How Community Media Can Fill Local News Gaps

[Commentary] A key takeaway from the Alliance for Community Media’s recent conference in Boston (MA): Community media can and must help fill the gaps in local news coverage that are growing across the country thanks to rampant consolidation and newsroom cutbacks. Community media is an umbrella term that refers to noncommercial media that isn’t part of NPR or PBS. ACM is an organization composed primarily of public access, education and government (PEG) TV channels available on cable television, along with the digital media centers and training programs such stations offer. There are more than 3,000 community media outlets in the US, and they’re diverse in terms of the resources they have, the programming they produce, the way they’re organized, and the scale at which they operate. What they have in common is that we need them more than ever.