PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE | January 3, 2022

Welcome to 2022

I hope you’ve taken some time to refresh and recharge your batteries at year’s end. For many of us, this is the time to both reflect on the year past and the year ahead – so let me share a couple of items to consider this week:

Our colleague Darryl Holiday at City Bureau in Chicago has written an inspiring call to action to include the public into the act of creating journalism and media.  It rightly places the work of community media organizations across the country along with libraries and other public institutions that build information and local democracy. Take some time with it and think about how your work can fit into the greater purpose of ensuring that local democracy can thrive

Nieman Lab posted a series of predictions for the coming year in media and journalism – including some inspiring takes on the importance of community.  You can find the host of predictions here. I particularly like Victor Pickard , S Mitra Kalia and Mike Rissole, but there’s plenty of interesting and inspiring material to consider here.

And while we’re mentioning interesting and inspiring, I’d suggest your look back at 2021 and consider putting together applications for the Hometown Media Awards – the competition will open this Thursday, January 6.  We want to celebrate the best of what community media does across the country, and the only way to do that is by demonstrating those successes and stories that you have helped make happen in the past year!  Now’s the time to think about the best of what you’ve done, so we can model it for others! 

 

ACM Public Policy Call - January 13

One other scheduling note, we will be holding the first ACM Public Policy briefing a week from Thursday on January 13 at 4pm ET/1pm PT.   I hope you’ll join us. Email us if you need the link.