4. Big Media, Little Kids: The Impact of Ownership Concentration on the Availability of Television Programming for Children

Katharine E. Heintz and Christina Romano Glaubke

5. Minority Commercial Radio Ownership: Assessing FCC Licensing and Consolidation Policies

Catherine J.K. Sandoval

6. Cross-Ownership, Markets, and Content on Local TV News

Danilo Yanich

PART III: ALTERNATIVE AND COMMUNITY MEDIA:

DISCOVERING NEEDS AND OPPORTUNITIES

7. Measuring Community Radio’s Impact: Lessons on Collaboration

Graciela León Orozco

8. Youth Channel All-City: Mapping the Media Needs and Interests of Urban Youth

Isabel Castellanos, Amy Bach, and Rachel Kulick

9. Mobile Voices: Projecting the Voices of Immigrant Workers by Appropriating Mobile Phones for Popular Communication

The VozMob Project

10. Community Connect: A Network of Civic Spaces for Public Communication in North Dakota

Lana F. Rakow and Diana Iulia Nastasia

PART IV: COMMUNICATIONS INFRASTRUCTURE:

RETHINKING RIGHTS

11. Telecommunications Convergence and Consumer Rights in Brazil

Estela Waksberg Guerrini, Diogo Moyses, and Daniela Batalha Trettel

12. Citizen Political Enfranchisement and Information Access: Telecommunications Services in Rural and Remote Areas

Richard S. Wolff

13. Open Access in Africa: The Case of Mauritius

Russell Southwood, Abiodun Jagun, and Willie Currie

14. Public FM Project: Supporting the Licensing of New Noncommercial FM Radio Stations for Student and Community Usage

Todd Urick

PART V: ASSESSMENT: CREATING SUPPORT FOR SCHOLAR-ACTIVIST COLLABORATION

15. Cultures of Collaboration in Media Research

Joe Karaganis

16. Engendering Scholar-Activist Collaborations: An Evaluator’s Perspective

Catherine Borgman-Arboleda

Conclusion: Bridging Gaps, Crossing Boundaries

Minna Aslama and Philip M. Napoli

List of Contributors

Index

FOREWORD

Communications Research in Action is a timely and important book for scholars, legal advocates, and community organizers interested in making a difference in communication and information policy (CIP) but not sure quite where to begin. CIP is a broad, interdisciplinary, and international arena of scholarship and practice that includes several overlapping policy sectors: broadcasting, telecommunications, the Internet, freedom of information, technology, and intellectual property. The work in this volume is also a gift to community organizers, policy advocates, and their funders who may have experienced the disappointment of calling, in vain, for help from the academic community. These contributions represent a series of welcome achievements in this regard. They bear witness to the fact that much scholarship is indeed a collaborative act (Barlow 2007). In these chapters, activists are not simply the objects of scholarly study, but equal partners in social change. Last and certainly not least, the book captures a very brief moment of five years where a vision of authentic collaboration was realized, at least in part. Those involved in the work represented here know that many of the projects were funded by a deliberative process nurtured and managed by an intermediary organization,¹ the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). The SSRC should be congratulated for its efforts to recognize the value of partnering with civil society in its experiment to nurture necessary knowledge.

Part of this experiment emerged from the Ford Foundation efforts between 2001 and 2007 to develop a new funding stream at the Foundation and within philanthropy for the CIP field. Commissioned studies and interviews (see Lentz 2009) revealed that for more than twenty-five years, powerful industry lobbying had all but dismantled many of the public interest protections that grants in the 1960s and 1970s had helped to secure.² During the Reagan administration, for example, the FCC lengthened TV and radio license periods, eliminated numerous regulations related to children’s programming, ended mandates dictating the amount of news and public affairs programming required of broadcasters, and lifted obligations that had kept broadcasters’ program logs open for public scrutiny. In 1987, the FCC suspended the Fairness Doctrine, which had been established in 1949 to increase the diversity of ideas by requiring broadcasters to air opposing viewpoints on public issues. FCC decision making has also eroded progress achieved during the Civil Rights era that required radio and television broadcast stations to interview a diverse range of local leaders in order to ascertain the issues of interest to all segments of the community they were licensed to serve.

