Core Community Media 1:
How Grassroots Media Activists Jump-Started
Today’s (and yesterday’s) Social Media
ACM 2025 National Conference
Boston College
24 June 2025, 11am-12:30pm
Presentations and Other Materials
CM1: History - Google Drive Folder Contents:
- PRESENTATIONS on Google Drive
- Antoine Haywood
- Rika Welsh
- John Higgins
- Michael Eisenmenger
- Presenter BIOS
- CTR 10th, CMR 25th, CMR 30th Anniversary Issues
- "The Battle for the US Airwaves, 1929-1935." Robert W. McChesney, 1990, Journal of Communication.
- "The Praxis of Access." John Higgins, 2001, Community Media Review.
Presenters
BIOS
Antoine Haywood, Assistant Professor, University of Florida
John W. Higgins, Retired Prof & Union Prez, University of San Francisco
Michael Eisenmenger, Executive Director, Community Media Center of Marin
Rika Welsh, Community Organizer
Description
This session explores the history and values of global community media.
Discussion focuses on the progressive grassroots activism that undergirded the rise of electronic media technologies: radio, television, cable, satellite, personal computers, and the internet – based on even earlier movements. Unsung amateurs, activists, and artists pioneered technologies that were then absorbed by for-profit media companies. Community media jump-started YouTube and social media, the same way that grassroots movements have helped jump start cultural trends throughout global media history.
This is the start of a two part discussion that continues in Core CM Session 2: Values. It’s adapted from ACM ‘White Papers’ sessions in the past where practitioners and scholars discussed practices and underlying tenets of access and community media https://mediaprof.org/acmwhitepaper/index.html
NFLCP/ACM history is documented through the pages of the Community Media Review, at the Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/communitymediareview
In particular, these issues:
10 Years: Summer 1986, vol 9 no 2;
25 Years: Summer 2001, vol 24 no 2;
30 Years: Spring-Summer 2006, vol 29 no 1-2