Changing Media for World Benefit
Workshop Nov 10-11, 2004
Mansion on
O St
Washington, DC
1 PM Nov 10 - 5 PM Nov 11
Sponsored in part by the Omidyar Network
Leading journalists, media professionals, bloggers and technologists will
meet in Washington DC on November 10-11 2004 to help create innovative ways to
bring people news that can change their world-views – and the world. This
issue has never been more important. Please register and attend this meeting.
Your help is needed. Like no other institution, the media is a witness to the
variety and truth of human experience. It is up to us to revitalize the creative
role of media in bettering the world.
This workshop is is a continuation of the Positive
Media Workshop held last August in New York. The
last workshop produced a flurry of activity, as
reflected
in its minutes. A number of online groups emerged on the
Omidyar Network, including:
This meeting will focus on the intersection of the mainstream media and
interactive communications supported by the Internet such as blogging The final
agenda is .being discussed
here.
Sorry, the workshop is filled to capacity, and we aren't
accepting further registrations.
John Marks, President and Founder of
Search for Common Ground will speak on the
use of media and its role for finding a common ground, even in highly conflicted
regions. His organization is active in Radio in Burundi, Liberia, and
Sierra Leone where they operate studios that produce news, features, drama, and
music. A particular specialty is soap opera for social change, which they
produce in eight countries, and programming produced by and for children.
They produce TV programming for adults and children that treats contentious
issues within a common ground framework. They also provide
journalist training and the Common Ground News Service news service in the
Middle East we, which syndicates articles giving common ground perspectives on
issues related to conflicts in the region. They also publish issue-oriented
magazines: In the Balkans they produce two magazines that examine controversial
issues through the perspectives of journalists of different ethnicities and
nationalities.
Jeff Jarvis is
former TV critic for TV Guide and People, creator of Entertainment Weekly,
Sunday Editor of the NY Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco
Examiner. He is now president & creative director of
Advance.net, which oversees the Internet
vision and strategy for Advance Publications, Inc., includes CondéNet and
Advance Internet. Over the past five years, CondéNet, working with the magazines
of Condé Nast, has created national brands including concierge.com,
epicurious.com and style.com. He is actively supporting community
projects, for example the
GoSkokie effort of
the Medill School of
Journalism.
Jan Shaffer is
Executive Director of The Institute for
Interactive Journalism, which will launch a pioneering program to seed
community news ventures around the country with a new $1 million grant from the
John S. and James L. Knight
Foundation. Over the next two years, the
New Voices project will
help fund the start-up of 20 micro-local, news projects; support them with an
educational Web site, in collaboration with the
Poynter Institute’s News University; and help foster their sustainability
through small second-year grants. She is the former Executive Director of the
Pew Center for Civic Journalism, a $14
million, 10-year journalism reform initiative. A former Business Editor and a
Pulitzer Prize winner for The Philadelphia Inquirer, she brings more than 30
years of journalism experience to her work. Her are some
examples of the institute's
projects.
Schedule
Note: many of the participants will be gathering informally at the mansion
after breakfast. Participants are invited to come by when they can.
Lunch may be purchased at the mansion.
Wednesday, Nov 10
1:00 PM begin workshop
5:00 PM wine and cheese reception; Show and Tell sessions - bring your
videos
dinner to be arranged by participants at their expense
Thursday, Nov 11
9:00 AM Begin
5:00 PM end of workshop
Local organizing Committee:
Tom Mandel,
Roberta Baskin,
Tonya Gonzalez,
Lisa Kimball, and
Tom Munnecke .
Roberta Baskin has been an investigative reporter for twenty
six years, most recently as senior correspondent for "NOW With Bill Moyers."
Before that she was in senior management at ABC News in charge of "20/20"
investigations. In her work as chief investigative correspondent at "48
Hours" she got into an ethical tangle with the CBS News president stemming from
her reporting on Nike's sweatshop operations in Viet Nam. In the aftermath of
that report, she objected to her fellow journalists being required to wear Nike
swooshes on the air under a sponsorship deal for the Nagano Olympics. Seeing her
employer's journalism values being trumped by its business values led her to
take time to reflect on the state of the media (particularly broadcast
journalism) as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. She then had the honor of an Ethics Fellowship at the Poynter Institute to further reflect with other journalists about journalism. Most recently,
she's had the privilege of taking an "Appreciative Inquiry" certification course with Professor David Cooperrider. After so many years
focused on "deficit-based" questions and stories, it is leading her to search for a new paradigm for journalism and media:
"Our world is shaped by the stories we tell. We need to move beyond the newsroom mentality of
'If it bleeds, it leads!' There's more going on in the world than the event-driven stories of crime and war.
She is determined to find a way to tell the untold stories of innovation, heroics and inspiration.
"We need to amplify the other truths in our world with equal enthusiasm. I'm now devoted to that mission..."
Tom
Mandel is leader in the technology of social computing and innovation.
"Organizations are almost always stocked with good people and good ideas. The
challenge lies in converting creativity into new business traction." For the
last ten years, I have pioneered innovative business practices, products and
services based on new communications technologies of the Internet. Today, I
develop innovation opportunities via new social software (such as wikis, blogs
and social networks) and other oncoming social technologies.
Tonya Gonzalez is executive director of the
Deliberative Democracy
Consortium, committed to the following goals: 1) demonstrate national public
deliberations on critical policy issues using multiple methods to support
participation, 2) Integrate online and face-to-face approaches, 3) Identify and
begin to develop the elements of a national infrastructure for democratic
deliberation that is connected to local capacity, 4) Integrate research and
practice in the field, 5) Reduce barriers to inclusion for any reason
Tom Munnecke is the founder of
GivingSpace, and has spent the past
several years looking for the simplest activity which will trigger the greatest
humanitarian uplift. Retired from a 30 year career in large scale hospital
information systems, he was a 2003 fellow at Stanford's
Digital Vision Program he is actively looking at
ways of developing information technology approaches to move to networked models
of humanitarian and charitable activities.
Lisa Kimball of
GroupJazz will be the facilitator.
There is a registration fee of $100 to cover the costs of the room,
refreshments, and lunch on Thursday, which will be waived for those who do not
have corporate reimbursement.