In 2003, as part of its congressionally mandated quadrennial review process, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC), despite widespread bipartisan congressional and public opposition, further relaxed ownership restrictions for media corporations. This opposition served as a watershed moment that catalyzed an advocacy infrastructure in the United States. Alongside the effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the media consolidation debates created a perfect storm that helped build internal Foundation support for media policy work.³ This support was bolstered by comparing the size of the policy obstacles to the limited number of resources available to the small ecology of underfunded institutions that had been fighting tirelessly to maintain the few remaining public interest safeguards. Civil society organizations were working on a range of policy issues that included privacy and surveillance, copyrights and patents, equitable deployment of broadband services, community radio, wireless communications, media industry consolidation, and radio frequency spectrum reform. However, until public interest and media reform advocates could find a common language and a shared cause,⁴ funding organizations believed that their efforts would continue to be disconnected, fragmented, and underfunded. Put simply, the field had no consensual definition of the public interest to unite its disparate efforts.

Advocacy groups, for example, were having difficulty capturing press and public attention to build viable constituencies in support of the diverse set of issues that they were working on. Historically, nonexperts have had little voice in this field because the issues are so technical; policy discourse about broadband access, intellectual property rights, privacy law, and media concentration is monopolized by highly specialized legal and technical professionals focused primarily on what goes on in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, media policy and telecommunications decision making historically has not been resolved by voters, but by regulatory bodies populated disproportionately by industry representatives. The FCC is not an elected body. It does not answer to the public, but to Congress, so public opinion has not necessarily factored into its decision-making processes. The proceedings on media ownership provided ample evidence of this imbalance.

Despite these challenges, civil society leaders and a handful of funding organizations determined it was a timely moment for philanthropic investment in the CIP field. The future of the Internet, television and radio broadcasting, personal computing, and telephony depended on it—their trajectories were being decided in Congress, and in other national, regional, state, and local forums with little demonstrable public input. Large media corporations with formidable lobbying capabilities greatly outnumbered the small cluster of public interest advocacy groups that were monitoring the effectiveness and accountability of policymakers. Indeed, it was a crucial moment to support public debate about the information and communications environment, so as to shift the then-dominant, narrow marketplace focus to embrace values such as public access, freedom of expression, media diversity, and transparency and accountability in decision making.

In 2004, Ford Foundation leadership approved a grantmaking strategy to address several of these concerns. The strategy was titled Reclaiming the Public Interest in Electronic Media Policy and tried to strike new ground. It was organized not around a single issue such as freedom of expression, media ownership, privacy, or the digital divide, but around building a core set of sustainable institutions that could advocate effectively for an enabling CIP environment that addressed each of these issues for years to come. Over the long term, the approach sought to yield a cluster of research institutions to help define twenty-first-century policy frameworks for electronic media policy in the public interest, watchdog and advocacy groups that could safeguard these frameworks, and grassroots alliances and coalitions that could continue to build local and broad-based support for them. Nurturing the building or expansion of a set of strategically linked and sustainable research institutions, public interest advocacy organizations, and grassroots alliances and coalitions that could advance public interest values in electronic media policy making in the United States over the long term was supported by three short-term goals: strengthening public interest advocacy institutions, engaging with and nurturing the uniting of diverse constituencies, and building strategic knowledge that could bolster the arguments of civil society in CIP policy debates.

The SSRC eventually became a partner in addressing the latter goal. Indicators of progress included the emergence of a strategic knowledge base that could help advance widespread learning and information exchange in the sector; evidence of the use and exchange of that knowledge base among researchers, public interest advocacy groups, and grassroots activists across issue areas; a nationally recognized and diverse set of public intellectuals to champion the field’s case in a variety of forums; and a variety of histories that not only documented progress in the field, but also provided strategic guidance for broad-scale policy change. As Napoli’s (2009) ambitious literature review has documented, these histories have already begun to emerge— evidence of the CIP field’s viability as a site for investment and as a site of scholarly inquiry and engagement. The best of these works include contributions from activists themselves as co-creators of necessary knowledge for media democracy, reform, and justice.

It is now 2010 and the public interest side of the CIP sector still boasts too few sustainable advocacy organizations, but at least several universities have begun to devote resources to building a knowledge infrastructure for the field. Fulltime faculty lines at several universities are nourishing a new generation of policy scholars and advocates.

