Center for Social Media snags $1 million grant

BY MIKE UNGER

What will the public media be like as communication continues to expand into the Internet-age? In the many forms we are seeing emerge, including blogging, what will public media behavior mean in those environments?

These are some of the questions American University’s Center for Social Media, and its director, School of Communication professor Pat Aufderheide, have been yearning to explore. Now, thanks to a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation, the center is poised to further its role as a national leader in exploring issues surrounding public media.

The grant will fund the September launch of the center’s Public Media ThinkTank, which will conduct and publish research on new directions in public media, convene meetings of leaders throughout the field, host public events and screenings to showcase the best in public media, and encourage and create demonstration experiments in new public media expression.

“It’s a terrific honor and a terrific responsibility,” Aufderheide said. “It’s a fantastic gift. It means the questions we’ve been concerned about are questions that are important in the wider world as well. It’s an endorsement of the issues that are important.”

The center is one of 13 organizations to receive a grant from the Ford Foundation’s new initiative, “Global Perspectives in a Digital Age: Transforming Public Service Media.” The program will distribute $50 million over five years to a wide range of public media organizations, ranging from PBS and NPR to California New Media, which works with ethnic and youth media.

“The Center for Social Media provides important research on the state of public media in the United States,” said Orlando Bagwell, a program manager in the media, arts, and culture unit of the Ford Foundation. “We hope that Ford’s grant will allow the center to share this research more widely and to host convenings of public media organizations that will enable them to learn from each other and to participate in shaping the future of the sector.”

The Public Media ThinkTank will hire a student fellow and employ several students on a part-time basis, Aufderheide said. Its activities will be integrated into some SOC classrooms, and it will bring in guest speakers and lecturers.

“We’ve had a remarkable growth since 2001, and we’ve found that a wide variety of funders have found that the questions we’re asking are interesting,” Aufderheide said. “This is the largest grant we’ve received by far, and they intend to renew the grant over time. We’re really excited for the whole AU community because something like this doesn’t happen because of one person or one center, it happened because the AU community really got behind the center.”