Media Re:public: Conclusions After a Year of Exploration

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"Media Re:public: My Year in the Church of the Web"
- Persephone Miel
Media Re:public’s final report went to press in November. It is available on the Berkman Center’s Web site at www.mediarepublic.org. Its conclusions include the following:

  • The disruption of the scarcity-based business model for traditional media outlets is leading them to reduce and shift the scope of their original reporting.

  • Web-native media entities are not addressing all of the reporting gaps left by legacy media, and current structures and mechanisms do not provide sufficient incentives for them to do so.

  • In the changing media environment, news consumers risk relying on news sources that are neither credible nor comprehensive.

  • Despite impressive successes, participation in the online media space is not universal; there are populations and ideas that remain underrepresented.

  • There are specific kinds of critically important journalism that have not found reliable sustainability models in the online media environment.

  • Efforts to understand and address the issues above are limited by a lack of rigorous empirical evidence, instead relying largely on incomplete information, anecdotes and intuition.