CIP continues to pose a particularly daunting set of questions to the research community. These policies affect the creation, processing, dissemination and use of information—and thus the processes at the heart of creating shared meaning among the members of a society. Many social, cultural, economic, political, and financial activities depend upon access to these important resources. Yet despite their societal importance, policymaking in this field remains a relatively obscure practice where participation in policy debates requires mastery of a particular brand of technical and economic discourse. This volume will contribute to engaging a wider discussion of the challenges of CIP research and advocacy.

I thank the editors and my colleagues in this work, Philip Napoli and Minna Aslama, for taking leadership to further this important conversation. Unknowingly, the book also channels the spirit of a recently deceased mentor and friend: Ana Sisnett, a Panamanian and black lesbian community media and technology activist from Austin, Texas, whose words still guide me: What is often said in our name frustrates me; I’m tired of being studied; we need to speak for ourselves. A similar sentiment is echoed in Makani Themba-Nixon and Nan Rubin’s article in The Nation in 2003. Let the work continue, for there is clearly much to do.

Becky Lentz

McGill University, June 2010

NOTES

1. For discussions of the role of intermediaries in grantmaking and institutional change, see Atlas and Brunner (2006), David (2007), LeRoux (2009), and Sturgis and Hoye (2005).

2. During the civil rights years, The Ford Foundation supported the Office of Communication (OC, Inc.) of the United Church of Christ for about ten years at approximately $100,000 per year. OC, Inc.’s work is documented in Kay Mills’ 2004 book, Changing Channels: The Civil Rights Case that Transformed Television.

3. The events of September 11, 2001, the Internet commerce downturn, malfeasance in the telecommunications sector (for example, WorldCom, the site of the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history at the time), and the war in Iraq increased Foundation awareness and concern about the media sector more generally.

4. Concepts that were beginning to take hold and unite constituencies at the time included media diversity, media reform, media justice, media democracy, communications rights, and information justice. Ford commissioned a study by Belden, Russonello, and Stewart (2006) about the various frames being used at the time by policy advocates.

REFERENCES

Atlas, Caron, and Helen Brunner. 2006. Serving Diverse Constituencies: Culturally Sensitive Intermediaries. Unpublished Working Paper commissioned by the Ford Foundation.

Barlow, Andrew L., ed. 2007. Collaborations for Social Justice: Professionals, Publics, and Policy Change. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

Belden, Russonello, & Stewart. 2006. Communicating About Communications: Media Leaders Discuss Their Work and Values. Unpublished Report prepared for the Ford Foundation.

David, Tom. 2007. Partnering with Intermediaries. Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Lentz, Becky. 2009. The Political Economy of Field-Building in the U.S. Media Reform and Justice Sector. Paper presented at the Second Annual Conference of the Association for Nonprofit and Social Economy Research (ANSER), Ottawa, Ontario (May 27–29).

LeRoux, Kelly. 2009. The Effects of Descriptive Representation on Nonprofits’ Civic Intermediary Roles. Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 38 (5): 741–760.

Mills, Kay. 2004. Changing channels: The Civil Rights Case That Transformed Television. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi.

Napoli, Philip. M. 2009. Public Interest Media Advocacy and Activism as a Social Movement. Communication Yearbook 33:385—429.

Sturgis, Chris, and J. D. Hoye. 2005. Rethinking the Role of Intermediaries in Strategic Grantmaking. Report for The Atlantic Philanthropies and MetisNet.

Themba-Nixon, Makani, and Nan Rubin. 2003. Speaking for Ourselves: A Movement Led by People of Color Seeks Media Justice—Not Just Media Reform. The Nation (November 17).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book and the book series of which it is the inaugural volume are dedicated to a pioneer of public interest media advocacy and activism, Dr. Everett C. Parker. In 1954, Dr. Parker founded the Office of Communications of the United Church of Christ, an organization that played a key role in the 1960s’ civil rights movement by addressing the portrayals of minorities on television, and by achieving a much more inclusive and influential role for the public interest community—and the public as a whole—in the media policymaking process.

In the 1960s, Dr. Parker led a landmark effort to systematically monitor and analyze the broadcasts of southern television stations, and to use this research to challenge the broadcast license of one station (WLBT-TV in Jackson, Mississippi) on the grounds that the station was engaging in racist programming practices and therefore not serving the needs and interests of its community of license. These efforts led to a years-long battle that resulted in a historic court decision that granted members of the public legal standing in FCC proceedings. It is this legal standing for the public that paved the way for the growth and development of public interest media policy advocacy and activism in this country.

