Transmission Project

Due to media consolidation and disintegrating business models, traditional local journalism is on the decline. As a result, mainstream media is failing the needs of American towns and cities for a local discourse that articulates common identities and informs the democratic process. Citizen journalism could fill this void, but citizen journalists constantly struggle for audience, reach, and relevance.

The rapidly growing online video medium can help, but critical infrastructure is missing. Local journalism can reach more people by embracing online video, and citizen video journalists can engage a larger audience by going local. But no infrastructure exists to connect local video producers to a local audience. Large corporate video hosts aren’t interested in meeting the needs of specific local communities, creating a chicken and egg problem: creators lack the motivation a potential audience provides, and would-be viewers cannot find enough interesting video to make it worth looking. The need is clear: try searching for videos from your local community and you will quickly be drowned in false results and dead ends.

Miro in My Community (MMC) will create a series of community-based video hubs to connect local creators, public access stations, and the community of viewers. With these new hubs and the relationships that they form, vibrant local communities of video can flourish. Quite simply, we can create an active, citizen-driven, online television world for individual cities and towns.

MMC will focus on five communities in the first year (three in Massachusetts). Each hub will be a local website (e.g. worcestervideo.org) where people can watch and submit video. A partnership with the local public access station will ground an outreach effort to connect creators and creative organizations to residents that are eager to engage with local news and information. MMC will provide tools for syndication (in and out), ways to geographically code and gather local content from across the internet, and custom local versions of the open source video player Miro.

In the second year, with the underlying infrastructure complete, MMC will be able to reach 12 communities at less than half the project cost. We will modularize outreach so that other media activists can use our tools and methods, and so that community foundations that want to support citizen journalism can fund roll-out to additional cities.

A VISTA member could be instrumental in advancing this project. We need an individual who is both technically aware (though not necessarily a programmer) and interested in community building. The VISTA member will lead outreach to local access and public television stations in Massachusetts and around the country. The member will help us develop and deploy training manuals and will work with partner organizations to run training session for local participants.