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Community broadcasting is anecdotally considered a 'training ground' for the mainstream media. However, there is little empirical research that supports these claims around skill development and career outcomes. Similarly, while community broadcasting is broadly recognized as contributing to social cohesion, the focus of much of this research is on audiences rather than the experiences of community media practitioners. This article is based on a broader programme of research that interrogated the experiences of people with significant involvement in the Australian community broadcasting sector to examine the impact of community media participation on career pathways. Here we consider a key finding: working or volunteering in community radio plays an important role in developing robust and meaningful networks, connections, and relationships which are central to shaping personal and professional pathways. These findings draw on rhizome theory to highlight the importance of community broadcasting for building and maintaining diverse and enduring networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how US community media organisations anchored to public, educational and government (PEG) cable channels facilitated community resilience during the 2020 pandemic. We find evidence that they served as active "meso-agents" (institutional actors) in local communication networks. Some 230 completed survey responses and 10 open-ended interviews with PEG staffers demonstrated that access media commonly performed essential functions including official and community communication and teacher training in new virtual platforms; providing news, especially coordinating official information; and providing "contactless community," with virtual versions of ritual occasions. These creative responses also suggest new ways to address "news deserts" in the US, if chronic problems with spotty broadband, underfunding of PEG services and lack of federal incentives can be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of digital media labs and spaces for content creation in public libraries has been documented in the scholarly literature. However, fewer studies have investigated the outcomes of media literacy initiatives in community media centers (CMCs) and how they might inform similar programs and services in public libraries. This article reports findings from a study that used qualitative research to investigate the current goals and activities of CMCs across the United States. The findings show that the educational, social, and community benefits of these programs could be useful for public libraries to consider in developing or augmenting their own media literacy initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the Internet has rapidly become an important distribution technology for video producers, it is also a problematic one for some of them. I explore the difficulties associated with its use to distribute videos through an analysis of a one-year ethnographic investigation of community, activist and fan video producers in the United States and UK. My analysis draws upon Actor-Network Theory and DeLanda's reading of Deleuze and Guatarri's concept of assemblages, and shows that while my informants were engaged in various processes to create and stabilize their video distribution assemblages, these were precarious as they were also subject to destabilizing processes resulting from their complex and contested nature. This situation often resulted in the producers being left with distribution assemblages which did not satisfy their goals. Framing the problematic aspects of their distribution practices in these terms shows that these aspects can not only be understood as resulting from the producers’ specific circumstances as they struggled with, for example, corporate interests, the limited affordances of the video hosting and social media platforms they used, or the social dynamics of which they were apart, but that they can also be understood more generally as arising from the processes of human-technology entanglements, providing an alternative perspective to previous studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article details the benefits and challenges of Insight Journalism, a community engagement and research methodology developed by the interdisciplinary Bespoke project. Based in two under-resourced urban neighbourhoods in North West England, Bespoke combined community media with participatory digital design by supporting local residents to create a series of 'old' and 'new' media outputs that were exhibited locally and used within an innovative design process. The digital designs inspired by the journalism were then built by the Bespoke team and deployed within the local area, where Insight Journalists evaluated their reception. Based on our experiences, in this article, we argue that Insight Journalism can provide a vital space for exploring salient civic and social issues, but must be understood as a process of building relationships and competencies, as well as a set of products including the mediated stories and digital designs that resulted from ongoing engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews the founding of the renowned Appalachian community media center, Appalshop, as well as one of its earliest films, Herb E. Smith's In Ya Blood (1971). In doing so, the author discusses the ways in which the media center's initial establishment reflected a middle-class idealism on the part of policymakers and an opportunity to reconstitute an Appalachian mountain subjectivity on the part of Appalshop's early participants. Ultimately, both register an inertial movement away from class as a tool for understanding poverty and toward a managerial liberalism and identity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a community-based use of location-sensitive media technology, drawing on it to discuss: relationships between personal and community experience and place; participation and ownership of community-based location-sensitive media projects; the potential of this technology for rich and diverse self-representations; and the kind of context that might enable ongoing community-based use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]