In many ways, Dr. Parker’s work is the starting point for the integration of communications research with communications activism and advocacy that is at the core of this book and of the book series that this book inaugurates. All of us who work in this field owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Dr. Parker and his work. And this book is an example of how his work continues to inspire so many.

A number of other individuals and organizations also deserve thanks for contributing to, supporting, or in some other way making possible this volume. Fredric Nachbaur, director of Fordham University Press, deserves particular thanks for his enthusiasm for this project from the very start and for his support of the new book series that this volume kicks off. Graduate research assistants Taryn Bensky and Lindsay Kaufman provided valuable assistance with the copyediting and management of the final manuscript. And, of course, all of the contributors are due our thanks for producing such diverse, thought-provoking chapters, and, for the most part, producing them on deadline and at least near the desired page limit. Two contributors to this volume, Becky Lentz and Joe Karaganis, have played key roles in envisioning and implementing the program, which has produced such a wonderful and diverse array of collaborative work. We are deeply grateful to Becky and Joe for their ideas and commentary regarding the book both before and during the editing process.

Philip M. Napoli would like to thank his wife, Anne, as always, for her patience and support as he threw himself into yet another project that had the potential to drag on interminably, and thus keep him from being particularly helpful around the house. He would also like to thank the Advisory Board of the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University, particularly Chair of the Advisory Board Nancy Busch, for their continued support of the Center’s activities. Everette Dennis, Chair of the Department of Communications and Media Management at Fordham’s Graduate School of Business, also deserves thanks for maintaining an environment that remains incredibly conducive to research— even research that often doesn’t fall within the traditional parameters of what one might expect from a business school faculty member.

Minna Aslama would like to thank the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation for its generous support of her work. She is particularly grateful for the opportunity she was given to conduct research for the Foundation for its report on communication studies in the United States, where she encountered some of the key figures in engaged scholarship and found out about some exciting collaborative projects that had no parallel in Europe. Even more important, she received a writing grant from the Foundation that has enabled her to participate in editing this unique volume on collaborative research that will have relevance not only in the United States but internationally. In addition, she would like to express her gratitude to her colleagues at the Social Science Research Council for support and inspiration during her assignment as the Program Officer for the Necessary Knowledge Collaborative Grants Program (2008—09). Finally, she is greatly indebted to all the grantees of the Program for showing her the immense power and potential of collaboration.

Communications Research in Action

INTRODUCTION MINNA ASLAMA and PHILIP M. NAPOLI

Research and praxis are great partners in theory. In the social sciences, normative concerns—such as conceptions of the means through which a functioning democracy is achieved—often guide research topics, questions, and conclusions. However, scholarly analyses seldom reach the relevant stakeholders outside the walls of academia. This is particularly the case in the field of media and communications research. The relationship between communications research and the media and communications industries, which used to be relatively strong and mutually enriching in the early days of the field (the 1930s and 1940s), has long since tapered off. The relationship between communications researchers and policy makers, with a few exceptions (such as in the areas of media effects and health communication) has been frustratingly weak.

One bright spot in this seeming disconnect between research and praxis is the relationship between communications researchers and public interest and advocacy communities. The past decade has seen a notable increase in public interest—oriented civil society activism and advocacy around media-related change. By many accounts, these activities represent a distinctive, developing social movement (Napoli 2009). These public interest media advocacy and activism efforts have become a developing point of intersection between scholars and activists.

Communications researchers’ interaction with—and contributions to the work of—the public interest and advocacy communities has historically been sporadic at best, with many analysts identifying a persistent scholar-activist divide that has limited the extent to which communications researchers and advocates work collaboratively to solve pressing social problems. As Hoynes argues, while social movement theorists, media researchers, and activists often share a broad set of questions—those that focus on the complex, two-way relationship between media and social movements— the work of scholars and activists remains largely in separate domains (Hoynes 2005, 100).

This divide has served to both suppress the visibility, relevance, and impact of the field of communications and to hinder the effectiveness of public interest and advocacy organizations, who are increasingly aware that rigorous research is essential to their success. In other words, engaged research by academic researchers in collaboration with movement actors has been sparse, and such collaborations have been subjected to relatively little analysis.¹

The goal of this book is to both showcase examples of the recent surge in scholar-activist collaborations that has taken place in the media and communications sector, and to offer analyses of the dynamics, consequences, and challenges associated with such collaborations. We hope that this collection will help to demonstrate Hoynes’ argument that academic researchers have skills and cultural authority that can be very beneficial to movement actors seeking to affect institutional change. Academic researchers can help foster a stronger research culture and research skills within advocacy organizations that will continue to produce benefits long after individual collaborations are concluded.

Scholars, in turn, gain unique research material, fresh perspectives on relevant research questions, as well as the opportunity to reach out to non-academic audiences that really care about, and can reap tangible benefits from, the research being conducted. Scholars also can benefit from having their research questions and the underlying assumptions of their research informed by a much more realistic and experiential sense of the institutional dynamics, constraints, and opportunities surrounding their particular areas of inquiry.

This collection also documents the broader effects of such collaborations. The contributions include discussions on the concrete impact of research on policymaking, public debates, community organizing, content production, and technology usage. The chapters address issues related to the design and implementation of scholar-activist collaborations, including the challenges and opportunities associated with integrating distinctive—and somewhat divergent—organizational cultures; the bridging of information gaps between the research and advocacy communities; and the ways in which we can develop and institutionalize sufficient incentives to promote continued scholar-activist collaborations.

Apart from the challenge of the perceived (and real) divisions between scholars and practitioners, the field of media activism and advocacy itself includes a vast array of agendas, approaches, and actors. The terms media justice and media reform are most commonly used, and have come to represent two distinctive, though frequently overlapping, components of the broader movement to improve the accessibility, diversity, and quality of our media and communications system (Napoli 2009). Although this burgeoning social movement may contain a diverse palette of outlooks and approaches to the public interest in media and communications, the chapters of this book reflect the unifying theme of collaborative research employed on behalf of achieving a more democratic public sphere.

Since its original conceptualization by the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas (1962/89) the term public sphere has been a focal point of scholarly debates ranging from the democratic theory of political science and the self-reflection of cultural critics to empirical studies in sociology and communications (Calhoun 1992; Garnham 2007). The notion has long ago left the strict Frankfurt School theory realm and is now often used somewhat generically to refer to the democratic goals and responsibilities of the media system and civic life (Dahlgren 2005).

Normative ideals of a shared arena for mediated communication, dialogue, deliberation, and rational decision making among citizens have been manifested in the remits of national public broadcasting organizations in Europe and elsewhere. The rise of the borderless Internet and networked communities in the 1990s reinvigorated theory and research in this area. Many scholars have noted the potential of multisector, online public spheres, including forms of e-government (from information dissemination to e-voting), new forms of journalistic content (from online newspapers to blogs), and proto-political spheres (such as chat rooms where political themes are discussed) (Dahlgren 2009). An important component of such a networked public space is the growing advocacy and activist domain that creates new opportunities for organized political work and more informal civic activity (Dahlgren 2009). The networked public arena of the Internet fosters single-issue movements that cross conventional institutional and geographic boundaries of participation.

Consequently, in recent years, much of the social scientific research that has examined the notion of the public sphere has focused on its relationship to social movements (Aslama and Erickson 2009). Reflecting the important linkage between theory, praxis, and the public sphere, Habermas (2006) has recently reminded scholars that they should embrace the Aristotelian mission of joining together (normative) theorizing and empirical research for better-functioning democratic societies.

The research projects featured in this book are engaged in, and committed to, such work. These scholar-activist collaborations aim to contribute to a communications environment in which individual access to information is improved, in which the structure and functioning of our media systems are better oriented to the needs of our democracy, and in which the opportunities for individual self-expression are enhanced and more widely distributed. The specific subject areas addressed in this collection reflect many of today’s most pressing media and communications issues, including the persistent digital divide in access to communications technologies, concentration of ownership of media outlets, the use of new technologies to foster the growth and development of alternative and community media, and the impact and evolution of the field of public interest media advocacy and activism.

The chapters feature a variety of methodological approaches to collaboration, from distinct divisions of labor between scholars and practitioners to participatory action research (PAR) involving joint activity at every stage of the research design and implementation. In some of the collaborations, the end goal involved producing outcomes along the lines of a traditional academic study, with specific hypotheses being developed and tested (Yanich; Heintz and Glaubke). In other cases, however, the goals and outcomes were very different, involving, for example, the development of databases or stakeholder feedback to facilitate strategic planning and outreach (Orozco; Urick), the formation or strengthening of individual communities (Castellanos et al.; Kidd and Lee; Rakow and Nastasia; The VozMob Project), the assessment of the information environment informing advocacy and policy-making (Dailey and Powell; Sandoval), or gathering and analyzing crucial information to enhance basic consumers’ and citizens’ rights (Waksberg Guerrini et al.; Wolff). The diversity of the structure, goals, output, and effects of the collaborations reflected in this collection is, we believe, of particular importance, as it highlights the variety of ways in which scholars and advocates can engage in mutually beneficial partnerships.

Finally, this book also provides some broader assessments of the state of affairs of collaborative work in the field of public interest media advocacy and activism, and of efforts to develop institutionalized support mechanisms for such collaborative work (Regan Shade; Borgman-Arboleda; Kara-ganis). The projects in this volume all emerged from an effort to provide support, infrastructure, and incentives for greater scholar-activist collaborations—specifically, the Social Science Research Council’s Necessary Knowledge for a Democratic Public Sphere program. Many universities and foundations are exploring new models for better institutionalizing engaged scholarship in general and scholar-activist collaborations in particular, and we hope that the concluding insights offered in respect to this particular program will be useful for future efforts in this vein.

This collection can be useful to readers on two levels. First, the specific research questions and topics addressed within this collection are of relevance to scholars, students, activists, policy makers, and mediamakers, and the new knowledge generated by these collaborations can enhance our understanding of topics ranging from community media to media ownership to the digital divide. Second, these exemplars of the process of scholar-activist collaboration—and the reflections contained within each chapter on the dynamics, challenges, and opportunities associated with engaging in this process—will be of interest to those scholars, students, activists, funders, and university administrators interested in gaining a deeper understanding of the wide range of opportunities for, and approaches to, such collaborative work as well as the benefits and challenges of engaging in, developing, and supporting such collaborations. The ultimate aim of this bi-level structure is to inform and inspire those who work towards a more democratic, mediated public sphere in theory and praxis—whether as scholars, activists, policy makers, or citizens.

NOTE

1. For example, a search in the Communication Abstracts database on journals addressing communication theory, mass communication, and interpersonal communication (with over 64,000 records and 160 sources covered in September, 2009) results in only a dozen articles on collaborative or participatory research.

REFERENCES

Aslama, Minna, and Ingrid Erickson. 2009. Public Spheres, Networked Publics, Networked Public Spheres? Donald McGannon Research Center Working Paper, Fordham University. http://www.fordham.edu/images/undergraduate/communications/public%20spheres,%20networked%20publics,%20networked%20public%20spheres.pdf.

Calhoun, Craig, ed. 1992. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Dahlgren, Peter. 2005. Television, Public Spheres, and Civic Cultures. In A Companion to Television, ed. J. Wasko, 411—432. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

———. 2009. Media and Political Engagement. Citizens, Communication, and Democracy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Garnham, Nicholas. 2007. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Global Media and Communication 3 (2):201—214.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1989/1962. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

———. 2006. Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy Still Enjoy an Epistemic Dimension? The Impact of Normative Theory on Empirical Research. Communication Theory 16:411—426.

Hoynes, William. 2005. Media Research and Media Activism. In Rhyming Hope and History. Activists, Academics, and Social Movement Scholarship, eds. David Croteau, William Hoynes, and Charlotte Ryan, 97—114. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Napoli, Philip M. 2009. Public Interest Media Advocacy and Activism as a Social Movement. Communication Yearbook 33:385—429.

PART I

Explorations of Movement Actors

Strategies, Impacts, and Needs

This part is devoted to research that has examined the activities, needs, and effectiveness of organizations dedicated to the improvement of our media system. Public interest media advocacy and activism has become an increasingly common focus of research. Scholars are interested in these organizations for a variety of reasons, including trying to enhance our understanding of the policymaking process and social movements (Napoli 2009). And, of course, scholars often become members of these organizations in an effort to affect social change with their scholarship. The media reform/media justice movement is increasingly perceived as a social movement in its own right. Research can contribute not only to our understanding of this social movement and the role that movement actors play in enhancing our media system, but also to the development of strategic and organizational assessments that can serve the movement and efforts to strengthen it.

The chapters in this part reflect this wide range of research imperatives. They examine the nature of public interest media advocacy and activism, the broader political and institutional conditions under which such efforts operate, and the strategic approaches and information needs of individuals and organizations working in this field. Such topics represent a natural point of collaboration between academics and public interest and advocacy communities, as organizations in this area often desire to rigorously assess the fields in which they work and the effectiveness of their efforts; and a growing number of academics are becoming actively engaged as members of these organizations.

Kidd and Lee’s chapter describes a multifaceted action research project dedicated to enhancing digital inclusion, from the perspective of a scholar (Kidd), who has long served as a key member of the initiating organization—the Media Alliance. The authors describe their project as embedded research, given the close association between the researchers and the advocacy organization out of which this project emerged. Regan Shade analyzes institutionalized efforts in Canada to incubate collaborative research focused on the diffusion, use, and economic and policy implications of information and communications technologies. In so doing, she assesses the impact of projects dealing with policy issues surrounding information privacy and community networking. Dailey and Powell describe the results of research directed at assessing the information needs and information flows of the individuals and organizations working in the vital area of broadband deployment and diffusion. Their work seeks to enhance our understanding of the ecology of knowledge in which those working on behalf of public interest broadband policies operate.

Together, these chapters highlight three very different points of intersection between scholars and activists. Kidd and Lee’s chapter is representative of a growing body of what might be described as self-reflective research on public interest media advocacy and activism (McChesney 2007) that originates from within movement actors in a way that harkens back to Todd Gitlin’s groundbreaking research on the student antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s and how it was covered by the media. Regan Shade’s analysis focuses on the institutionalized efforts within a particular government (in this case, Canada) to foster just the kind of collaborative enterprises that are the focus of Kidd and Lee’s analysis. Regan Shade’s analysis highlights the extent to which policymakers often recognize how the public interest is served by scholar-activist collaborations and are willing to devote resources to fostering them. Dailey and Powell’s chapter focuses on a level of analysis that encompasses both of the previous chapters. Their unique focus on the information environment in which policymakers, scholars, and activists all work provides a rare examination of the information resources and communication processes that serve as the backbone for policy research, policy making, and policy advocacy (Cox and Fominaya 2009). Together, these chapters provide three distinct, interlocking paths of inquiry into better understanding public interest media advocacy and activism as a social movement.

Certainly, the long-term effectiveness of scholar-activist collaborations for a more democratic public sphere depends, at least in part, on enhancing our understanding of the individuals and organizations involved in such efforts, the challenges and opportunities they face, and the dynamics of the environments in which they are working to achieve their goals. The chapters in this section contribute to all of these areas.

REFERENCES

Cox, Laurence, and Cristina F. Fominaya. 2009. Movement knowledge: What do we know, how do we create knowledge, and what do we do with it? Interface: a journal for and about social movements 1 (1):1—20.

Gitlin, Todd. 2003. The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McChesney, Robert W. 2007. Communications Revolution: Critical Junctures and the Future of Media. New York: The New Press.

Napoli, Philip M. 2009. Public Interest Media Advocacy and Activism as a Social Movement. Communication Yearbook 33:385—429.

CHAPTER 1

Digital Inclusion

Working Both Sides of the Equation

DOROTHY KIDD with ELOISE LEE

This action research project examined efforts to enhance digital inclusion in San Antonio, a working-class immigrant neighborhood of East Oakland, California. Part of a longer-term collaboration between the researcher (Department of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco) and an advocacy organization (Media Alliance), it took place during the fall of 2008 and first half of 2009. The research encompassed the design, implementation, and evaluation of three interconnected initiatives: a media training program for women community leaders called Raising Our Voices (ROV); the planning of a local digital media production and distribution site; and municipal and national policy interventions regarding broadband communications.

The study is the latest in a series of academic-activist research collaborations involving Media Alliance, a thirty-three-year-old regional media resource, training, and advocacy organization. The first study analyzed the role of Media Alliance in advocating for the participation of underserved communities in the planning and implementation of municipal broadband, and the resultant widening of the frame of digital inclusion in a campaign in San Francisco (Ganghadaran 2007). The second study incorporated the lessons from the San Francisco municipal broadband campaign in a citizens’ advocacy toolkit (Levy et al. 2007).

The principal investigator, Dorothy Kidd, consulted on the two earlier studies. She has worked with Media Alliance for over ten years in many capacities, and now describes this approach as embedded research.¹ Her own research agenda is focused on documenting the changing relations between mediascapes, movements concerning media change, and dominant and counter-public spheres in the San Francisco Bay region. Most recently, she has compared the current movements to democratize broadband and the Internet with the citizens’ telecommunications movements of the progressive era; she has also documented earlier versions of ROV and their contribution to antipoverty counter-public spheres (Kidd and Barker-Plummer 2009).

Building on this earlier body of research, the current study was based on two broad premises. First, efforts to democratize broadband communications (to provide universal service for all) needed to go beyond concepts of digital divide, or of the corporate and government-centered notions of digital inclusion (Gangadharan 2007). Although the provision of Internet access, computer training, and appropriate content for marginalized communities was necessary, Media Alliance argued that the vector of broadband development should be the development of communications capacity for marginalized communities themselves. Broadband planning for marginalized neighborhoods would then start from the community as producers of meaning for the public sphere, rather than as consumers of commercial content or of e-government information.

Second, U.S. citizens’ efforts at media reform in general—and in municipal broadband campaigns in particular—had suffered, in part, from fragmentation and division among activists working to bolster the media representation of marginalized communities seeking economic and racial justice; computer and Internet technology designers and trainers; and government policy reformers.

Action research, a participatory approach that expressly promotes social analysis and citizens’ action for democratic social change, was chosen as the most appropriate methodology. Action research is a form of participatory community-based research, based on generating knowledge for the express purpose of taking action to promote social analysis and democratic social change (Hearn et al. 2009, 46). This approach differs from some other social science research methodologies, in the nature of the enquiry process, which is . . . an attempt to take action or provoke change or improvements of some kind (e.g., to design, implement or evaluate a new media application) (49). Following from this approach, and consistent with her own skills, the principal investigator participated in all stages of the project, including planning, course design, workshop development and implementation, and evaluation. A methodological pluralism was adopted, employing a mix of methods, including informal in-person interviews, in-class discussions, written commentaries and evaluations, survey instruments, participant observation, and video/multimedia observation.

This chapter reviews the origins of the project, the results, and the specific implications for communications policy and academic-activist research collaborations.

MEDIA ALLIANCE AND THE BACKGROUND TO THE PROJECT

Begun by radical journalists in 1976, Media Alliance is one of the oldest membership-based media activist organizations in the United States. Its original goal was system change from within the media field—reforming corporate journalism, through defending media workers’ rights, critiquing ‘bad’ journalism and celebrating the ‘good,’ and training aspiring journalists (Hackett and Carroll 2006, 108). In the late 1990s, Media Alliance shifted in response to major changes in the local and national mediascapes. The commercial and public service media in the Bay Area, like most of the United States, had become increasingly conglomerated, with a much smaller professional work force and a marked shrinking of locally produced news and cultural programming, especially for historically marginalized communities (Kidd 2005; Barker-Plummer and Kidd 2009). A new media sector, directed by social justice organizations, was emerging, in addition to the alternative media sector.² This development was partly in response to the ballooning democratic deficit (Hackett and Carroll 2006, 17); the growing awareness of the strategic value of communications for social change; and the greater availability of cheaper, easy-to-use digital production equipment and Internet distribution (Barker-Plummer and Kidd 2009).

Media Alliance initiated movement in three different vectors. First, they offered more support to the growing alternative media sector. They coordinated, for example, a campaign to democratize the venerable Pacifica Radio station, KPFA-FM, demanding increased representation of youth and communities of color in programming and governance; and another campaign to democratize the local PBS television station, KQED. Second, in 1999, they started Raising Our Voices, a computer and media training program for antipoverty and housing activists to produce journalism for mainstream and alternative media, and to develop their own media platforms. Third, they took on a role as regional hub in the emerging national media reform movement, best exemplified by their mobilization of public support against the further deregulation of media ownership rules by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) (Chester 2007).

In 2003, Media Alliance saw a political opportunity closer to home in the pending municipal franchise agreement between the City of San Francisco and Comcast, the giant cable incumbent. Jeff Perlstein, the executive director at the time, argued that the local campaign could provide a public forum for addressing community concerns about the impact of big media corporations, for